Christopher McQuarrie is an American screenwriter, director and producer. A
regular collaborator of director Bryan Singer, he co-wrote the screenplay of
Singer's Public Access, wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects,
co-wrote and produced Valkyrie and co-wrote Jack the Giant Slayer and Edge
of Tomorrow. McQuarrie won the Academy Award for Best
Original Screenplay for The Usual Suspects. His greatest commercial
success was The Tourist, co-written with Julian Fellowes and based on the French
film Anthony Zimmer, which grossed US$278 million worldwide. McQuarrie
wrote and directed The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher and directed Mission:
Impossible – Rogue Nation, his fourth collaboration with actor and producer
Tom Cruise, after Valkyrie, Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow. He also created
the 2010 NBC television series Persons Unknown.
Early life McQuarrie was born in 1968 in either
Princeton, New Jersey or Princeton Junction, New Jersey, a nearby
unincorporated community, where he was raised. After graduating from West
Windsor-Plainsboro High School South in 1986, he worked as an assistant at
Christ Church Grammar School in Perth, Western Australia, recalling in 2013, “I
was offered an Interim program. ... I picked a place out of a hat and ended up
at Christ Church Grammar School. I lived at the school and worked at the boarding
school, though I did very little work". Fired after nine months, "I hitchhiked
for three months, came home, knocked around for about a month and then
immediately started working for this detective agency.... [It] was actually a
glorified security-guard position. I think in the four years I worked there I
did about six investigations...." He had been acquainted with his future
filmmaking collaborator, director-producer Bryan Singer, "from
the time we were very little our parents were friends. I had been in one of his
8mm films." They attended the same high school, with Singer two years ahead, and
became friends after Singer's graduation. At 16, McQuarrie wrote a
screenplay for an uncompleted film project with Singer, and stayed in
contact through McQuarrie's early work years. Their first professional
collaboration, Public Access came about following McQuarrie's decision to leave
the detective agency ...to move to California and try
screenwriting — Bryan was already living there. And then I was offered my own
agency in Florida. I was 22 years old, and was being given this opportunity to
run my own business. So I called Bryan and he said, “Listen, I’d love to have
you out here but there’s nothing going on; you should probably go to Florida.”
So I told them I would do it ... and then, out of nowhere, it fell through.
... So I applied for the New York [City] Police Department [with a friend] and we
both passed. As we were gearing up to do that, Bryan called. He had made a short
film called "Lion’s Den", with Ethan Hawke –... and we tried to make a
feature-length film out of it. The script was horrible. My parts of it were
written by hand. So Bryan called me and said that these people had seen "Lion’s
Den" and really liked it and had asked to see another script. And he made up a
three-second pitch off the top of his head, which evolved into Public Access.
... He asked me if I wanted to write it. ... I wrote a draft in 15 days. ...
Bryan then got Michael Dougan involved in the writing, and he came in and took
this basically glorified episode of Murder, She Wrote and really darkened it
up. I took a look at his rewrite and was like, "Oh, you mean I can be dark with
it…" Career
= Public Access= Though earning only a 50 percent
positive rating on the film-critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the 1993
thriller Public Access, won the Critics Award at the Deauville American Film
Festival and the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize. It did not
secure a theatrical distributor. = The Usual Suspects=
Three years later, Singer and McQuarrie collaborated again on the 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 No. 35 on their list of 101 Greatest
Screenplays. = The Way of the Gun=
Five years later, in 2000, Artisan Entertainment released The Way of the
Gun, a modern-day Western written and directed by McQuarrie. It starred
Benicio del Toro, Ryan Phillippe and James Caan. The film received mainly
negative reviews and performed poorly at the box office, grossing US$13
million worldwide off a reported US$21 million budget. It has since been
regarded as a cult film. = Valkyrie=
Eight years later, McQuarrie co-wrote and co-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. While doing
research for the screenplay, they also spoke with Hitler's bodyguard. The film
stars Tom Cruise and is directed by Bryan Singer. It received two awards,
the BMI Film Music Award and the Bambi Award for Courage.
= The Tourist= In 2010, McQuarrie co-wrote Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Tourist, starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.
The film grossed US$278 million worldwide. It received three Golden
Globe Award nominations and several other awards, among them the Redbox
Movie Award for the most rented drama of 2011.
= Jack Reacher= In 2012, McQuarrie directed Jack
Reacher, an adaptation of One Shot, the 9th in the series of 19 Jack Reacher
novels by Lee Child. Paramount Pictures released the film.
Tom Cruise played Jack Reacher amid criticism that he was too short to play
the part of a 6' 5" character. In an interview with the BBC, Lee Child stated
that although Cruise was not the Jack Reacher from the novels, he still felt
Cruise had the talent and presence to make an effective Reacher. Filming began
in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area on October 3, 2011, and continued through
the end of January 2012. The film was released in December 2012. It won the
BMI Film Music Award, and was nominated for three Golden Trailer Awards.
= Jack the Giant Slayer= 2013 saw the release of McQuarrie's
fourth collaboration with Singer: Jack the Giant Slayer, co-written by
McQuarrie. The film was a failure at the box office, grossing only US$198 million
with an estimated US$240 million budget. The critical reviews were generally
negative. = Edge of Tomorrow=
McQuarrie co-wrote the 2014 science fiction action thriller Edge of Tomorrow
with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, based on the Japanese novel All You Need
Is Kill. Directed by Doug Liman, this marked the third collaboration with Tom
Cruise. While the film underperformed at the box office on its opening weekend
with only US$28.8 million, it received strong reviews and became a
word-of-mouth hit, grossing just over US$100 million at the domestic box
office. = Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation=
In 2015, McQuarrie released his third directorial feature Mission: Impossible
- Rogue Nation, the fifth entry in the Mission: Impossible film series, which
he co-wrote with Drew Pearce. This marked the fourth collaboration with Tom
Cruise and second as director. The film received strong reviews and grossed over
US$55 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend.
Filmography = Writer & Director=
The Way of the Gun Jack Reacher
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation = Writer=
Public Access – Co-writer with Bryan Singer and Michael Feit Doug
The Usual Suspects – Writer Valkyrie – Producer and co-writer with
Nathan Alexander The Tourist – Co-writer with Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck and Julian Fellowes
Jack the Giant Slayer – Co-writer with Mark Bomback, Darren Lemke and Dan
Studney Edge of Tomorrow – Co-writer with Jez
Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth = Television=
NYPD Blue – Writer The Underworld – Writer
Persons Unknown – Creator/Executive producer
Bibliography McQuarrie, Christopher. The Usual
Suspects. Faber and Faber Publishers; ISBN 0571191533/ISBN 9780571191536
References External links
Christopher McQuarrie on Twitter Christopher McQuarrie at the Internet
Movie Database Christopher McQuarrie at AllMovie
Christopher McQuarrie at Rotten Tomatoes