About

1988 Lions Den (short)- Producer + Director + Writer + Actor

We go back to where it all began for Bryan Singer, at 23 years old, a young film student at The University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinema-Television embarked on what would become the first film of his directing career- Lion’s Den (1988).

Lion’s Den was a short film, just 25 minutes in length, directed by both Singer and John Ottman, a collaboration that would ignite The Usual Suspects some 7 years later.

Breaking The Mould

Singer: Because I did not make this film within the USC curriculum, I had to find a venue to screen it on its own. I placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times, Variety and Hollywood Reporter to attract other filmmakers to participate in a screening at the Directors Guild theater.  Because I was friends with his brother Ted, I asked director Sam Raimi if he would host that screening and he agreed. As a result we filled the 600 seats. It was at that screening that  ‘Lion’s Den’ was seen by a representative from a Japanese Company which financed my first feature ‘Public Access.’ That film went in to win the Grand Jury Prize at prestigious  Sundance Film Festival in 1993. By this time I had gone into $33,000 of credit card debt. It wasn’t until I made ‘The Usual Suspects’ that I could repay that debt. Needless to say these were very stressful times. But also some of the most exciting times of my life.

1993 Public Access- Producer + Director + Writer

Two decades ago Bryan Singer had his first feature film debut, screening Public Access (1993) at the Sundance Film Festival and Deauville Film Festival that year.

Under Singers direction to tell the story slowly and deliberately with the screenplay written by Singer, Christopher McQuarrie and Michael Feit Dougan, the film was shot in 18 days for $250,000, a budget secured off the back of Singers first ever short- Lion’s Den (1988). Singer likens Public Access to his follow up film The Usual Suspects (1995) in that ‘Both films are about telling stories and provoking, which segues into my style—using sound and images and music to create tension’.

Public access was one of two films to win the Grand Jury prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival and won the Critics Award at the Deauville Film Festival that same year, with critics praising Singers direction- not bad for his first debut in the world of directing. Despite its recognition and praise, it didn’t secure a theatrical distributer but it did lead Singer onto directing his arguably most infamous international hit crime thriller The Usual Suspects.

1998 Apt Pupil- Producer & Director

Apt Pupil, a novel by Stephen King was adapted to the big screen in 1998 with director Bryan Singer at its helm. It sees a 16 year old high achieving, high school student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) who suspects his neighbor Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen) is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding from justice named Kurt Dussander.

For Singer, the novel Act Pupil was known to him since his teenage years where he first read it at 19. With the desire to adapt it to the screen, he asked his friend Brandon Boyce to write a spec script and they went directly to Stephen King armed with script and a copy of The Usual suspects which had yet to be released to the public.

1998 - Last Semester USC - Singer shoots Lions Den

While in my last semester of studies, I shot a 16 mm 25 minute short film called ‘Lion’s Den’ using money I had raised independently. I’m on the cast was Ethan Hawke who had grown up in my neighborhood in New Jersey and had been in some of my 8mm films.

2003 X-Men 2- Director + Writer

Fox commissioned the second installment to the X-Men franchise, the sequel ‘X2’ or ‘X-Men 2’ which was bought to our screens in 2003. The superhero movie is directed again by Singer who also researched various story lines from the X- Men comic book series to cultivate a plot on which to base the script.

The plot follows an assassination attempt on the president by a mutant named Nightcrawler, which sparks a fear of meta-humans and triggers an assault on Professor Xavier’s school for mutants making the X-Men go into hiding. Meanwhile a scientist and religious fanatic named William Stryker plans to annihilate all meta-humans and kidnaps the X-Men’s leader Xavier in a plot to use the cerebro to find the mutants and destroy them. This leaves the X-Men with no choice but to team up with their enemy Magneto, in a temporary alliance to stop Stryker before it’s too late.

2006 Superman Returns- Director + Writer

In July 2004 Bryan Singer left behind the Marvel Universe for DC comics rendition of the much loved man of steel, directing the sixth and final instalment to the original Superman film series, Superman Returns (2006).

The film was produced as a direct quasi-sequel to Superman II (1981), taking place 5 years after when the mythic embodiment of heroism that is Superman (Brandon Routh), returns to earth to find that the world didn’t necessarily miss him when he was gone. Meanwhile his old enemy Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is once again plotting his demise, contriving a new sinister plot to wipe out Superman along with billions of others. With the realisation that his heart throb Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has moved on with her life, Superman’s bittersweet return challenges him to prove himself to her and the world, embarking on an epic journey to save humanity.

