Focus bryan singer

Article by Carsten Dau

It’s probably a little early to start the search for thematic unity in the work of Bryan Singer (three feature-length films and a self-produced short). Yet both The Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil display a sense of craft and polish that suggest a much more experienced hand, one that has already navigated through the better part of a full career.

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What may be most remarkable about Singer’s work so far is that despite his relative youth, his movies — whatever their source material, whatever the amount of collaborative effort that went into in them — are inarguably his movies. The final product on the screen is the result of Singer’s personal vision of filmmaking, his feeling for what a good story is, his understanding of how best to tell it through film. Self trained in photography and the use of 8 mm cameras as a boy, a student in New York’s School of Visual Arts and at USC’s film school (the critical studies program), Singer is a ‘hands on’ director in the most old fashioned sense, one whose approach to his role comes from a variety of influences and experiences. He is or has been involved in every phase of his projects, from steps as fundamental as conceiving of story ideas to those as minute as setting frames and selecting lenses for his shots. He prefers to ride his own zooms; at times, he’ll operate his own lights; in a pinch, he’ll secure his own funding. Only one of his films deals with anything remotely biographical, yet all of them are so much the product of his collective efforts and artistic choices, that it seems fair to think of them as personal works.
If there is a defining on-screen moment for Singer’s resume of movies thus far--not a best moment, just a good one that resonates in his other films--maybe it’s that point in Usual Suspects when Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) leaves the jailhouse after being bailed out by his lawyer girlfriend.

bryan & camera

This early in the movie, the audience is not entirely sure what to think of Keaton; he appears to be one of those noirish characters who are perpetually condemned by past mistakes. He’s an ex-cop who went bad, did a turn in prison, and is now struggling to find resurrection through the love of a woman. Initially, he stands out from the other suspects simply because he’s persecuted more than they are. The others are efficiently rounded up; Keaton is publicly humiliated in front of potential business partners. Of all the suspects, he is the only one beaten during interrogation.
Yet Keaton is acquainted with the other criminals in the holding cell (he’s the only one who knows everybody else). Three separate times his attempt at reforming himself is referred to with disbelief. (“Dean Keaton gone the high road--what is the world coming to?”) He easily matches the others in posturing his toughness, staring down McManus (Stephen Baldwin) and telling the roomful of criminals that they can “all go to hell.” He even sounds like them, using the same clipped, retro-noir dialogue that separates them from the “straight” world. (“This whole thing was a shakedown. How many times you been in a lineup? It’s always you and four dummies--P.D. are paying homeless guys ten bucks a head half the time...”)
Keaton’s refusal to be included in McManus’ proposed “job” seems unequivocal while he is still inside the jail. But once outside, when he is told that the investors in his restaurant — his legitimate business venture — need more time, his resolve quickly collapses. It’s a fine bit of film gestalt when all the elements of the moment work together to turn the audience’s impressions in the same direction. Keaton tells Edie (Suzy Amis) that he is finished, that the police have ruined him. She tries to comfort him by reasserting her love. Keaton is at first too distracted by self pity to notice what she is saying. At the same time, the movie cuts to individual shots of the other suspects slowly dispersing into the night, none of them moving too quickly, all of them aware of Keaton’s hesitation. The camera is behind Edie and close on Gabriel Byrne’s hangdog face when he realizes what she is telling him and is immediately sorry. He hugs her to him, her head covering the lower half of his face, as Byrne’s eyes do a triple take: first to McManus lounging against a newsstand, then to Hockney about to enter a cab, then to Verbal waiting at the subway entrance. The harsh urban noise of a passing subway car takes over for the soundtrack. Edie tells Keaton that they’ll “worry about this tomorrow.” But Keaton’s face--and the soft resurgence of John Ottman’s evocative score--suggest something entirely different to the audience. Keaton, for all intents and purposes, has made his decision. Without expressing a word, he has joined the group of suspects; we realize that his sympathies are ultimately with the other criminals.

