Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998, USA/France/Canada)
Director Bryan Singer decided to follow up his breakout 1995 smash hit The Usual Suspects with an adaptation of a lesser-known Stephen King novella about a relationship between a Nazi-in-hiding and a young man. While in retrospect Singer's choice of the material makes sense, it wasn't the most obvious choice for one of Hollywood's hottest young directors at the time. The adaptation history of Apt Pupil itself is a tortured one, with multiple false starts (almost half of an earlier adaptation was filmed in the late 1980s until the production was dropped). Surely one of Stephen King's darkest works, Apt Pupil was most likely not the easiest film to market. The Singer adaptation is somewhat true to King's text, although it makes considerable changes toward the ending, and also tones down many of the more gruesome and disturbing aspects of the novella. The young man Todd Bowden, here played by Brad Renfro, is a single age throughout the film, whereas in the novel
