Apt Pupil (film)

Apt Pupil
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Bryan Singer
Screenplay by	Brandon Boyce
Based on	Apt Pupil by Stephen King
Produced by	Bryan Singer Don Murphy Jane Hamsher
Starring	Ian McKellen Brad Renfro
Cinematography	Newton Thomas Sigel
Edited by	John Ottman
Music by	John Ottman
Production companies	TriStar Pictures Phoenix Pictures Bad Hat Harry
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Releasing
Release date	October 23, 1998 (1998-10-23)
Running time	111 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$14 million
Box office	$8.9 million (US)

Apt Pupil is a 1998 American

The novella was first published in King's 1982 collection Different Seasons. Producer Richard Kobritz sought to adapt the novella into a film during the 1980s, but two actors he invited to play Dussander died. When filming began in 1987, a loss of financing led to the production being shut down. Forty minutes of usable footage existed, but production was never revived. In 1995, when rights to the novella returned to King, Bryan Singer petitioned the author for an opportunity to adapt the novella. With King's support, Singer filmed Apt Pupil with McKellen and Renfro in Altadena, California, in 1997. The director shortened the novella's storyline, reduced its violence, and changed the ending. Singer called Apt Pupil "a study in cruelty" with Nazism only serving as a vehicle for the capacity of evil.

During the $14 million production, a lawsuit was filed by several extras, including some underage who alleged that they were told to strip naked during a shower scene. There was no cause to file criminal charges, and a civil-case lawsuit was dismissed due to insufficient evidence. The film was released in the United States and Canada in October 1998 to mixed reviews and made under $9 million. The main actors won several minor awards for their performances.

Plot

In

Todd is questioned about his relationship with Dussander and he convinces the police that he knew nothing of the man's true identity. A group of Neo-Nazis demonstrates outside the hospital; realizing his situation is hopeless, Dussander commits suicide by giving himself an air embolism. When French learns that the man who met Todd at school was not Todd's grandfather but a war criminal, he confronts Todd, who then blackmails French into silence by threatening to accuse him of making inappropriate sexual advances.

Cast

Ian McKellen stars as Kurt Dussander, a Nazi war criminal who hides in America under the pseudonym Arthur Denker. Screenwriter Brandon Boyce described Dussander as being "a composite of these ghosts of World War II" but not based on any real-life individual. McKellen was attracted to the role because he was impressed with Singer's The Usual Suspects and saw the role of Dussander as "a nice, meaty part and difficult".^[1] Singer, who enjoyed McKellen in John Schlesinger's 1995 film Cold Comfort Farm, invited the actor to take the role.^[2] The character's language was written originally for "a very stoic German", but Singer felt that McKellen's "complex" personality could contribute to the character. The director said of choosing McKellen, "I felt if I could combine his complexity, his colorfulness, to the stoic German character it would create a character that, although evil, would garner more sympathy and would be more enjoyable for the audience to watch."^[3]

Brad Renfro stars alongside McKellen as Todd Bowden, a 16-year-old who discovers Denker's criminal past. Singer auditioned a couple hundred young men and chose 14-year-old Renfro, saying of him, "Brad was the brightest, the most intense and the most real. Not only could he have the intensity when we wanted, there was a hollowness that he could convey, and by the end of the picture he had to become this empty vessel."^[4][5] Portraying a manipulative character temporarily influenced Renfro, who said that people around him were worried about his state of mind. Renfro said of his performance, "It's a trip I have to take. People just kind of have to leave me alone when I'm doing it. It's my job."^[6] He described Todd as a "very articulate boy" who unveils himself as a "monster", which also signified a departure from his previous roles as the "rebel" or the "oversensitive bad boy".^[7] Singer described his impression of the character:

I don't believe for one minute that [Todd Bowden] was pure as the driven snow. The capacity to blackmail an old man — obviously there's a search for something going on that's a good hard step beyond innocence. I think he had it within him, some emptiness that needed fulfillment and taken to a new place, a new direction. His school, his parents, his environment weren't doing it for him. This particular individual came along before some other, but it perhaps could have been drugs, it could have been rape. Todd was probably not a very good guy. But that kind of bad guy can exist within a lot more people than we realize.^[8]

Schwimmer plays Edward French, Todd Bowden's high school guidance counselor. Before Schwimmer, Kevin Pollak was attached to the role.^[9] While Schwimmer was known for his comedic role on the television show Friends, Singer was impressed by the actor's performance in a Los Angeles stage production and decided to cast him as the counselor.^[1]

Production

The film was adapted from the Stephen King novella of the same name.^[10][11]

