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A touch of evil >> Bryan Singer on his Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil by MATTHEW HAYS
Singer, the director behind the 1995 hit Usual Suspects, had read Apt Pupil, a novella by King, and found himself fascinated by the author's artful contrast of appearances and reality. "The face behind a face behind a face," explains Singer, "the idea of things never being what they seem--this always intrigues me." Singer's attraction to the story is understandable; a brief synopsis alone comes across as rather chilling. A precocious high school student in his senior year (played by Brad Renfro) has an obsession with the Holocaust. He studies books and journals extensively, and one day he recognizes one of the faces from his research in his own, quiet, southern Californian neighbourhood. If Renfro's hunch is right, this reclusive old geezer (played by Sir Ian McKellen) living just around the corner is a bona fide Nazi. In a typical King twist, Renfro does not phone the police immediately and turn in McKellen. Instead, he blackmails the aging Nazi, insisting he'll go straight to the cops unless McKellen tells him all the details of the death camps and what it was really like to put thousands of Jews to death. Soon enough, McKellen is threatening Renfro with his own blackmail, and a vicious cycle of manipulation has begun. Evil lives "The thing I liked about the novella the most," Singer says, "is the idea that there was this terrible, awful thing that happened decades ago in Europe, that somehow survived across the ocean and crept up through the earth in this sunny little southern Californian suburban community--and in this seemingly normal, all-American young man." Singer was well aware of the controversy the story would arouse when he optioned the rights from King. The author--who has become something of a cultural institution--was warned by his publishers that the book would draw nasty criticism when he first wrote it in the early '80s, but insisted they go ahead with it anyway. "I'm Jewish, Stephen King's not," says Singer, arguing his ethnicity makes him more sensitive to the issues at hand. "I screened it for some Jewish rabbis at the L.A. Holocaust Centre and the response was very good. For Jewish people like myself, whenever we reference the Shoah in any form, even in popular entertainment, it's a good thing, because it's part of remembering that it happened." For Singer, the events in the book and the film are not even specifically Nazi-related, but have more to do with the lure and fascination with pure evil. "I don't think it's Nazi or pro-fascist. It's not about Nazism at all; this man could have been any monster who'd committed murder." Singer and screenwriter Brandon Boyce did make some substantial changes from the novella and, ironically enough, while most filmmakers tend to sensationalize the shift from print to screen, they actually toned down what were graphic scenes of violence (the book concludes with a Marc Lépine-style mass shooting). "I liked the way the evil manifested itself in the book," recalls Singer, "but the trouble is, you show that on the screen and people get real tired of seeing it. Here we just decided to play the psychological horror." Minor nudes Threats of litigation plagued Apt Pupil when parents of some of the grade-school-aged extras complained about a group shower sequence in the middle of the film. The sequence is nothing racy and there are certainly no sexual overtones, but parents complained their offspring had not been warned that the work they were doing would require nudity. "It annoyed the hell out of me," says Singer. The filmmaker didn't think anyone had a case against him or the producers, but decided to re-shoot all of the scenes in question using adult extras. Singer was already sensitive to the threat of lawsuit. In the late '80s, another group of filmmakers had attempted to bring Apt Pupil to the big screen (with Ricky Schroeder in the Renfro role); the production buckled after 10 weeks of shooting, in part because of legal woes (eventually the film rights reverted back to King). Now Singer is gearing up for X-Men, the big-budget movie adaptation of the immensely successful Marvel comic book. The project is budgeted at between $7090 million and Singer says his primary concern is the balance between action sequences and dialogue. "When you look at a lot of the early Bond films, they have great talking scenes in them that were entertaining and everyone enjoyed. Star Wars and the Hong Kong cinema are great in many ways, but they've convinced the system that they can make these movies that are just a bunch of action sequences strung together. And you know what? Unfortunately, audiences verify that." Apt Pupil opens Friday, October 23
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One would have thought the Stephen King library would've have been raided so thoroughly by now, that there simply wouldn't be any titles left for filmmakers. But Bryan Singer found one.