A native of southern New Jersey, Christopher McQuarrie attended high school with Bryan Singer, his future collaborator on such monstrously popular projects as "The Usual Suspects" (1995) and "X-Men" (2000). After graduation, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter spent a year working in Western Australia before returning to the USA and a job at a Garden State detective agency, where his job entailed working as a glorified security guard at a rough urban movie theater, as opposed to requiring him to crack many interesting cases. While not exactly the exciting life McQuarrie imagined leading,