Previous production attempt

When Stephen King's novella

Direction under Bryan Singer

Singer described Apt Pupil's premise as a "study in cruelty".[15] He prepared for the film by reading books like the 1996 history book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which confirmed his beliefs that Nazi war criminals felt "guiltless and matter-of-fact about what they did".^[16] He referred to how young Todd Bowden's interactions with Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander start to affect him, "I liked the idea of the infectious nature of evil ... The notion that anybody has the capacity within them to be cruel if motivated properly is, I think, a scary concept." The director also perceived the film as not about the Holocaust, believing that the Nazi war criminal could have been replaced by one of Pol Pot's executioners or a mass murderer from Russia. "It wasn't about fascism or National Socialism. It was about cruelty and the ability to do awful deeds, to live with them and be empowered by them," Singer said.^[15] To this end, the director sought to avoid overt use of swastikas and other Nazi symbols.^[17] He was also attracted to the film as "[an] idea that the collective awfulness of this terrible thing that happened decades ago in Europe had somehow crept up across the ocean and through time, like a golem, into this beautiful Southern California suburban neighborhood".^[18]

Singer turned down directing opportunities with films like The Truman Show and The Devil's Own after the success of The Usual Suspects. He instead pursued Apt Pupil, "It was a very dark subject matter, and it was something that came from passion." He acknowledged in retrospect that Apt Pupil "wasn't really supposed to be a big success".^[19] Singer was financially supported by producer Scott Rudin and the production company Spelling Films. Ian McKellen was cast as Dussander, and Brad Renfro was cast as Bowden. With $1 million paid toward pre-production,^[20] filming was scheduled to begin in June 1996. Due to financial disagreements between Singer and Rudin, the start date was pushed back and subsequently canceled.^[12] Singer and his production team stayed together while producer Don Murphy and his partner Jane Hamsher sought refinancing.^[20] Mike Medavoy, a former chairman of TriStar Pictures, rescued the production with the financial backing of his production company Phoenix Pictures. The company provided filmmakers with $14 million to produce Apt Pupil.^[1] Filming took place on location in Altadena, California.^[13] Singer related to how Todd Bowden rebelled against his suburban environment. The director used the name of his high school football team, the Pirates, and the green-and-gold team colors in the film, saying, "I just projected my own childhood right out to Southern California."^[21]

Editing and composition

Another scene in which Ottman meshed his editing and composing duties was when Dussander wakes up in the hospital with the television show The Jeffersons playing in the background. Ottman explained his intent for the scene, "I used The Jeffersons as this innocuous thing—going between him and the television—so that when he does open his eyes, it scares the hell out of you ... I added this deafening Bartok pizz, which is when all the violins pluck their strings really loud and they create this gnarly, unsettling sound." Ottman recorded the film's score with the Seattle Symphony.^[22]

Critical analysis

Obsession with Nazism and the Holocaust

In The Films of Stephen King, Dennis Mahoney writes that the obsession with Nazism and the Holocaust that unfolds in Apt Pupil is the result of the paternal bond between Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander and high school student Todd Bowden. Such bonds are common themes in Stephen King's works: "King's portrayal of evil most often appears to require an active, illicit bond between a male (often in the role of a father or father surrogate) and a younger, formerly innocent individual (often in the role of a biological or surrogate progeny) who is initiated into sin".^[23] In the film, the year 1984 highlights, in addition to Orwellian overtones, the time in American history in which the Holocaust is treated as a week-long course with little time "to be tempered with self-questioning as to the motivations behind it".^[24] Bowden's obsession with the Holocaust is a key plot device "wherein the past has this unbreakable hold on the present". The film's opening sequence shows how Bowden treats this history as a simulacrum in which the history becomes his own, as evidenced by his head's brief overlapping with the Nazis he is studying. Though history becomes alive for Bowden, he perceives it through the perpetrators (namely Dussander) and not through the victims, characterizing Bowden as "apt" in the sense of "a natural tendency to ... undesirable behavior".^[25]

Mahoney says language serves as "a vehicle for corruption", as Dussander tells Bowden horrific stories of his service at the fictional Death Camp of Patin. Bowden, in listening to the stories, becomes "a vampiric extension of the evil" that Dussander exhibits.

