Christopher McQuarrie encyclopedia topics

Life

McQuarrie was born and raised in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where he attended West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South with director Bryan Singer and actor Ethan Hawke. In lieu of college he took a job working as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in Perth, Western Australia, and later hitchhiked around the western half of the continent. Returning to the United States a year later, he went to work for a detective agency in New Jersey for the next four years. In 1992, he applied to the New York City Police Department and was on his way to the academy when former schoolmate Singer offered him the opportunity to write their first feature film, Public Access, winner of the 1993 Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize.

Career

Singer and McQuarrie collaborated again on the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, for which McQuarrie received best screenplay awards from Premiere magazine, The Texas Board of Review, and the Chicago Critics as well as the Edgar Award, The Independent Spirit Award, and the British and American Academy Awards. The film was later included on the New York Times list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, and the character Verbal Kint was included on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest Heroes and Villains of all time. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America voted The Usual Suspects #35 on their list of 101 Greatest Screenplays.

McQuarrie spent the next several years dividing his time between rewriting studio movies (such as Singer’s X-Men) and developing a screenplay on the life of Alexander the Great, written with Peter Buchman, for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Scorsese and DiCaprio chose to do The Aviator first, making way for Oliver Stone to produce his version of Alexander.)

McQuarrie also wrote and directed The Way of the Gun, starring Benicio del Toro, Ryan Phillippe, and James Caan. Despite a desire to move away from the crime genre, it was the only arena in which he could find any creative control. He set out to make a crime film about truly "criminal" criminals – a revisionist modern-day Western populated with multi-layered characters whose actions are not motivated by backstories contrived to make them endearing and sympathetic. He also rejected the stylized approach that had come to define the action-crime genre – choosing instead to rely on story and performance. The film failed to live up to the acclaim of McQuarrie’s earlier films.

More recently McQuarrie has developed a script with co-writer Dylan Kussman about the life of John Wilkes Booth, and The Last Mission with co-writer Nathan Alexander detailing the harrowing last hours of WWII in the Pacific.

He is currently producing Valkyrie, based on the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, from a script co-written with Nathan Alexander. The film is in production with Tom Cruise starring and Bryan Singer directing.

In 2008 he will produce and direct The Stanford Prison Experiment, co-written with Tim Talbott.