Celebrity Biographies
Christopher McQuarrie
At the age of 12, he did not stop reading and writing because he wanted to become a successful novelist. With the passing of the years and the movies, he understood that his vocation could be made compatible with the Seventh Art, a much more lucrative world than that of literature. He began as a screenwriter who shone for his capacity for suspense and today he is a rising director who dominates action cinema.
Christopher McQuarrie began his career as a screenwriter with his great friend Bryan Singer . Together they wrote Public Access , a low-budget film that was not a huge box office hit but was a big hit at Sundance, where it received the Grand Jury Prize. The film told the story of an idyllic town, where all its inhabitants are happy, which is disrupted by the arrival of a stranger. The power of the film resided in the intelligent and mysterious plot that the two friends had intertwined.
While at Sundance, McQuarrie told Singer an idea that was on his mind: he wanted to write a movie in which five criminals meet in a lineup. Two years later, in 1995, The Usual Suspects was released and Christopher won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. In this tape he brought to the table his best virtues as a screenwriter: originality, capacity for suspense and command of script twists.
The success of The Usual Suspects was not a meteoric rise for McQuarrie. In fact, it took five years to see one of his films on the big screen again, something usual for a man with a career full of temporary gaps between films. He returned with Infernal Kidnapping , although this time in addition to being a scriptwriter he was also listed as a director in the credits. This thriller told the story of a surrogate mother kidnapped by two criminals. The film, which Cristopher himself acknowledges having written in just 5 days, was not a great success, but it was a more than worthy debut in which he demonstrated his talent, once again, to create a work that is as entertaining as it is surprising.
Whether due to lack of ambition or due to vicissitudes in his personal life, McQuarrie took a long time to return to work. He did it 8 years later as a co-writer of Valkiria , a film directed by Bryan Singer. The story, based on real events, narrated the conspiracy that took place during World War II to kill Hitler. Due to its historical interest and its agile script, the film was very well received. It was a moment that Cristopher had to take advantage of to relaunch his career.
In 2010, he collaborated on the script for The Tourist , a film that was as successful as it was ousted by critics, a remake of the French film The Secret of Anthony Zimmer . That same year he premiered his own television series: Unknown . Although neither project was a complete success, Christopher finally showed that he wanted to work.
In 2012 he premiered Jack Reacher , a play written and directed by himself. In it he told the story of a retired military policeman who decides to investigate on his behalf the case of a sniper accused of killing five people. The film was successful as an action movie and was a kind of rebirth for its protagonist, Tom Cruise , who repeated after Valkyrie . With him Cristopher has returned to work on his last two projects: Edge of Tomorrow , in which he is one of the screenwriters, and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation , which he has directed and written.
His latest works have shown us a man who dominates the action thriller and who is presented as ideal for creating blockbusters. He perfectly controls the suspense and agility of the stories. He likes to make movies with the general public in mind. He has everything Hollywood looks for in a filmmaker and seems to have overcome that ulterior motive – he never talks about his personal life, we don’t even know the day he was born – that prevented him from working continuously. Is it finally his time?