Where to watch The Usual Suspects (1995)

Trivia & production notes

• Christopher McQuarrie wrote nine drafts of the screenplay over five months before Bryan Singer felt it was ready to pitch to studios, with only a European financing company initially willing to back the project.
• Major studios declined to finance the film partly because of its non-linear structure and heavy dialogue, but the European backing allowed producers to assemble a strong cast willing to accept below-market salaries for the opportunity to work with one another.
• Kevin Spacey researched his role by meeting with doctors and cerebral palsy experts to determine how the condition would affect his character's movements, ultimately deciding it would impact only one side of his body.
• Benicio Del Toro deliberately developed Fenster's nearly unintelligible speech patterns by reasoning that since his character was written to die early, the specific intelligibility of his dialogue mattered less than making it distinctively uncomprehensible.
• The famous police lineup scene required extensive reshoots because the actors kept laughing and breaking character, with Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Pollak deliberately trying to make Gabriel Byrne crack up until director Singer finally used a take where they couldn't stay composed.
• The emeralds used in the film were real gemstones on loan, and Singer spent an 18-hour day shooting the underground parking garage robbery scene, then refused to stop filming the next day despite the bonding company threatening to shut down production.
• During the interrogation scene where Redfoot flicks a cigarette at McManus' face, actor Stephen Baldwin was genuinely hit when the move went off-target, and his authentic reaction was kept in the final film.
• During post-production editing, Bryan Singer initially believed the film was complete two weeks early but then realized he needed that time to construct a sequence convincing audiences that Dean Keaton was Keyser Söze, then do the same for Verbal Kint.
• Gramercy Pictures was concerned that audiences would struggle to pronounce "Keyser Söze," so the studio launched a promotional campaign with "Who is Keyser Söze?" bus stop posters and TV spots teaching viewers how to say the name before the film's theatrical release.
• The character of Keyser Söze was inspired by John List, a New Jersey accountant who murdered his family in 1971 and evaded capture for nearly two decades before assuming a new identity.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Usual Suspects, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.