Chris McQuarrie mines crime genre with 'Way of the Gun'

Unusual suspects

Ryan Phillippe and director Christopher McQuarrie on the set of "The Way Of The Gun"

In this story: Detective to director Casting Ryan Phillippe RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Jamie Allen
CNN.com Senior Writer

(CNN) -- It's like this: Chris McQuarrie was always a writer, but he had to spend some time doing something else to realize his voice.

Listen to McQuarrie talk about his experiences working for a New Jersey detective agency -- before he was the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the cool crime hit "The Usual Suspects" -- and this becomes clear. You begin to realize where he comes up with intricate plots involving characters of moral deviation that populate his work.

McQuarrie was a "glorified security guard," as he calls it, and some of his work at the agency entailed tracking down cheating spouses. Sometimes, there was a unique twist to the storyline. Like this one time --

"My boss, Joe Sarno, and I followed the mistress of a cheating husband, for the wife, to prove that the mistress was cheating on the husband," McQuarrie explains during a recent phone interview. "The wife hired us to follow the mistress when the husband was out of town ... so that she could present evidence that she was cheating to her husband and say, 'Why don't you stop seeing her?' We followed the mistress and found the husband hadn't left town. He was staying at the mistress' house.

"When we reported this to the wife, the wife called the mistress and started screaming at the husband, saying, 'I've got two private investigators watching you right now!' He said, 'I'm going to go outside and kill them.' We were in Pennsylvania, we couldn't carry guns, and we were sitting in our car and this guy comes storming out of the building. I'm sitting there with Joe, saying 'Wow, that guy looks pissed. They must've had some fight in there!'"

McQuarrie and Sarno survived the incident.

In fact, McQuarrie has since gone on to more creative endeavors. After four years at the agency, he got a call from a high school buddy. Bryan Singer, who had read some of McQuarrie's school-house musings, asked his old friend if he wanted to write a movie for him. The result was "The Usual Suspects," the 1995 movie starring Kevin Spacey that had everyone guessing, who is Keyser Soze?

Since then, McQuarrie got lost in the shuffle of Hollywood screenwriting, trying to pen plays for studios that wanted formulaic structure and lots of car crashes. It wasn't fun for McQuarrie.

"I was just really sick of watching characters get away with murder," he says. "I was sick and tired of the notion that in an attempt to tone down violence, movies were coming up with better and better reasons for why killing was OK."

But now he's back to what he does best. His latest effort is "The Way of the Gun," a low-budget flick that he bills as "a modern-day Western where cell phones don't work."

The storyline: Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro), a pair of career criminals, kidnap a very pregnant woman (Juliette Lewis), who is supposedly the surrogate mother to a rich couple's child. They're chased by bodyguards hired by the couple, played with icy flair by Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt. James Caan plays the weathered and battle-weary Joe Sarno, a character based loosely on the Joe Sarno that used to be McQuarrie's boss at the detective agency.

"The Way of the Gun"'s hard-onion plot peels away scene by scene, suspicious glance by suspicious glance. It includes a car chase that makes O.J. Simpson's infamous low-speed freeway run look like a stock car race, and the kind of gunplay that puts the sting back in movie bullets.

Lost amid details might be the fact that this is McQuarrie's directorial debut. He's using this podium to get back to the raw reasons for making a crime film, one that hasn't been glittered over with cute lines uttered before somebody is shot to death.

"There was a lot of pressure for me to make a crime film," he says. "And I thought, if I'm going to make a crime film, I'm going to make a film about criminals. They don't have reasons that you would normally accept. There shouldn't be forgiveness for committing horrible acts of violence and ruining people's lives. There shouldn't be excuses for it. The person to blame for violence is the person who commits the act. That's where Parker and Longbaugh came from."

Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro star in "The Way of the Gun"

McQuarrie says he wrote the movie with Del Toro ("The Usual Suspects") in mind to play Longbaugh. But when it was time to cast Parker, he had a more difficult time finding the right actor. Phillippe, who had starred in the cringe-worthy "Cruel Intentions" (1999), was the last person on McQuarrie's list.

"I was very resistant to Ryan and Ryan refused to take no without meeting, " says McQuarrie. "We sat down and talked about it. My producer, Ken Kokin, pointed out to me that the one actor that I did not want in 'The Usual Suspects' was Benicio and hadn't I learned my lesson. He said, 'More than anything, he wants to be in your film. Don't you want to work with somebody who wants to work for you?'

"There were a lot of other actors that we had considered," says McQuarrie, "and they were all very reluctant to play this role. I asked Ryan, 'Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to be in this film?' And he said, 'You know, everybody's trying to make me a movie star and I want to be an actor.' And I respected that and I hired him."

Phillippe lived up to the challenge -- he's 25 pounds heavier in this film, with a scruffy veneer that hides his baby face.

Caan, meantime, embraced the role of Sarno, McQuarrie says. He's charged with heading up the operation to rescue Lewis' character. While he wears his scars and stiff neck like a badge, we eventually learn his true stake in the matter.

"The heroism of the role," says McQuarrie of Caan, "was playing up the vulnerability of the role, and that was all Jimmy."

McQuarrie admits being intimidated by Caan. In fact, the process of directing a movie was something that he had to get used to. Caan helped set him straight.

"It was Jimmy that saw that I was struggling with the transition from writer to director, that as a writer you work very hard to accommodate people and as a director you've got to say, 'No,'" McQuarrie says. "And it's very hard for me to say no. He saw that this was becoming more and more of a struggle and finally one day he pulled me aside and said, 'I'm going to tell you something. All actors, and that includes me, need direction. We need to be told what to do. This is your film whether you like it or not. Now quit f---ing around and go back there and start telling those people what to do.'

"And that was really the day I started directing," McQuarrie says.

Review: 'Cruel Intentions' is crude, unusual punishment
March 4, 1999

'The Way of the Gun'

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