Les Jones

“The Ususal Suspects” screenwriters disagree about what happened

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | The Usual Suspects |

Dallas News via Kottke:

McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.

“I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”

He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”

Obviously Verbal was lying to some degree, simply because we know he was pulling story details out of thin air, or more precisely out of the corkboard in the police office. “I used to be in a barbershop quarter in Skokie, Illinois,” he says while looking at a corkboard made by the Quarter company of Skokie, Illinois. That board is the source of so many lies that I believe the story itself is mostly lies.

At the end of the movie we see Verbal losing his feigned limp and getting into a car with the actor who played Kobayahsi - Keyser Soze’s messenger - in the flashbacks. None of that proves that Verbal is Soze or that dude is Kobayashi. We know that most of his story is a lie. The existence of the man who portrays Kobayahsi - whose name was taken from the bottom of a coffee cup - in the imagined flashback doesn’t make the lie the truth.

I don’t believe he was the criminal mastermind Keyser Soze. For one thing, he was too young. For another, he was a known small time con artist who had done time. Everyone gets 24 hours in a day. You can’t be a small time con artist locked up intermittently and be an international criminal mastermind heading up a vast criminal network with its tentacles everywhere.

2 Comments to “The Ususal Suspects” screenwriters disagree about what happened

Rob Howard
May 21, 2009

I can see this side of the story, but why would someone pretend to be crippled for all that time if he didn’t have the will of a criminal mastermind. It’s been 20 years now (if not, almost) and I know Verbal Kent is Keyser Soze. I mean - isn’t that what the movie’s about? It was the sketch from the dying Hungarian that tied him up as being Keyser.

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Les Jones
May 21, 2009

“It was the sketch from the dying Hungarian that tied him up as being Keyser.”

Or did someone give that description to the sketch artist because Verbal conned them into believing he was he was Soze?

It’s a helluva thing to be trapped in a funhouse, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t.

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