bryan

When Keaton gazes at them — even as the instrument of his potential salvation is urging him to turn his back — his compulsion to rejoin this doomed fringe community seems obvious. The moment has a touch of classic tragedy; Keaton is a man who has the ability and intelligence to be better than he is—the natural leader of the group--but some fundamental part of him is flawed. He knows that he will leave Edie. He is perfectly aware of his deception (regret is a large part of the on-screen character), yet he is unable to help himself. The pull of the group — in this case, a group that is clearly going to be short lived and will more than likely lead to his own destruction — is too strong.
Whether the story of Dean Keaton — the ex-cop fatally tempted by his darker side — is “real” or only part of the elaborate fantasy that Verbal Kint constructs for Agent Kujan is unresolvable and probably irrelevant. Keaton’s story is the one we see; he’s the closest thing to a traditional protagonist that Usual Suspects gives us. In truth, he might be the closest thing to a traditional protagonist that exists in any of Singer’s full length features. Without him, the intricate machinery of Singer’s plot and editing become more about structuring a puzzle than they do about telling a story.
This in itself would be no small accomplishment, as Usual Suspects is certainly one of the most intricately plotted movies ever made. However, in his own words, Singer is a “mainstream boy;” as a filmmaker, he is less concerned with ideology or style than he is with story.
“I’m more oriented to [story] than anything else,” said Singer. “Half of my work goes into getting a story ready. As a director, fifty percent of my job is developing the material. Shooting it is the other fifty. Wait - what about editing? OK, that’s the other fifty.”
As diverse as their subject matter makes them, Singer’s movies have similar motifs: the formation and dissolution of unhealthy communities and, often, the dawning of a character’s awareness as he recognizes that he is involved in something that is falling apart around him, or worse, is going to pull him down as well.
In Lion’s Den, the 24 minute 16 mm short that Singer created after graduating from USC’s critical studies film program (he was unable to get into the production branch), a group of five friends congregate at their old hangout a year after graduating from high school. Although the meeting is intended to renew their ties, it soon becomes apparent that what once bound them together has begun to unravel. Singer himself plays the protagonist, the ‘nice guy’ who has planned the event and comes to realize that his group, this micro-community he has identified himself with, is not going to endure.
“It takes a time when you get back together with somebody and try to recapture what you’ve got,” said Singer. “All of a sudden it dawns on you: we’ve changed. We can’t be what we were anymore. It’s a sad but interesting part of

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growing up.”
The real catalyst for the film’s action is Chris, played by Singer’s childhood friend Ethan Hawke shortly before the release of Dead Poets Society. Although Chris had a leadership role when the group was in high school, he has since been passed by. He works as a security guard, reliving past glories and nursing a growing resentment towards those friends that have moved on.
The script for Lion’s Den was written by Singer after Hawke had proposed the idea. Singer based several of the characters on people he’d known from growing up in his hometown of Princeton. The character of Chris is a reference to Chris McQuarrie, a friend who actually was working as a security guard at the time, although he had ambitions to be a writer. (McQuarrie would eventually go on to win an Academy Award for writing Usual Suspects.)
However, the Chris in Lion’s Den seems destined for a less happy outcome. Kyle, played by Dylan Kussman (another future Dead Poets Society actor), is home from college, where he has pledged a fraternity, in essence switching his group allegiance. Worse, Dean (David Leslie Conhaim) is recently returned from Los Angeles, where he has found some success as a working actor. The resistance of these characters to Chris’ attempts to reassert his old dominance presents immediate conflict; Chris is forced to confront his relative failure to progress beyond what he was in high school.
“There’s a line in Stand By Me that really moved me,” said Singer. “It made me so emotional when I heard it, I nearly threw up. When Richard Dreyfuss says, ‘Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.’ That just weighed so heavily with me because through growing up in New Jersey, and going to summer camp every year, and then to college, and then another college-you just watch that process of people leaving. You know, people can be everything in your life. A lot of what I am is attributed to these different people, some of whose names I can’t even remember anymore. So it’s the most intimate movie I’ve ever done. It’s also the least realized and the lowest quality--but I made it when I was twenty-two years old. In fifty hours.”
Shot in seven summer nights, Lion’s Den was filmed almost entirely within the Copper Penny diner (one pivotal scene is shot in the bathroom at a nearby athletic club). Out of necessity, most of the shots are close on one or two characters.