The central characters Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander are onscreen most of the time, and they are frequently framed in close proximity, which Picart and Frank describe as "[intensifying] a homoerotic intimacy [which is] punctuated by dread of contact with the monstrous".[32] Homoeroticism in Apt Pupil is further demonstrated by the focus on Todd's body. In the opening scene in which Bowden is in his bedroom during a stormy night, "the ever-encroaching camera and the lighting fetishize Todd's youthful body", similar to the fetishism of the female body in films like Psycho (1960).^[33] This depiction creates a dualism in which "he is now simultaneously dangerous and endangered" in his homophobic and homoerotic ties to Nazism.^[34]

When Bowden gives Dussander an SS uniform to wear and in which to march under Bowden's orders, the student's demands are more heightened in the film as "more dominant and voyeuristic", according to Picart and Frank. Bowden tells Dussander, "I tried to do this the nice way, but you don't want it. So fine, we'll do this the hard way. You will put this on, because I want to see you in it. Now move!" The editing style of the Nazi march scene juxtaposes Dussander marching in the uniform and Bowden reacting to the march.

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil begins in 1974, when Todd Bowden is in junior high, and it ends with him graduating from high school. In Bryan Singer's film, the story takes place fully in 1984, when Todd Bowden is in his last year in high school.^[24] In the novella, for three years leading to the end of the story, Todd Bowden and discovered Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander independently murder a large number of hobos and transients, whereas in the film, the murders are condensed to Dussander's attempt to kill the hobo Archie.^[38] Singer sought to reduce the novella's violence, not wanting it to appear "exploitative or repetitive".^[5] Unlike in the novella, animosity toward Jews was not explicitly displayed by the characters in the film.^[27] The novella's dream sequence in which Bowden rapes a sixteen-year-old Jewish virgin as a laboratory experiment under Dussander's guidance was replaced by the film's dream sequence in which Bowden sees three shower-gas chamber scenes unfold.^[39] Reduced in the film was Todd's encounter with the schoolgirl Betty (named Becky in the film). In the novella, he dreams of Betty as a concentration camp inmate whom he can rape and torture. In the film, he has a brief encounter with Becky where he finds himself unable to perform sexually.^[40]

In the novella, Bowden's high school counselor Edward French confronts the student with suspicions that Dussander is not really Bowden's grandfather, and Bowden murders French in cold blood. Bowden then embarks on a shooting spree from a tree overlooking a freeway, which results in his death five hours later.^[41] Singer felt unable to accomplish King's ending, "I told [King] the ending reads so beautifully. I could never measure up to it; I would have killed it."^[5] In the film, Bowden intimidates French, who suspects Dussander's false relationship to the student, by threatening to destroy him with "rumor and innuendo". Stanley Wiater, author of The Complete Stephen King Universe, wrote, "As depicted on screen, Todd is much more consciously evil, in his way, than in the book. This switch, while making the ending less brutal, perhaps, achieves the impossible: it also makes the ending even darker."^[42]

Release and reception

Bryan Singer previewed Apt Pupil at the Museum of Tolerance's L.A. Holocaust Center to assess feedback from rabbis and others about referencing the Holocaust. With a positive response, the director proceeded with the film's release.^[43] Apt Pupil was originally scheduled to be released in February 1998, but the film's distributor moved the release date to autumn, feeling that it belonged "alongside other more serious-minded films".^[13] It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1998.^[44] It was then commercially released on October 23, 1998 in 1,448 theaters in the United States and Canada, grossing $3.6 million on its opening weekend and placing ninth at the weekend box office. The film went on to gross $8.9 million in the United States and Canada.^[45] Apt Pupil was considered a critical and commercial disappointment.^[46] The film was less successful than Singer's previous film The Usual Suspects,^[47] with Rotten Tomatoes describing it as "a somewhat disturbing movie that works as a suspenseful thriller, yet isn't completely satisfying".^[48]

Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that the film was well-made by Bryan Singer and well-acted, especially by Ian McKellen, but that "the film reveals itself as unworthy of its subject matter". The critic felt that the offensive material lacked a "social message" or an "overarching purpose" and found the film's later scenes to be "exploitative".^[49] Janet Maslin of The New York Times applauded the production value of Bryan Singer's direction, liking Newton Thomas Sigel's "handsomely shot" cinematography and John Ottman's "stunningly edited" work. Maslin wrote of McKellen and Renfro's performances, "Both actors play their roles so trickily that tensions escalate until the horror grows unimaginatively gothic." The critic felt that as the film approached the end, "the story's cleverness is noticeably on the wane".^[50]

Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment called McKellen and Renfro's performances "skin-crawling" but felt that it did not complete the film. Murphy wrote, "[The acting] makes you wish Apt Pupil had the art and the courage actually to look into evil's awful abyss." The critic perceived that Apt Pupil came off as a conventional horror film, that it had Stephen King's "characteristically unsavory" touches, and that Singer's "inept" direction "trivialize[s] the characters and the subject matter".^[51] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly saw Apt Pupil as not a "hunted-Nazi thriller" nor a "full-tilt Stephen King thriller", but as a "student-teacher parable" that comes off as "disturbing". Schwarzbaum felt that Singer told "a story with serious moral resonance", though patience was needed to get past Singer's "more baroque cinematic touches" of "visual furbelows ... and aural gimmicks" in the film, citing as examples Dussander watching Mr. Magoo on television or the musical piece Liebestod being blared during a bloody scene.^[52]

Jay Carr of The Boston Globe called Apt Pupil "most compelling for its moral dimension", enjoying the "duet between Renfro's smooth-cheeked latter-day Faust and McKellen's reawakened Mephistopheles". While Carr found the film's framework to be realistic, he noted the change of pace, "Perhaps sensing a narrative slackening and a smothering claustrophobia ... 'Apt Pupil' veers into melodramatic devices that yank the film out of its disquieting amorality and turn it into something much more ordinary and mundane." The critic concluded, "It maintains a bleak integrity by not pretending to arrive at remorse. Never is there any discussion."^[53] Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune described Apt Pupil as "a good shocker that misses the ultimate horror", finding the film's weakness to be the "contrived" bond between Dussander and Bowden. Wilmington called the plot "overly slick", asking, "How can Todd not only conveniently find a Nazi war criminal in his hometown but also instantly coerce and control him?"^[54]

Accolades

Renfro won the Best Actor award at the

For Apt Pupil, Bryan Singer filmed a shower scene in which Todd Bowden, saturated with horrific stories from Kurt Dussander, imagines his fellow showering students as Jewish prisoners in gas chambers. The scene was filmed at Eliot Middle School in Altadena, California on April 2, 1997, and two weeks later, a 14-year-old extra filed a lawsuit alleging that Singer forced him and other extras to strip naked for the scene. Two boys, 16 and 17 years old, later supported the 14-year-old's claim. The boys claimed trauma from the experience, seeking charges against the filmmakers including infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and invasion of privacy.^[59] Allegations were made that the boys were filmed for sexual gratification.^[60] The local news shows and national tabloid programs stirred the controversy. A sexual crimes task force that included local, state, and federal personnel investigated the incident. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office determined that there was no cause to file criminal charges,^[17] stating, "The suspects were intent on completing a professional film as quickly and efficiently as possible. There is no indication of lewd or abnormal sexual intent."^[60] The scene was filmed again with adult actors so the film could finish on time.^[13]

The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2020, "Singer was one of several defendants named in the suits, which reportedly were settled for an undisclosed sum, with the plaintiffs bound by confidentiality agreements."^[61]

See also

• List of Holocaust films
• List of American films of 1998

Nazi Next Door films^[62]

• Marathon Man (1976)
• The Boys from Brazil (1978)
• Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
  (1987)
• Music Box (1989)

Notes

References

• Mahoney, Dennis F. (February 2008). "Apt Pupil: The Making of a 'Bogeyboy'". In Tony Magistrale (ed.). The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 25–38.
  ISBN 978-0-230-60131-4
  .
• Mottram, James (May 2007). "Genre II: School Days – Election, Rushmore, and Apt Pupil". The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood. Faber & Faber. pp. 203–244.
  ISBN 978-0-86547-967-8
  .
• Picart, Caroline; Frank, David A. (October 2006). "Apt Pupil: The Hollywood Nazi-as-Monster Flick". Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film. Southern Illinois University. pp. 98–125.
  ISBN 0-8093-2723-6
  .

Further reading

• Browning, Mark (2009). "Boys to Men: Rites-of-Passage – Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998)". Stephen King on the Big Screen. Intellect Ltd.
  ISBN 978-1-84150-245-8
  .
• Magistrale, Tony (November 2003). "Paternal Archetypes: The Shining, Pet Sematary, Apt Pupil". Hollywood's Stephen King. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 85–116.
  ISBN 0-312-29321-6
  .
• Eppert, Claudia (Spring–Summer 2002). "Entertaining History: (Un)heroic Identifications, Apt Pupils, and an Ethical Imagination". New German Critique (86): 71–101.
  JSTOR 3115202
  .
• Picart, Caroline; McKahan, Jason Grant. "Apt Pupil's misogyny, homoeroticism and homophobia: Sadomasochism and the Holocaust film". Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (45): 1–23.
• Rogak, Lisa (2010). "Apt Pupil". Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 8–25.
  ISBN 978-0-312-60350-2
  .

External links

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