Christopher McQuarrie was born in 1968 in either Princeton, New Jersey, or Princeton Junction, New Jersey, a nearby unincorporated community where he was raised. After graduating from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South in 1986, he worked as an assistant at Christ Church Grammar School in Perth, Western Australia, recalling in 2013, “I was offered an Interim program. ... I picked a place out of a hat and ended up at Christ Church Grammar School. I lived at the school and worked at the boarding school, though I did very little work". Fired after nine months, "I hitchhiked for three months, came home, knocked around for about a month and then immediately started working for this detective agency.... It was actually a glorified security-guard position. I think in the four years I worked there I did about six investigations....". He had been acquainted with his future filmmaking collaborator, director-producer Bryan Singer, "from the time we were very little our parents were friends. I had been in one of his 8mm films." They attended the same high school, with Singer two years ahead, and became friends after Singer's graduation. At 16, McQuarrie wrote a screenplay for an uncompleted film project with Singer, and stayed in contact through McQuarrie's early work years. Their first professional collaboration, Public Access came about following McQuarrie's decision to leave the detective agency ...to move to California and try screenwriting — Bryan was already living there. And then I was offered my own agency in Florida. I was 22 years old, and was being given this opportunity to run my own business. So I called Bryan and he said, “Listen, I’d love to have you out here but there’s nothing going on; you should probably go to Florida.” So I told them I would do it ... and then, out of nowhere, it fell through. ... So I applied for the New York Police Department and we both passed. As we were gearing up to do that, Bryan called. He had made a short film called "Lion’s Den", with Ethan Hawke –... and we tried to make a feature-length film out of it. The script was horrible. My parts of it were written by hand. So Bryan called me and said that these people had seen "Lion’s Den" and really liked it and had asked to see another script. And he made up a three-second pitch off the top of his head, which evolved into Public Access. ... He asked me if I wanted to write it. ... I wrote a draft in 15 days. ... Bryan then got Michael Dougan involved in the writing, and he came in and took this basically glorified episode of Murder, She Wrote and really darkened it up. I took a look at his rewrite and was like, "Oh, you mean I can be dark with it…"

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