Background

Bryan Singer was born on September 17, 1965, in New York City, New York, United States. Bryan was adopted as an infant by Grace, an environmental activist, and Norbert Dave Singer, a corporate executive. His adoptive parents were Jewish. It is not publicly known who Bryan’s birth parents are, but his birth mother is said to live in England. He was an introverted child, playing the piano from an early age and loving movies and the Star Trek television series. At age twelve, Singer became fascinated with still photography, setting up a darkroom in his home while other kids were out playing baseball.

Education

In 1984 Bryan Singer graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City for a brief period of time but did not graduate from there. In 1989 Singer graduated from the USC School of Cinema-Television (now the USC School of Cinematic Arts). Rejected by the production program of the film school there, he instead majored in critical studies, reviewing hundreds of films. In college, he met other young men with whom he formed a working relationship: Kenneth Kokin, who has co-produced with Singer, and the editor and composer John Ottman.

Career

Bryan Singer worked on several small projects, including a short feature written and directed by himself, Lion’s Den (1988), an award-winning twenty-five-minute short that chronicles the reunion of five high school friends who discover how much they have drifted apart only six months after graduation. Starring friend Ethan Hawke, Lion’s Den was shot for under $15000, but nonetheless also opened doors for future films.

Singer’s first critical success came in 1993 with the film Public Access. Described by Entertainment Weekly contributor Ty Burr as a "glacial, audacious moral horror story," Singer’s first major movie tells the tale of Whiley Pritcher (played by Ron Marquette), a stranger who arrives in the small town of Brewster and establishes a call-in show on the local public-access cable channel. Pritcher’s show is not just the run-of-the-mill call-in show, however; it is a rumor-mill that soon pits Brewsterites against one another. The Grand Jury at the Sundance Film Festival was impressed enough by the film to award it top honors in 1993. Suddenly the young director from New Jersey was being taken seriously in Hollywood.

For his second major outing, Singer again worked with McQuarrie, author of the screenplay for The Usual Suspects, as well as with Kokin and Ottman. Singer shopped the story to twenty-five companies before finding a German company that came through with enough start-up money to assemble a case. When this initial funding fell through, Singer had to get the actors to sign on to the picture concept; with those names in hand, Singer found someone willing to sign a guarantee so he could borrow the money to begin production.

The plot of The Usual Suspects revolves around a planned robbery. In jail for a line-up, five men - a corrupt cop (Gabrielle Byrne), a gunman (Steven Baldwin), an explosives man (Kevin Pollack), a mobster type (Benicio Del Toro), and Roger "Verbal" Kint, a crippled con artist (Kevin Spacey) - concoct the perfect heist. Unfortunately, the heist does not simply go bad - it spins completely out of control. The Usual Suspects is told in flashback by Kint, one of two survivors of an explosion that starts the movie and takes the lives of twenty-seven men and some $91 million in cocaine. Investigating the explosion, United States Customs Special Agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) thinks Verbal knows more than he’s sharing; it is during the course of Verbal’s interrogation that the flashback plot unfolds.

For his third movie, Singer worked from the Stephen King novella, Apt Pupil, about the relationship between a teenage boy and an aged Nazi who lives quietly and undetected just down the block. Starring Ian McKellen as ex-Nazi Kurt Dussander and Brad Renfro as the teenager, Todd, Apt Pupil revolves around a coincidence. Sixteen-year-old Todd has just finished a week of Holocaust study in school and has become obsessed with the subject. On a public bus he sees Dussander, a notable recluse in the neighborhood, and suddenly recognizes him as a wanted war criminal depicted in one of his school texts. Instead of turning Dussander into the authorities, Todd confronts the old man with a bargain: he will not report him to the Nazi hunters if Dussander agrees to tell him exactly what he did in the war at the camps and how it felt. At first reluctant, Dussander increasingly becomes animated with his retelling, sometimes inspired by alcohol, sometimes by Todd’s encouragement.

Singer took a quantum leap in the budget for his next feature, a $75-million adaptation of the best-selling X- Men comic. This tale of reluctant superheroes again piqued the director’s curiosity. The X-Men, as envisaged in the original comic book by creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, live a realm in which Charles Xavier, a wheelchair-bound telepath, attempts to make the world safe for mutants - the next stage in human evolution. While Xavier hopes to have mutants live in harmony with lesser-gifted Homo sapiens, Xavier’s archenemy, Magneto, wants to create a world in which the mutants take over and enslave man. He has a cameo appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) as a crewman on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. He was set to direct Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) but turned it down due to schedule conflicts with X2 (2003).

By the time X2 hit theaters in early May of 2003, it had been three years since the first film floored audiences, and the sense of public anticipation was palpable. Fortunately, Singer had once again crafted a finely tuned adaptation that remained remarkably true to the characters while cranking up the stakes and action to a fever pitch. X2 was generally regarded as, at the very least, an equal to its predecessor, and many fans voiced the opinion that it actually did X-Men one better.

