The Simple Job That Morphed Into ‘Valkyrie’
TWO Christmases ago the director Bryan Singer was looking for a modestly scaled movie to make, something he could slide in quickly between behemoths.
He had just come off three consecutive comic-book adaptations (“X-Men” in 2000, its sequel in 2003 and “Superman Returns” in 2006), he had helped to create the hit Fox series “House,” and he was now in the market for something different. When he read “Valkyrie,” a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who had been a friend since high school and won an Academy Award for writing Mr. Singer’s most acclaimed movie, “The Usual Suspects” (1995), he knew he had found that change of pace.
Two years, a reported $90 million, half a dozen Internet-fueled controversies and the arrival of one big movie star-turned-mini-mogul later, “Valkyrie,” with an eye-patched and jackbooted Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of a failed attempt within the Germany military to kill Hitler in 1944, arrives in theaters on Dec. 25.
“This was my shot at a small movie, and I blew it,” Mr. Singer said with a laugh during a Thanksgiving week visit to New York. “Maybe I just discovered I’m a big-movie guy. Even when I was making ‘Usual Suspects,’ which I shot in 35 days for $6 million, I had to have this giant boat, this police car, explosions, all that stuff. No matter what the circumstances are I tend to amplify.”
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He had just come off three consecutive comic-book adaptations (“X-Men” in 2000, its sequel in 2003 and “Superman Returns” in 2006), he had helped to create the hit Fox series “House,” and he was now in the market for something different. When he read “Valkyrie,” a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who had been a friend since high school and won an Academy Award for writing Mr. Singer’s most acclaimed movie, “The Usual Suspects” (1995), he knew he had found that change of pace.
Two years, a reported $90 million, half a dozen Internet-fueled controversies and the arrival of one big movie star-turned-mini-mogul later, “Valkyrie,” with an eye-patched and jackbooted Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of a failed attempt within the Germany military to kill Hitler in 1944, arrives in theaters on Dec. 25.
“This was my shot at a small movie, and I blew it,” Mr. Singer said with a laugh during a Thanksgiving week visit to New York. “Maybe I just discovered I’m a big-movie guy. Even when I was making ‘Usual Suspects,’ which I shot in 35 days for $6 million, I had to have this giant boat, this police car, explosions, all that stuff. No matter what the circumstances are I tend to amplify.”