Though McQuarrie's first film as a Screenwriter, the 1993 thriller Public Access, directed by Bryan Singer, earned only a 50 percent positive rating on the film-critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it won the Critics Award at the Deauville American Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize. It did not secure a theatrical distributor. Three years later, Singer and McQuarrie collaborated again on the film The Usual Suspects (1995), for which McQuarrie received best screenplay awards from Premiere Magazine, the Texas Board of Review, and the Chicago Critics as well as the Edgar Award, The Independent Spirit Award, and the British and American Academy Awards. The film was later included on the New York Times list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, and the character Verbal Kint was included on AFI's list of the 100 greatest Heroes and Villains of all time. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America voted The Usual Suspects No. 35 on their list of 101 Greatest Screenplays. In 2000, Artisan Entertainment released The Way of the Gun, a modern-day Western written and directed by McQuarrie. It starred Benicio del Toro, Ryan Phillippe and James Caan. The film, budgeted at US$8.5 million, received mainly negative reviews and performed poorly at the box office, grossing US$13 million worldwide.