Following the ‘Suspects’ : After his much-acclaimed 1995 hit, ‘Usual Suspects,’ director Bryan Singer has chosen a tale of a dark secret.

It is a sunny morning in early April and Bryan Singer is slouching in his director’s chair, anxiously waiting for the cast and crew of his latest film, “Apt Pupil,” to reassemble for another take in front of an aging, aristocratic school hugging the foothills of Altadena.

Singer, 31, is directing his first film since garnering widespread critical acclaim and Hollywood’s attention with Gramercy Pictures’ 1995 mystery-crime thriller “The Usual Suspects.”

When “The Usual Suspects” opened, Times critic Kenneth Turan called it “a maze moviegoers will be happy to get lost in, a criminal roller coaster with twists so unsettling no choice exists but to hold on and go along for the ride.”

And the key stylist, the review noted, was Singer, who “shows . . . to be an uncommon kind of natural filmmaker, disciplined rather than self-indulgent. Cinema is a game he enjoys, and as well as he plays it, he doesn’t do it alone.”

Now, the boyish-looking director with close-cropped hair and piercing eyes is engaged in principal photography on a project that is certain to create heightened expectations in the wake of “The Usual Suspects,” which captured Academy Awards for Kevin Spacey as best supporting actor and Christopher McQuarrie for best original screenplay.

In “Apt Pupil,” 14-year-old actor Brad Renfro portrays Todd Bowden, a high school student who carries a dark secret: He has discovered a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander--played by British actor Sir Ian McKellen--living in his hometown.

Todd, who yearned to know more about the Holocaust than his teachers taught in the classroom, decides to blackmail the elderly gent to learn first-hand about Nazi atrocities. The $14-million film is based on a Stephen King novella and will be released early next year by TriStar Pictures.

“It’s a scary project,” Singer says. “It takes a lot of trust. I always tell people, ‘Trust me.’ As Chris McQuarrie said, in the end I always do the right thing. It’s just hard for people laying money on the line and the reputation of a company to trust that a kid like me will always do the right thing for everybody.”

McKellen’s character, Dussander, is a composite of these ghosts of World War II although not based on any real-life individual, explains screenwriter Brandon Boyce, who adapted King’s book.

“Dussander was the commandant of the camp, a big fish,” Boyce says. “This was a camp that didn’t exist, but it’s based on a sort of amalgam of real camps and all the stories he tells the boy, Todd, are based on reality.”

Todd is a bright fellow, Boyce explains, who in school discovers that his one great interest, the thing that really inspires him to learn more, is the Nazis and World War II.

Singer said he first read King’s novella when he was 19. He and a friend from USC, Don Murphy, pursued the rights while Singer and Boyce developed a screenplay on spec and sent it off to King. “He optioned it to me for $1,” Singer recalled. “He gets money once the movie is made.”

It has been a struggle getting “Apt Pupil” made. Last year, the project was set to go when Spelling Entertainment pulled out. Rescuing the project was Mike Medavoy, the onetime head of TriStar, who in 1995 formed his own production company, Phoenix Pictures (“The Mirror Has Two Faces,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt”).

Medavoy said that as he was forming his company, he approached Singer and said Phoenix would like to do a project with him.

“I didn’t hear from him, and then he went and made the deal with Spelling,” Medavoy recalled. “I basically stayed on top of it and I finally went to Bryan and said, ‘Bryan, what have you got?’ So, he gave me a copy of the script. I read it and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

McKellen, who has adopted a carefully cadenced German accent for the role, said he was attracted to the project because he was impressed with “The Usual Suspects” and because the role of Dussander is “a nice, meaty part and difficult.”

For Todd, Singer selected Renfro, who portrayed Huckleberry Finn in Touchstone Pictures’ “Tom and Huck” and also appeared in “Sleepers” and “The Client.”

“I saw a couple hundred kids,” Singer recalled. “He was the one who was most real.”

The one piece of casting that at first might seem a bit odd is that of David Schwimmer. While Hollywood might know Schwimmer as a comedian for his role in NBC’s hit sitcom “Friends,” Singer and McKellen were impressed when they saw him perform in a small Los Angeles stage production of Roger Kumble’s “d girl” and came away convinced he was the right actor to play Todd’s high school counselor.