ethan hawke

“This was my first lesson on how you need three or four times the actual space as the room portrayed to film the scene properly,” Singer said. “I’ve always been a fan of the slow creep--not really zooming in but what we call creeping--but I couldn’t do as much as I’ve done in future movies. [Lion’s Den] is not stylized; it’s a character piece. It’s more grounded.”
Nonetheless, the film manages to avoid becoming claustrophobic until the story calls for the emotional atmosphere to shift into something more oppressive. One such moment occurs towards the end of the film, when Singer and one of the other group members, Darren (Brandon Boyce), are alone in a bathroom. Darren reveals that he is gay, a secret he has been keeping from the others, particularly from Chris. We learn that Darren’s hidden life is essentially tearing him apart, yet he begs not to be exposed. He is content, it seems, to go on as he has been, playing loyal sidekick to Chris, enduring his periodic abuse in order to maintain the relationship.
“It was Ethan’s idea,” recalls Singer. “‘Why not have one of the characters be gay? That’ll be cool.’ It was purely a device. But it did set up a kind of…odd relationship. Chris’ only fan is the one he’s beating up on, who’s probably in love with him. In retrospect, I look at it as probably a very sophisticated kind of young relationship which is ultimately unrequited and doesn’t come to fruition.”
This “device”—the relationship that feeds on both members’ capacity for self-deception, making them dependent upon each other even while sharpening their antagonism--is an idea that anticipates similar relationships in Apt Pupil and, to a lesser degree, Usual Suspects. In Usual Suspects, the audience is lead to believe that Verbal bears roughly the same relation to Keaton as Darren does to Chris. Aside from the issue of sexuality, Verbal is presented as something of a hero-worshipper, defending Keaton to Agent Kujan even when Kujan seems to have ably demonstrated that Keaton is really a criminal mastermind who has arranged Verbal’s inevitable assassination. Verbal is also shown taking Keaton’s abuse, yet simultaneously depending upon his friendship, without which the others will not accept him into the group. More directly, the relationship that is established between Kurt Dussander and Todd Bowden in Apt Pupil is a kind of mutual parasitism. It could more properly be called symbiotic except that it is so completely unhealthy for both characters. Dussander needs Todd’s obsession in order to regain some of his vigor; the evil that Todd rekindles in blackmailing the ex-Nazi is energizing for both of them--and also, inevitably, an addictive drug that

ian & brad

binds them together.
Despite the limitations imposed by its location, Lion’s Den is a fairly sure-handed directorial debut. Singer’s prior on-set experience had been limited to his 8 mm projects, a 16 mm synch sound production he had engineered and abandoned at the School of Visual Arts, and work as a production assistant on two different features, both of them far from mainstream releases. The second of these films, Summer Rain, brought him into contact with John Ottman, who was working on the film as an editor. Singer formed both a friendship and valuable professional working relationship with Ottman, who would go on to be Singer’s film editor and composer. On Lion’s Den, Ottman was Singer’s ‘second eye,’ assisting with direction.
Overall, the film’s pacing and development of character have little of the self indulgence or choppiness of more celebrated independent film debuts. Singer works around the tightness of the locations as much as possible in his choices of framing and reaction shots. The story’s resolution is implied in the expression on Singer’s own face when he witnesses the group’s interior conflicts emerge into physical confrontations. Life is more complex than boys think it is. These young men have little in common anymore, and the only part of the group which will go on is, perhaps, its least positive one.
When Singer was unable to get Lion’s Den shown at USC, he found two other filmmakers who had also produced short films that they wanted to present to the public. He arranged to rent a DGA theater, sent out 2,000 invitations to people in the entertainment industry and took a full page in Daily Variety, advertising an evening of independent short films. For a host, Singer was able to enlist director Sam Raimi, who he knew through his brother Ted. Raimi’s only request was that flyers for the Sierra Club be placed in every program. Six hundred people eventually showed up, including a representative from Tokuma Japan Productions, a Japanese company that had created a film program called CinemaBeam. Six directors from around the world were to be awarded quarter million dollar stipends. Singer was asked to come up with a concept that could be used as the basis for a feature film. The story he pitched, eventually written by him, Chris McQuarrie, and Michael Feit Dougan, was Public Access.
“I felt that was an interesting name for a movie,” said Singer. “I was intrigued by public access TV. I wrote a little synopsis which was way off what the movie ultimately was, and they said ‘OK, write a screenplay.’ So I called my old friend Chris McQuarrie, who was about to move to Florida to work for his uncle.”
Public Access is the oddest of Singer’s movies. Shot in 18 days at a budget of $250,000, it is undeniably a feature film in its look and technique. However, despite its sharing the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival when it was eventually shown in 1993, its story seems less controlled than those of Singer’s other films. The movie follows Wiley Pritcher (Ron Marquette), a mysterious drifter who arrives in the idyllic small town community of Brewster and sets up his own cable TV show, in which he repeatedly asks his phone-in audience “What’s wrong with Brewster?” Wiley’s origins and purpose are never fully revealed, although the viewer is given various hints of his traumatic past in flashbacks.

