What actually happened in The Usual Suspects?
Brian Singer directed and Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects. [Spoilers to follow…1] After they finished the film, they realized that the two of them disagreed significantly on what exactly happened in the movie. Did Kint/Soze tell the truth or was his whole story a lie?
McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.
“I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”
He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”
I always assumed that Verbal was telling the truth the whole time, in the cavalier the-truth-can’t-hurt-me manner of the movie master criminal. (thx, dave)
[1] What’s the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings? The Usual Suspects is fourteen years old; surely everyone who wanted to see it has seen it by now. ↩
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