Bryan Jay Singer (born September 17, 1965) is an American film director, film producer, writer, and actor. He is the founder of
Bad Hat Harry Productions and he has produced or co-produced almost all of the films he has directed. He wrote and directed his first film in 1988 after graduating from university. His next film,
Public Access (1993), was a co-winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993
Sundance Film Festival. In the mid-1990s, Singer received critical acclaim for directing the neo-noir crime thriller
The Usual Suspects (1995), which starred
Stephen Baldwin,
Benicio del Toro and
Kevin Spacey. He followed this with another thriller,
Apt Pupil (1998), about a boy's fascination with a Nazi war criminal.