“I was scared of the part,” Schwimmer said, “but I wanted to be part of the movie.” He said it is a “little frustrating” that some people typecast him because of the pop phenomenon of “Friends.”

What he likes about working with Singer is that “he’s like a kid,” said Schwimmer, himself only 30. “His mouth can’t keep up with his mind. He has so many ideas hitting him. Ideas are smacking themselves against him like bugs on a windshield.”

On this particular morning, Singer leans forward, hands cupped above his brows, peering into the camera monitors. He studies expressions, analyzes angles, judges bits of glare and shadow, movements and positions, always racing the sun as it moves over the actors’ heads.

For this scene, Todd arrives at the front steps of fictional Santo Donato High School (in reality, Eliot Middle School) as a line of students and parents parade inside for graduation ceremonies.

Standing with his parents, they are greeted by Todd’s guidance counselor, played with utmost seriousness by Schwimmer in a thick, dark mustache.

“Gee, Mr. Bowden, I was hoping to see your father,” the counselor says to Todd’s dad (Davidson).

Todd’s father, unaware that his son’s counselor mistakenly believes Dussander to be the boy’s grandfather, replies: “Oh . . . it’s a long trip from Charlotte.”

Deceptions abound as the relationship between Todd and Dussander spirals out of control, eventually with murderous results.

Singer noted that the technical challenges in making this film differ from his last movie. “In ‘Usual Suspects,’ I had all kinds of characters to cut to. Here, it’s only two. It’s all about them.”

It is this sense of trust that led no less an actor than McKellen, the award-winning stage and film star (“Richard III”) to portray the alcohol-bathed life of Dussander.

McKellen, holding a cigarette that burns precariously long as he waits to be called onto the set, says of his young director: “He likes a good story, so, I think he’s the right man to do this.”

But even McKellen confesses that he hasn’t the foggiest idea how the movie will look once it reaches the theaters. “I think Bryan himself doesn’t know.”

While the production itself has been on schedule, it was recently rocked by controversy when the parents of a 14-year-old boy who worked as an extra filed a lawsuit claiming the boy was placed, without their permission, in a nude shower scene with other youths and adults. Phoenix Pictures declined to comment on the suit, but sources say the company disputes the allegations.

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The past two years have been a dizzying ride for Singer.

He tells the story about how years ago, before Hollywood studios came to him, he was working security at a black-tie Starlight Foundation event and noticed one of his icons, director Steven Spielberg. Singer stuck out his hand and nervously introduced himself and then left without saying more.

“He [probably] just stood there and wondered, ‘Why did he introduce himself and just walk away?’ ” Singer says.

After “The Usual Suspects,” however, it was Spielberg who invited Singer to his office at DreamWorks SKG. Singer recalls the moment:

“The first thing he says is something about my age. ‘How old are you!? You are too young!’ And, I say, ‘I’m too young? How old were you when you started?’ We ended up talking forever and he ended up becoming one of my [Directors Guild of America] sponsors. Him and Robert Altman, whom I’ve known for about four years.”

Although he now has been drawn into Hollywood’s elite orbit, chumming with Jack Nicholson and Spacey, Singer says he does not view his career as meteoric.

“It seemed to the outside person like a rocketing success,” Singer says, “but to me, being in the middle of it, [it was] an evolution.”

He grew up near the Princeton, N.J., train station. His boyhood pals included actor Ethan Hawke and screenwriters McQuarrie and Boyce, his onetime paperboy whose first screenwriting effort was adapting “Apt Pupil.”

Singer, who attended USC as an undergraduate, had McQuarrie write a script called “Public Access.” The film shared the coveted grand jury prize award at the Sundance Film Festival and, after that, he made “The Usual Suspects.”

When he completes “Apt Pupil,” Singer said he is scheduled to direct a far larger production, “X-Men,” an action/sci-fi movie that could become a franchise for 20th Century Fox.

Adopted as a child, Singer surrounds himself with family and friends on the set. His mother is playing a small part in the movie as a secretary while his father will play a hospital administrator.

Having friends around the set “makes the experience enjoyable,” Singer says. “Instead of surrounding yourself with sycophants, you are surrounding yourself with people who are not afraid to tell you when you are screwing up.”