Download The Usual Suspects movie

The Usual Suspects is a 1995 American neo-noir film written by Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Bryan Singer. The film tells the story of Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey), a small-time con man who is the subject of a police interrogation. He tells his interrogator, U.S. Customs Agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), a convoluted story about events leading to a massacre and massive fire that have just taken place on a ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro Bay. Using flashback and narration, Verbal's story becomes increasingly complex as he tries to explain why he and his partners-in-crime were on the boat.

The film, shot on a USD $6 million budget, originally began as nothing more than a title taken from a column in Spy magazine called "The Usual Suspects" after Claude Rains' line in Casablanca. Singer thought that it would be a good title for a film whose poster he and McQuarrie had come up with as the first visual idea.

The Usual Suspects was shown out of competition at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and then was initially released in few theaters, but received favorable reviews and was eventually given a wider release. McQuarrie won an Academy Award for the screenplay and Spacey won the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance.

Principal photography

The budget was set at USD $5.5 million and the film was shot in 35 days[9] in Los Angeles, San Pedro, and New York City.[8] Spacey said that they shot the interrogation scenes with Palminteri over a span of five to six days.[11] These scenes were also shot before the rest of the film.[1] The police line-up scene ran into scheduling conflicts because the actors kept blowing their lines. Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie would feed the actors questions off-camera and they improvised their lines. When Stephen Baldwin gave his answer, he made the other actors break character.[1] Byrne remembers that they were often laughing between takes and "when they said, 'Action' we'd barely be able to keep it together".[2] Spacey also said that the hardest part was not laughing through takes, with Baldwin and Pollack being the worst culprits.[11] Their goal was to get the usually serious Byrne to crack up.[11] They spent all morning trying to film the scene unsuccessfully. At lunch, a frustrated Singer chewed out the five actors and when they resumed, the cast continued to laugh through each take.[1] Byrne remembers, "Finally, Bryan just used one of the takes where we couldn't stay serious".[2] Singer and editor John Ottman used a combination of takes and kept the humor in to show the characters bonding with one another.[1]

While Del Toro told Singer how he was going to portray his character, he did not tell his cast members and in their first scene together none of them understood what the actor was saying. Byrne confronted Singer and the director told that for the lock-up scene, "If you don't understand what he's saying maybe it's time we let the audience know that they don't need to know what he's saying"[1]—hence the inclusion of Kevin Pollak's improvised line, "What did you say?"

The stolen emeralds were real gemstones on loan for the movie.[6]

Singer spent an 18-hour day shooting the underground parking garage robbery.[1] According to Byrne, the next day Singer still did not have all of the footage that he wanted and the producers told the director that the bonding company was threatening to shut the production down but he refused to stop filming.[1]

In the scene in which the crew meets Redfoot after the botched drug deal, Redfoot flicks his cigarette at McManus' face. The scene was originally to have the Redfoot character flick the cigarette at Baldwin's chest, but the actor missed and hit Baldwin's face by accident. Baldwin's reaction in the film is real.[6]

Despite enclosed practical locations and a short shooting schedule, the film's cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, "developed a way of shooting dialogue scenes with a combination of slow, creeping zooms and dolly moves that ended in tight close-ups", to add subtle energy to scenes.[12] This style combined dolly movement with "imperceptible zooms" so that you’d always have a sense of motion in a limited space".[13]