Singer turned down the opportunity to direct X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) to direct Superman Returns (2006). His next film Valkyrie (2008), a thriller centering on a real-life plot to assassinate Hitler and starring Tom Cruise, didn't fare much better with critics or filmgoers, but with an executive producer credit on the wildly popular medical series House and a slew of other film and television projects, his career was still in full swing. Meanwhile, behind the camera, Singer began production on his next feature, 2013's Jack the Giant Killer - an imaginative take on the beloved fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. Though he had worked as a writer and a producer on 2011's X-Men: First Class, Singer didn't return to the director's chair on the series until 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, which became one of the best-reviewed and highest-grossing films of the series.

Singer also directed the Queen biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Sanchez-Guzman sued Singer in 2017, alleging sexual harassment, which Singer denied. Singer was fired from the Oscar-winning movie Bohemian Rhapsody for "unreliable behavior" amid the allegations. The director was later removed from his film's Bafta Awards nomination due to allegations he sexually abused under-age boys. He is the founder of Bad Hat Harry Productions.

Achievements

• Hailed as one of the film industry's most exciting and provocative new talents after the huge success of The Usual Suspects (1995), Bryan Singer has built his reputation on making films that are essentially lengthy, verbally dexterous flirtations with the darker side of human nature. On June 17, 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "AFI's 10 Top 10" - the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres - after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. The Usual Suspects was acknowledged as the tenth-best mystery film. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay #35 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • X2

    (The X-Men band together to find a mutant assassin who has...)

    2003
  • Trick 'r Treat

    (The rituals of All Hallow's Eve were devised to protect u...)

    2007
  • Apt Pupil

    (A sixteen-year-old honor student discovers a Nazi war cri...)

    1998
  • Superman Returns

    (Following a mysterious absence of several years, Superman...)

    2006
  • Uwantme2killhim?

    (An online relationship turns deadly in this true-crime th...)

    2013
  • Valkyrie

    (At the height of WWII, a group of German officers hatched...)

    2008
  • Star Trek: Nemesis

    (After the Enterprise is diverted to Romulus, supposedly t...)

    2002
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past

    (The X-Men send Wolverine to the past in a desperate effor...)

    2014
  • X-Men: Apocalypse

    (In the 1980s the X-Men must defeat an ancient all-powerfu...)

    2016
  • The Usual Suspects

    (A customs agent interrogates the lone survivor of a deadl...)

    1995
  • X-Men

    (A group of heroic mutants battle an evil mutant bent on r...)

    2000
  • The Look, Up in the Sky: Amazing Story of Superman

    (The story of Superman is the story of the most influentia...)

    2006
  • Jack the Giant Slayer

    (An age-old war is reignited when a young farmhand unwitti...)

    2013
  • Bohemian Rhapsody

    (Rami Malek stars as Freddie Mercury in this electrifying ...)

    2018
  • X-Men: First Class

    (Following the classic Marvel mythology, X-Men: First Clas...)

    2011
  • The Taking of Deborah Logan

    (When Mia Medina records the everyday life of her mother D...)

    2014

• TV series

  • House Season 1

    (Dr. Gregory House is devoid of bedside manner and wouldn'...)

    2004

Religion

Bryan Singer was raised as a Jewish. He includes Judaism in much of his films.

Politics

Bryan Singer doesn't express his political views openly.

Views

Bryan Singer told, "I think television is moving more into movies, particularly with serialization and almost cinematic proportions and expectations. A show like 'Game of Thrones' is a perfect example of that, or even a show like 'The Wire,' which isn't all about instant gratification it's about inviting someone into the long experience of television the way you'd be invited into a theater for two hours. So I think in that way, and the quality of writing in television is probably much better than most film writing."

Quotations: "We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality."

Personality

Bryan Singer is openly bisexual. He is a huge fan of the original Star Trek (1966) series. One of his favorite movies is the thriller film Jaws (1975). His favorite actor is Hugh Jackman.

Interests

• movies

Connections

Bryan Singer has a son, Dashiell Julius William Clunie-Singer, from his friend Michelle Clunie, an actress.

Adoptive father:

Norbert Dave Singer

Adoptive mother:

Grace Singer

Son:

Dashiell Julius William Clunie-Singer

Uncle:

Jacques Singer

Friend:

Gary Goddard

Friend:

Ethan Hawke

colleague:

Newton Sigel

Newton Sigel collaborated with director Bryan Singer on films like The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, and the X-Men film franchise.

colleague:

Ian McKellen

Bryan Singer frequently works with Ian McKellen (Apt Pupil, the X-Men films).

Acquaintance:

John Ottman

Bryan Singer met John Ottman at the USC School of Cinema-Television (now the USC School of Cinematic Arts).

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2010
• War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film
  2011