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In terms of locations and camera work, Public Access is a much more open movie than Lion’s Den. Throughout the film the camera is restless, constantly in motion, creeping in and out of unusual places, drifting up through floorboards, crawling along walls. Many of the shots are subjective from Wiley’s point of view and generally accompanied by John Ottman’s brooding electronic score. The results are mixed--the movie often achieves an air of growing menace; at the same time, just as often, it seems to lose its momentum.
“I think I was showing off,” said Singer about this project. “You know, the story was a little strange, at times not very accessible to people, so I thought the least I can do is show off my style. It’s perhaps a bit over-stylized. Or maybe it’s under-storyized.”
In Public Access, Singer presents another doomed community, an entire town this time, and again, as in Usual Suspects, the catalyst for the community’s destruction comes through infiltration, the entry of a deceitful outsider who has purposes of his own. On the surface, Brewster is filled with sunlight, playgrounds and picnics, but the townspeople are quick to respond to Wiley’s insinuations that something is “wrong” in their city. Before long, he has neighbors turning on each other in a growing atmosphere of suspicion. At the same time, the community is undermined by its own leadership. The mayor of the town makes a back-door deal with the mysterious Gemini Electronics, whose trucks arrive in an ominous convoy as the film opens. That the company is up to no good and will ultimately destroy the town is signaled not by Wiley, whose narrative plays out independently of this sub-plot, but by Jeff Abernathy, a local school teacher who has been disgraced and can not get anyone to listen to his warnings.
Abernathy is a figure who both updates and anticipates a recurrent character motif of Singer’s films: the knowing but impotent bystander. In Lion’s Den this position is occupied by Singer himself, who sees the group dissolving despite his efforts to hold it together, and who knows, through Darren’s revelation of his sexuality, more about the inner dynamics of the group than any of the others. In Usual Suspects, Agent Kujan is the only person who has glimpsed the full answer to the film’s puzzle--but he has arrived at it too late, and the last time we see him, he is standing on the street, helpless, while his quarry gets away. Apt Pupil puts the guidance counselor Ed French (David Schwimmer) in essentially the same place. At the end of the film, he has come closest to understanding the full truth behind the story of Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander, but he will presumably be forced to stay silent, his knowledge kept in check by Todd’s threats of blackmail.
Singer adds his own perspective. “They’re castrated authority figures. I like the fact that they are sincere and strong characters. Ed French is a decent and honest guy. Dave Kujan is a good, smart cop. Jeff Abernathy is a righteous teacher... None are victims who deserve to be the victims. They are not completely clueless; they are one-upped. But it’s easy to get one-upped by a Nazi war criminal, Keyser Soze, or the devil that came to Brewster.”
In Public Access, Wiley eventually kills Abernathy before the teacher can reveal what he knows about the mayor’s pact with Gemini Electronics. When the mayor makes an appearance on Wiley’s cable show, the connection between them is immediate. Up to this point, Wiley’s media persona has at least kept up the illusion of being focused on getting at the real “problem” in the community. However, in his meeting with the mayor, Wiley seems relaxed, even jovial, for the first and only time in the movie. The choices Singer makes for this scene are indicative of his growing awareness of what is possible in advancing a story on film. The moment plays in slow motion without dialogue; we watch from behind the glass of the cable station studio as the music builds and the relationship between Wiley and the mayor

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becomes increasingly clear.
“In the script, it’s a huge two page monologue, and I thought: let’s just show the two of them laughing and talking together. That’s the scary moral of it. Two people who have committed different forms of atrocities, and we see them joking about it. When you’re an audience, there’s only so much talk you can listen to, and no matter how well written it is — and how wonderful it is — it’s only so long before you go ‘What the hell is he talking about?!’”
It is evident in this scene that Wiley and the mayor of Brewster are two sides of the same coin. Both have been fully accepted by a flawed community, one that distrusts itself; both are murderers. Their appreciation of each other is like a recognition of mutual contributions to a shared field. The theme of Public Access is best realized in the closing scenes, as Wiley is leaving Brewster for an unknown destiny. He encounters a little boy riding a bicycle. The boy tells him that his mother said never to talk to strangers, but it’s all right to speak with Wiley (by this time, a multiple murderer), because the boy knows him from television.
“Just because you see someone on TV, you don’t know who they are or why they do what they do,” said Singer. “Wiley is a symbol of media perfection. [He’s] from the city, a product of city violence who has gone to the country to search for something in his past, and [he defends] the mayor at all costs because the mayor is a kind of father figure. I think that’s the story I was trying to tell. Of course, nobody gets that at all.”
Whatever the quirks of its story, Public Access allowed Singer to display a much wider range of technique than Lion’s Den. Camera position, movement, framing, the use of colored filters, the importance of musical cues--virtually every part of the film displays a willingness to experiment with film craft.
“You just grab stuff that tells a story,” said Singer. “Whatever works. The golden age of movies was all script driven; scripts told the story. Now film language tells the story. In the Spielberg-Scorsese stage, you can apply those D.W.Griffith techniques to the maximum.”

