Christopher McQuarrie

Christopher McQuarrie
Born	1968 Princeton Junction, New Jersey

Christopher McQuarrie (born 1968) is an American screenwriter, producer and director. His screenplays include The Usual Suspects, for which he won the 1996 Academy Award, The Way of the Gun and Valkyrie. He is the creator of NBC television series Persons Unknown.

Early life

McQuarrie was born and raised in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where he attended West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South with director Bryan Singer, actor Ethan Hawke and musician James Murphy.^[1] 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 wrote and produced Valkyrie, which opened on December 25, 2008. The story is based on the real-life July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The script was co-written with Nathan Alexander. The pair had access to members of the Stauffenberg family as well as a book written by Fabian von Schlabrendorff - a conspirator who survived.^[2] While doing research for the screenplay, they also spoke with Hitler's bodyguard. In an interview,^[3] McQuarrie talked about how the plot succeeded in one key respect; despite the conspirators' obvious failure to kill Hitler, one of their objectives was also for history to reflect that they tried so the world would know that not all of Germany or its military was sympathetic to Hitler. The film stars Tom Cruise and is directed by Bryan Singer.

One Shot

One Shot is an upcoming film being directed by McQuarrie, an adaptation of One Shot, a 2005 best selling novel by Lee Child. The film rights were sold to Paramount Pictures.^[4] Josh Olson worked on the early screenplay and adapted it from the original novel, while McQuarrie worked on the finished script.

Tom Cruise was confirmed to play the role of Jack Reacher amidst much criticism from fans claiming that he has neither the tough image or the physique to carry out the role.^[5] Cruise will also act as a producer on the film.^[6] In an interview with the BBC, Lee Child stated that it would be impossible to find a suitable actor to play the giant Reacher and that it is impossible to recreate the feel of the book on the big screen, but Cruise had the talent to make an effective Reacher.^[7]

Filming will begin in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area on October 3, 2011, continuing through the end of January, 2012. The film is scheduled to be released in February 2013.^[8]

Filmography

• Public Access (with Bryan Singer and Michael Feit Dougan) (1993)
• NYPD Blue (1994) (TV)
• The Usual Suspects (1995)
• X-Men (with David Hayter) (2000) (uncredited)
• The Way of the Gun (2000) (also Director)
• Valkyrie (with Nathan Alexander) (2008) (also Producer)
• The Tourist (with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Julian Fellowes) (2010)
• Persons Unknown (2010) (TV) (Creator)
• Jack the Giant Killer (with Mark Bomback, Darren Lemke and Dan Studney) (2012)
• Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (with Andre Nemec, Josh Applebaum and J.J. Abrams) (2012)

Bibliography

• McQuarrie, Christopher (1996). "The Usual Suspects". Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19153-3.

References

1. ^ Miller, Lynn. "More West Windsor Filmmaking Stars on the Horizon", West Windsor & Plainsboro News, December 15, 2007. Accessed December 15, 2007. "Two West Windsor-Plainsboro High School graduates are following in the footsteps of two other filmmakers from West Windsor, Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie. Singer, Class of 1984, and McQuarrie, Class of 1986, have recently joined together for the filming of “Valkyrie,” a controversial film about Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German Army officer who tried to do away with Hitler during World War II."
2. ^ "Christopher McQuarrie: Valkyrie". SuicideGirls.com. 24 December 2008. http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Christopher+McQuarrie%3A+Valkyrie/. Retrieved 2008-12-24. .
3. ^ "Christopher McQuarrie: Valkyrie". SuicideGirls.com. 24 December 2008. http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Christopher+McQuarrie%3A+Valkyrie/. Retrieved 2008-12-24. .
4. ^ "One Shot Information Page". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790724/. Retrieved 23 July 20119. 
5. ^ "Tom Cruise Mulling Offer to Take on Jack Reacher in 'One Shot". The Hollywood Reporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/risky-business/tom-cruise-mulling-offer-take-200906. Retrieved 23 July 2011. 
6. ^ "One Shot Credits". Internet Movie Data Bases. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790724/fullcredits#cast. Retrieved 23 July 2011. 
7. ^ "Author Lee Child wins top crime award". British Broadcasting Corporation. 22 July 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14246226. Retrieved 23 July 2011. 
8. ^ Falk, Joshua (September 9, 2011). "Tom Cruise movie 'One Shot' confirmed for Pittsburgh". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11252/1173378-100.stm. Retrieved September 10, 2011. 

External links

• Christopher McQuarrie at the Internet Movie Database
• indieWIRE.com INTERVIEW: Christopher McQuarrie's Way of the Writer-Director. By Matthew Breen
• Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast with Christopher McQuarrie (via iTunes)

Persondata
Name	Macquarrie, Christopher
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1968
Place of birth	Princeton Junction, New Jersey
Date of death
Place of death