Origins
How did Keyser Soze get his name?
The Usual Suspects
Bryan Singer met Kevin Spacey at a party after a screening of the young filmmaker's first film, "Public Access", at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Spacey had been encouraged by a number of people he knew who had seen it, and was so impressed that he told Singer and McQuarrie that he wanted to be in whatever film they did next. Singer read a column in "Spy" magazine called "The Usual Suspects" after Claude Rains' line in "Casablanca." Singer thought that it would be a good title for a film. When asked by a reporter at Sundance what their next film was about, McQuarrie replied, "I guess it's about a bunch of criminals who meet in a police line-up," which incidentally was the first visual idea that he and Singer had for the poster: "five guys who meet in a line-up," Singer remembers. The director also envisioned a tagline for the poster, "All of you can go to Hell." Singer then asked the question, "What would possibly bring these five felons together in one line-up?" McQuarrie revamped an idea from one of his own unpublished screenplays — the story of a man who murders his own family and walks away, disappearing from view. The writer mixed this with the idea of a team of criminals.Söze's character is based on the accounts of John List, a New Jersey accountant who murdered his family in 1971 and then disappeared for almost two decades, assuming a new identity before he was ultimately apprehended. McQuarrie based the name of Keyser Söze on one of his previous supervisors, Keyser Sume, at a Los Angeles law firm that he worked for, but decided to change the last name because he thought that his former boss would object to how it was used. He found the word "söze" in his roommate's English-to-Turkish dictionary, which translates as "talk too much." All the characters' names are taken from staff members of the law firm at the time of his employment. McQuarrie had also worked for a detective agency, and this influenced the depiction of criminals and law enforcement officials in the script. Singer described the film as "Double Indemnity" meets "Rashomon," and said that it was made "so you can go back and see all sorts of things you didn't realize were there the first time. You can get it a second time in a way you never could have the first time around." He also compared the film's structure to "Citizen Kane" (which also contained an interrogator and a subject who is telling a story) and the criminal caper "The Anderson Tapes."