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Although Public Access was successful enough to split the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury prize with Ruby in Paradise, it failed to attract a distributor. Singer had won a major award at America’s premiere film festival, but he was still in debt and could get no offers to continue his directing career.
“It was success and failure simultaneously,” he said. “But I still had this really good feeling. I’d made a feature movie by the age of twenty-six. It won the biggest festival in America. But now I start again. Each movie you’re trying to get made is precarious. If you’re making interesting movies, none of them ever get ‘offered.’ There’s always a journey.”
Singer eventually returned to Japan where he hoped to secure funding for another project from the same company that had financed Public Access. While he was there, attending the Tokyo Sundance Festival, he spoke on the phone with Chris McQuarrie, who had an idea about “five felons in a lineup.”
“He had the title first,” said Singer. “He was on line with Dylan Kussman to see a film at Sundance and they were talking about what would be a cool title for a movie--how about “The Usual Suspects?” And what would the poster be? Five felons in a lineup with the tag line: ‘All of you can go to hell.’ Then, from another idea he was working on, he had the opening scene, a guy on a ship waiting to be shot.”
After six months and nine drafts, Singer and McQuarrie had the working script for Usual Suspects. Twenty-five different movie companies, including every major-mini film production studio in Hollywood, rejected it.
“They said it was too confusing, or they didn’t like it, or it didn’t make sense, or they didn’t get it — whatever,” said Singer. “I didn’t get depressed. It’s rejection. It’s the film industry. Everybody gets rejected.”
Singer was finally able to find financing at WMG, a German based company of international business investors that offered him a budget of six and a half million dollars. Kevin Spacey, a relatively unknown actor who had approached Singer after attending a DGA screening of Public Access, was already attached to the project. (McQuarrie had thought of him in the part of Verbal as the script evolved.) Gabriel Byrne’s involvement came through George Freeman, his agent at ICM, who had also seen Public Access but was unable to get enough support from colleagues to hire Singer as a client. Nonetheless, Freeman showed the script to Byrne, who became interested. From there, the project

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developed its own momentum.
Eight weeks from the beginning of shooting, after all the principle parts had been cast, contracts negotiated, crews hired and offices filled, WMG’s financing fell through.
“I knew there was an instability going on with this financial organization,” Singer recalls, “but I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t want my ‘go picture’ status to be diminished in the community. I knew I’d be lucky if that money was real.”
Singer was quick to react to the problem, however, calling each of the five principle players (Spacey, Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Chazz Palminteri, and Pete Postlethwaite) and asking them to sign a ten day option on their participation in his movie, which he could then use to locate replacement financing. Signed letters in hand, Singer returned to Aaron Spelling and Polygram, both of whom had already rejected the project once. Now, with the commitment of an offbeat cast, as well as the growing buzz that had been generated about the script, Spelling and Polygram took over the financing, splitting up the world distribution rights between them.
The movie was filmed in seven five-day weeks. It opened to rave reviews in both Los Angeles and New York and enthusiastic receptions at every major film festival in the world. Among the many awards Usual Suspects eventually earned were two Academy Awards, one to Chris McQuarrie for Best Original Screenplay, and another to Kevin Spacey for Best Supporting Actor.
In the end, the differences between Usual Suspects and the two films that preceded it are primarily in its demonstration of creative control. Nothing in the movie seems unaccounted for; every detail is in its place. Bits of dialogue and action that seem unimportant while they are occurring eventually dovetail into much deeper significance. By the end of the film, the audience is made to reconsider which parts of the narrative are ‘real,’ which parts a lie, and which could be either. The film manages to keep possibilities spinning while at the same time maintaining its coherence and driving the plot forward at an increasingly swift pace.

