American Cinematographer - September 2000 - 66

A brave

McQuarrie
makes his point

during a
discussion with
actor and
onetime
Corleone family

venerable leader
of the bagmen.

Interview

studio

by Douglas Bankston

In 1995, the mind-bending noir
crime thriller The Usual

Suspects
posed this puzzling question:
"Who is Keyser Soze?" Rife with

member James

Caan, who plays
Sarno, the

GRIUING THE PERPfTRATOR

crime movie and end up as "the
crime guy," but after going from

countless twists and turns, the film
earned

writer

McQuarrie

an

Christopher
Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay. McQuarrie
is currently is in the process of
penning the feature adaptations of
two great TV hits from the 1960s:
The Green Hornet and The Prisoner.

studio

trying to get other
projects off the ground, I realized
that [a crime thriller] was really the
only film they were going to let me
to

make. It

was

Benicio Del Toro who

suggested a film about a kidnapping;
he said he'd never really seen an
interesting movie about it. I was
having dinner one night with my
wife, Benicio and [producer] Ken
Kokin, and my wife told us this story
about a wealthy couple who had
hired a surrogate mother to have
their child. They were very afraid

shooting the Coen brothers' film [O
Brother, Where Art Thou?] and was
unavailable. Instead, I asked him for
a

list of

cinematographers he would

recommend, and Dick Pope was one
of them. Dick had shot all of

[direc¬
tor] Mike Leigh's work, but he'd also
done

a

film that I had

seen

years ago

called The

Reflecting Skin. That was
so
radically different from everything
Dick was doing with Leigh that I
realized, 'Here's a guy with range, not
somebody who comes in and does
one
signature thing.' This was a guy
who could help me come up with a
look for this film that would be

completely unique. I spoke to him on
phone, and we immediately hit it

the

off. He
with
he

the States

came to

me,

to meet

and I knew right away that

the guy.
The Way

was

of the Gun harks
like
Westerns, with a little gangster-film
back

to

some

flavor. What

classic genres

were

some

of your

inspirations for the picture?
McQuarrie: I know

a

lot of

people

my age are big 70s nuts, and
those are the films they grew up on.
But I grew up on

John Huston, John
Sturges and John Ford. I just love that
feel. When I first spoke to Dick Pope
Before putting pen to paper for those
classics, however, McQuarrie donned
a

director's viewfinder for another

crime film he had written,

based

this

one

kidnapping. American
Cinematographer managed to round
up the "usual suspect" himself and
interrogate him about his first direc¬
torial outing, The Way of the Gun.
on

a

something was going to happen to
so they hired bodyguards to
watch her 24 hours a day. That was
the [premise] we needed. I thought,
'Well, what are the complications?
We've come up with the simple plan,
now how do we f*** it up?' There are
her,

all these variables that
and it seemed like
What

American
Where did you

Cinematographer:
get the idea for The

Way of The Gun?
McQuarrie: I had been trying
to get another film, Alexander the
Great, made for
was

some

going to be

that financed

as

difficult to get
first film, so I
project I could

very
my

looked for another
start out

time. I knew it

with that wouldn't be

an

$80 million epic. I didn't want to
follow up Suspects with another
64

September 2000

a

can

go wrong,

great idea.

prompted you to
BSC as your cine¬

about what the film would look like,
what I
Bad

bright, washed-out, almost 'primary
colors' sort of backdrop. Sturges and
Huston and Ford are all people who
stay out of the action. They stand
back in the

that

matographer?

than

of

a

room,

and

pulling back is more involving
getting in there with close-ups
and looking people right in the face.
Was that what motivated the

in

somebody who had a great deal of
experience in or who had developed
a
style based on [music] videos,
which is where a lot of cinematogra¬
phers are coming from. I had origi¬
nally spoken to Roger Deakins [ ASC,
BSC] about the project, because he
was going to shoot Alexander the
Great if it ever happened. But he was

corner

you feel very much like a spectator
within the scene. I sometimes feel

choose Dick Pope,

McQuarrie: I wasn't interested

really wanted to go for was
Day at Black Rock. I love that

lighting style, which seemed to
involve fixtures hanging in the air?
McQuarrie: I think the thing
we were most
trying to do was to
work as quickly as humanly possible!
Dick

was

under

enormous

pressure

keep things moving, and he did so
beautifully. The real areas where he
to
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