2008 Valkyrie- Producer + Director

Based on a true story set in Nazi Germany in WWII. The script, co-written by his high school friend and ex-colleague Christopher McGuire. Valkyrie was the first time Singer has made a film with a movie star- Tom Cruise, two giants of industry team up to give you an unforgettable experience.

Set in 1944 Nazi Germany, the tense and compelling thriller is based on the well-known large-scale conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It centers around Col. Claus Stauffenberg (Tom cruise) joining a group of high-ranking like-minded men who want to overthrow the Nazi regime from within and so plan the daring coup on 20 July to use the ‘Operation Valkyrie’ to seize control from the evil dictator.

Singer is able to elicit suspense from this story with a foregone conclusion (as we know the conspirators didn’t succeed) and he doesn’t do things by halves, in fact this move took two years in the making and around 90 million dollars to get to our screens. Valkyrie was nominated for best director and best actor (Tom Cruise) at the Saturn Awards and is rated a respectable 7.1 on IMDB.

2012 Mockingbird Lane- Director

Back in 2012 Bryan Singer directed a spin-off show of the original ‘The Munsters’ an American sitcom from the 1960’s. Singer directed the pilot and it was produced by his company Bad Hat Harry Productions with Bryan Fuller (writer of Pushing Daisy’s and Hannibal) as executive producer and writer. Singer and Fuller proved to be a winning combo for this Munsters makeover, it having received rave reviews leaving fans wanting more. It is described it as a glimpse into a horror-meets-fantasy world giving the audience an eccentric, spooky and funny hour of film and achieving a respectable 7.5/10 rating on IMDB plus even a few award nominations.

2014 X-Men Days of Future Past- Producer + Director

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the 2014 superhero movie of Bryan Singers repertoire that won the Jupiter Award for ‘Best International Film’ and the first ever of the X-Men movie franchise to be nominated for an Oscar. As the seventh installment in the X-Men film series, it was both directed and produced by Bryan Singer.

The film follows Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in a dystopian era where mutants are being made extinct by robotic Sentinels. He re-joins X-Men and is sent back in time to 1973 to stop Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) from obtaining Mystique’s (Jennifer Lawrence) DNA and using it to power the Sentinels, an act that caused the mutant apocalypse, dooming both humans and mutants alike.

2016 X-Men Apocalypse- Producer + Director + Writer

Apocalypse is the sixth mainline instalment to the series, but set in 1983 it follows the awakening of the first Ancient Egyptian mutant ‘En Sabah Nur’ (Oscar Isaac) after a millennia entombed. He believes humanity has lost its way and aims to destroy and remake the world with the help of four mutants- Ororo Munroe (Alexandra Shipp), Psylocke (Olivia Munn), Angel (Ben Hardy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender). With the fate of the world in uncertainty the only chance of salvation is for Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) and a team of young X-men to stop their greatest nemesis. Singer’s focus is on the characters in this movie, the villain differs from the previous X-men films. En Sabah Nur once worshiped as a god, makes no distinction between humans and mutants, he doesn’t fight for either side but for dominance over earth.

2017 The Gifted

• eXposed (Episode 1- Director)

2017 bought us the X-men spin off TV series produced by 20^th Century Fox Television and Marvel Television- The Gifted. The pilot episode was directed by none other than Bryan Singer, who then remained an executive producer on the show for its 2 season running of 29 episodes. The Gifted is based on an alternate timeline of X-Men, where the X-Men have disappeared but left in their wake are mutants forced off the grid in a wave on anti-mutant hysteria. The pilot episode ‘eXposed’ features a suburban couple whose previously assumed normal children accidentally expose their mutant abilities at a school dance, forcing the entire family to flee from the hostile government, assisted by an underground mutant network or risk capture in detention centers.

The pilot set up the series and of course we can count on Bryan Singer to do just that, being no stranger to pilot episodes, queue House MD (2004-2012) which ran for 8 seasons. The pilot was described as ‘an impressive premier composing a compelling comic book series’ and received rave reviews. Singer brings the same flavor of storytelling to the pilot that he bought to X2, whilst seamlessly blending the series to deliver a more intimate narrative than the big blockbuster hits he has produced in the movie field. This expansion to the metaverse was an easy hit for Fox and a small win in Singers huge X-Men career.