usual suspects

Singer lets the medium tell the story as much as possible, utilizing voice-over narration, flashbacks, various frame-number slow motions, subtitles, expressive lighting, unusual locations — basically, every facet of “film language.” What would have amounted to “cool moments” in Public Access become necessary blocks of visual information here (but are no less cool for that): Hockney turning into the light of the flames as he realizes he’s being betrayed--Keaton suddenly revealed in a shadow across a glass wall while observing Edie--the camera spinning around Verbal as he makes his pivotal speech: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled...”
Some of what makes Usual Suspects work is in its conception, both the initial script and the angle of the story that Singer used as an approach. “I viewed this whole movie like The Wizard of Oz,” he said. “I viewed New York as Kansas and L.A. as Oz, and it was sort of like the suspects were Dorothy thrust into this weird, strange place — Los Angeles —where they really didn’t belong. So everything had to be completely realistic but colorful and strange, like the green light in the parking garage or the Korean Friendship Bell or Kobayashi’s office in this weird super modern building. Kobayashi was the man behind the curtain, and Keyser Soze was the wizard.”
Another part of the movie’s success is Singer’s comfort with the medium, his willingness to simply do whatever works. In the voice lineup sequence, when the suspects are first brought together, their separate stories become one story as each of them subverts the line he is given to read. By the end of this short scene, they have quickly been established as being essentially on the same side, if not yet united.
“That whole lineup scene is like an audition,” said Singer. “The whole scene is a big blooper. Somebody passed gas and that started them all giggling, and nobody knew who did it. Then Benicio said his line, with everybody laughing at him. So we used this incomplete take. What it did was it brought the characters together in one accidental moment that could have taken pages to try to explain in a conventional way.”
Prior to Usual Suspects, Singer’s casts were mixed lots, comprised of professionals, semi-professionals, and admitted amateurs (such as Singer himself). The performances at the hearts of these films are sufficiently realized; Ethan Hawke shows signs of his eventual stardom while Ron Marquette presents an odd, occasionally intriguing figure. The cast surrounding them, however, is not always as consistent. In Usual Suspects, the cast is more than uniformly professional. Even smaller characters are sharply defined and stay with the viewer long after the film is over. Benicio Del Toro’s Fenster, for example, is a one of a kind, a nearly incomprehensible sad sack in the wardrobe of a Holiday Inn lounge lizard.
“Benicio invented all that,” said Singer. “It wasn’t on the page at all. He said, ‘I’m gonna bring a character to you.’ He showed up and started talking like that. All the other actors were like: [in Gabriel Byrne lilt] ‘You know, Benicio—we respect him as an actor and we don’t mean to mess with his process, but well—we can’t understand what he’s saying.’ So I told them, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ That’s why, in the jail scene, Kevin Pollack says ‘What did you say?’ and the guy in the lineup scene tells him ‘Again, in English.’”
Other actors provided their own contributions. For the part of Verbal Kint, the cripple whom Hockney refers to as “Pretzel Man,” Kevin Spacey came up with his own haircut, filed down the side of one shoe to aid him in limping realistically, and used glue to keep Verbal’s ‘bad’ hand in a twisted position.
“Everybody involved was a fine actor,” said Singer. “With Kevin, he gave multiple levels of performance. He would constantly try different ranges, different variations. There were times I wanted to bring him down, and times when I wanted more of that impish, annoying kind of thing he brought.”
The ending montage of sounds and images--coming only minutes after Kujan’s dramatic unmasking of Keaton as Keyser Soze (including a shot of Gabriel Byrne apparently shooting himself)--is a brilliant reversal on the audience’s expectations, revealing the clues exactly as Kujan begins to see and hear them, inter-cutting them with the symbol of his shock, the coffee cup repeatedly falling to the floor in slow motion, and with Verbal’s rapid transformation, all to the accompaniment of John Ottman’s powerful, moody score.
If Usual Suspects had been followed by a series of interesting but less fully realized projects, Singer’s reputation would probably not have suffered. However, Apt Pupil is the equal of anything Singer has done in its use of film technique (there are several montages that rival the ending of Usual Suspects in terms of conveying information and setting a mood) and in its handling of unusual subject matter. Moreover, in some ways, Apt Pupil is the logical extension of Singer’s takes on the allure of unhealthy communion. The “group” in this film has shrunk to include only two members — Todd and Dussander —but they are definitely two of a kind. In no other part of the mainstream community within which they live do they seem as alive or as resourceful as they do when they are together. Within Dussander’s home, they live out an intense, feverish life that is completely separate, and that adheres to a different set of rules.
In Apt Pupil

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