Bryan Singer – Public Access

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. The film was remarked to have ‘tapped into the poisonous well-springs of the middle-American psyche’ by Time Out Film Guide, following a drifter, Whiley Pritcher, who ends up in the small, seemingly idyllic American town of Brewster. The plot develops into an ominous thriller about this quiet town, the people who live there and the stranger who changes people’s lives once he gains access. He decides to host his own television show ‘Our Town’ where people can dial in and anonymously voice their problems on the local public access cable TV. When deep dark secrets are aired and the question becomes ‘What’s wrong with Brewster’, tensions mount and the town becomes entangled in the mess it has created.

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’. He looks back on it now in nostalgia and sees how small and underdeveloped it is in comparison to his more known-for works, but everyone has to start somewhere. 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, with Kevin Spacey being encouraged to take a leading role after seeing Singer’s work on Public Access in this exceptional debut.