The Usual Suspects' Lockup Scene Was Saved By Farts And Improv

Farting is the great human equalizer.

We all do it (this includes Mr. Josh Brolin on the set of Denis Villenueve's "Dune"), and, when in the company of others, we try to do it as discreetly and politely as possible. If it's possible to step outside at a social gathering and expel one's gaseous accumulation, I'd like to think everyone reading this would choose this option. But sometimes quarters get tight, and the urge is too great to resist. We're caught, and the pressure built up in our bowels is involuntarily assuaged. If it's a noisy environment, you might get away with what we call "crop dusting," which entails maneuvering oneself to another area of the room and hoping someone else gets sniffed out as the culprit.

Sometimes, however, it's dead silent, and you're plainly the one who has, in flatulence parlance, dealt it.

This is never less than embarrassing, and occasionally mortifying. But when director Bryan Singer was shooting the lockup scene in "The Usual Suspects," a stray backside emission helped turn the scene, and possibly the entire film, into a classic.

According to Singer (who has not worked in Hollywood since 2019 when four men alleged in The Atlantic that the filmmaker sexually assaulted them when they were minors) on the film's DVD commentary, the lockup scene, which brings the five title conspirators together for the first time, was initially a "tense" sequence to shoot. On the second day of filming this scene, Singer held a "bonding lunch" to hopefully bring the actors together, so they could loosen up and make Christopher McQuarrie's dialogue sing.

The lunch worked. "It became like a love fest and we got all giddy," said Singer. "And this giddiness carried over into this scene because none of the actors could stop laughing."

This playful tough-guy tone was exactly what McQuarrie had envisioned. "Yeah, originally played as a very serious scene," he said on the commentary. "In the script it was written as a very — the dialogue made the scene funny, but the guys were carrying themselves very seriously and it failed in bonding them."

And what brought them together? Evidently, that lunch gave one of the actors a touch of intestinal upset.

In 2021, McQuarrie acknowledged on X (née Twitter) that someone let slip an air biscuit, which gave the scene the extra stink it needed. Per the screenwriter:

"[O]ne of the actors broke wind in a very hot and confined space (I have the outtakes in which it's audible). The more they were directed to play it straight, the more they laughed. Editor John Ottman saw the value and left it in."

So, the next time you watch "The Usual Suspects," keep in mind that in some of those takes, the actors are inhaling someone's gastrointestinal fragrance. And feel free to examine the sequence like it's the Zapruder film to figure out who treated his castmates to this post-meal scent (I'm laying even odds on Stephen Baldwin). We know the identity of Keyser Söze; now, we need to know, to put it bluntly, who farted in lockup.

29 years later, McQuarrie told his followers on X that this incident proved quite instructive:

"This solved a major script issue: I was constantly being asked to include a scene of the suspects bonding (the sort of scene that stops the story cold). The line-up became the bonding scene. Since then I've held to the belief that sometimes you're good, sometimes someone farts."

So, aspiring directors, if your actors aren't vibing early in principal photography, perhaps a nice, greasy pizza lunch is in order.