Bryan Singer – Apt Pupil

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 neighbour Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen) is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding from justice named Kurt Dussander. Bowden soon confronts Denker and blackmails him to reveal his stories of the holocaust or be turned into the police. The boy and old man develop a strange relationship; the more the boy hears the more it affects his personality, grades and behaviour and Dussander has his old Nazi habits stirred, with disturbing results.

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. Stephen king subsequently handed them the rights to the movie. Singer appreciated being able to make a horror film with less supernatural terror and more character-driven terror and describes the premise of the movie as a study in cruelty. This leads to the tag line of the movie ‘if you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you’ve got a lot to learn’. Singer manages to construct a tense and unnerving atmosphere throughout the film which secured the win of the Saturn award for ‘Best Horror Film’ and a nominee for Singer as Best Director, with other wins for Ian McKellen as Best Actor at the Saturn awards, Critics Choice, OFTA film award and FFCC award.