Christopher McQuarrie is an acclaimed producer, director and an Academy Award® winning writer. McQuarrie grew up in Princeton Junction, New Jersey and in lieu of college, he spent the first five years out of school traveling and working at a detective agency. He later moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film.

In 1995, his screenplay for The Usual Suspects, directed by childhood pal, Bryan Singer, garnered him the Academy Award® and the BAFTA Award for "Best Original Screenplay". McQuarrie also went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Independent Spirit Award. The Usual Suspects has been named one of the greatest screenplays of all time by the Writer's Guild of America.

Attended and graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School in Central New Jersey (along with Bryan Singer).
Voted onto Premiere magazine's "25 Future Powers Under 35" list (2002) (age 33).
He was hired by frequent collaborator Tom Cruise to do revisions to the script for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011). McQuarrie's work was originally given a shared 'written by' credit. This was evident in the first trailer for the film. However, the Writer's Guild of America removed McQuarrie's name from any writing credit by the time the movie was released on December 16, 2011.

Action to me is something very fun to shoot.
Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.
I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.
While I was a voracious moviegoer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.
Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.
The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.