Unknown magazine -1995

Preview

Although The Usual Suspects won't hit the screens until August, it's already being tagged as one of the must-see films of the year. Shot last year over the course of 35 days on a modest (by current blowout standards) budget of $3 million, Suspects has taken on a life of it's own. Some are even calling the independent the Pulp Fiction of 1995 for it's box-office potential.

Bryan Singer, the film's 27-year-old director (his last film, Public Access, was an award-winner at Sundance in 1992), calls it" A movie with a heist in it. It evolves into a classic-style mystery but with a unique take on it. " Starring Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Kevin Pollack, Benicio Del Toro, Pete Postlewhaite, Chazz Palimenteri and Stephen Baldwin, the film ponders, "What if five criminals met in a police lineup and ended up working together?"

Although Singer and his 27-year-old producer Ken Kokin (who also served as second-unit director) attracted a very talented cast, it wasn't all easy sailing. Singer recalls, "The studio was like, 'You can't sell a movie on Gabriel Byrne. Baldwin? No one has heard of him in Europe. Pete Postlewhaite? Who is that? Oh, he was nominated for an Oscar?' "

The short shoot flowed nicely regardless, and according to the producing/directing team, everything went swimmingly well despite some unplanned hitches.

In the film's climax, Gabriel Byme's character is running around a 265-foot boat in San Pedro, looking for guns and drugs. The vessel, which is called the Tanager and was once owned by the Kennedy family, apparently was under the scrutiny of the local Coast Guard. As the crew was shooting one night. the Coast Guardsmen boarded the ship looking for real guns and/or drugs.

"It was weird. " muses Singer. "They were carrying guns, and we were packing lights. "

NEXT ISSUE: The full story behind the Suspects, including why Baldwin now calls co-star Byrne " prison bitch, " and just why Samuel L. Jackson didn't get the part.

-Dominic Griffin

(I don't know what magazine this came from and don't have the next issue. Anyone else have it?)

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Actor-director Kevin Spacey

Closing in on the leading 'suspect'

His hair forming and exclamation point on his forehead, his body twisted into a palsied knot, Kevin Spacey hobbles painfully through the neo-noir  thriller The Usual Suspects. As gimpy Roger "Verbal" Kint, Spacey is at turns pitiable, funny, wily, and utterly inscrutable. 

"He's a character actor and a chameleon," says Suspects' director Bryan Singer. "In his roles he always changes his look, his hair, his voice. Beneath the surface is a very complex human being."

In person, Spacey, 36, can swing from serious to frivolous. (His hilarious impersonation of Jack Lemmon, his mentor and costar in Long Day's Journey Into Night, is dead on.) California bred and Juilliard educated, he broke out in 1988 with his terrifying portrayal of a brutal gangster in TV's Wiseguy, followed by a Tony-winning performance in 1991 as Uncle Louie in Lost In Yonkers. Spacey, now based in New York, says his theater roles "are closer to me as a person than most of my film roles," which is good news, as his most memorable screen characters - the sadistic real estate manager in 1992's Glengarry Glen Ross, the abusive studio executive in 1995's Swimming With Sharks - are not exactly folks you'd invite home for dinner. "the dangers of ambition are what interests me," he declares. "I was driven to do Suspects because Verbal was more internal. It was a discipline for me to trust that stillness."

Spacey's latest challenge was his directorial debut for the forthcoming heist drama Albino Alligator, starring Matt Dillon and Faye Dunaway. ("I've been madly in love with her my whole life," he exclaims. "Acting pales next to this experience.") But he'll be back before the camera next month, as a DA in Joel Schumacher's A Time To Kill. What he'll do with his hair and his voice this time is anyone's guess. 

- Anne Thompson

September 8, 1995 (Entertainment Weekly?)

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CLASSIC SCENE 
The Usual Suspects

"Who is Keyser Soze?" The phrase was echoed by critics and audiences alike during the summer of 1995, when The Usual Suspects arrived on the big screen. Not since 1949's The Third Man had such attention been paid to the mystery of a movie character's true identity. In director Bryan Singer (X-Men) and writer Christopher McQuarrie's complex thriller, Soze is a criminal mastermind who gets five thieves to go on a suicide mission to destroy $91 million worth of cocaine. It's a cat-and-mouse game in which the characters, like the audience, are in the dark about what's actually going on. 

The five crooks - McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), Fen- ster (Benicio Del Toro), Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), and Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar) - are bound together by their fear of Soze, who holds damning information on all of them. McQuarrie's Oscar- winning script (his directorial debut, The Way of the Gun, opens this month) is filled with great lines and finely etched characters. In this scene, the weaselly Kint is being questioned by federal agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) at the San Pedro Police Department. After explaining to Kujan how the group was coerced by a lawyer named Kobayashi into doing the job for Soze, Kint tells the fed what he knows of the legendary gangster.

Verbal Kint: He's supposed to be Turkish; some say his father was German. Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody ever knew him or saw anybody that ever worked directly for him. But to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. One story the guys told me - the story I believe - was from his days in Turkey. There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. After a while, they come into power and then they come after Soze. He was small-time then, just running dope, they say. They come to his home in the afternoon looking for his business - [Cut to: a flashback of three Hungarians bursting into a room in Soze's house] They find his wife and kids in the house and decide to wait for Soze. He comes home to find his wife raped and children screaming. The Hungarians knew Soze was tough, not to be trifled with, so they let him know they meant business. [A Hungarian slashes the neck of one of Soze's sons.] They tell him they want his territory, all his business. Soze looks over the faces of his family... then he showed these men of will what will really was.

[Soze shoots two of the Hungarians, and then, turning the gun on his family, he shoots them too, leaving one of the Hungarians standing.] He tells him he would rather see his family dead than live another day after this. He lets the last Hungarian go, then waits until his wife and kids are in the ground, and then he goes after the rest of the mob. He kills their kids, he kills their wives, he kills their parents, and their parents' friends. [Soze walks away from a stream of fire that is erupting behind him.] He burns down the houses they live in and the stores they work in. He kills people that owe them money. And like that [Kint, back in the police station, blows on his fingers, as if to say, "Poof!'], he's gone. Underground. Nobody's ever seen him since. He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night. "Rat on your pop and Keyser Soze will get ya." And no one ever really believes. 

Dave Kujan: Do you believe in him, Verbal?

Kint: Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him." Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.

Premiere, September 2000, page 96

 

 

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