29 movies in, De Palma still won't play by Hollywood's rules
In the new documentary "De Palma," 75-year-old filmmaker Brian De Palma reflects on a half-century career, offering frank observations on such subjects as his signature split-screen technique to his legendarily fraught relationship with the Hollywood establishment.
Although two of his films have been nominated for Oscars - "Carrie" and "The Untouchables" - and several others are highly regarded, De Palma himself has been singled out five times as "worst director" by the Golden Raspberry awards, for "Dressed to Kill," "Scarface," "Body Double," "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Mission to Mars." While De Palma's youthful inner circle - Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola - have been lionized, De Palma remains a polarizing figure.
His films have been called sexist and violent, as well as technically groundbreaking. Through it all, he has worked, cranking out 29 features since 1968's "Murder รก la Mod." After walking away from a planned HBO drama about the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno scandal in 2014 - "They were sending me too many notes," he says - De Palma is now deep in preproduction for "Lights Out," a China-set thriller about a blind woman that he describes as "Mission: Impossible" meets "Wait Until Dark."
De Palma called from his car in Manhattan, where he has lived for 40 years, to continue the conversation that the documentary, directed by longtime friend Noah Baumbach, along with Jake Paltrow, has started.
Q: Is it fair to say that you have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood?
A: Yeah. I basically started making political films in the '60s, very anti-establishment. I got brought out to Hollywood to make what they thought was an anti-establishment movie - "Get to Know Your Rabbit," with Tommy Smothers - which ultimately I got fired from and Warner Bros. took over. This put me in the wasteland for a couple of years. So, yeah, I've been in and out of the system. I think the system is basically very corrosive. The values it has - like repeating yourself and making big, star-oriented vehicles in which the casting doesn't make any sense, except to the financiers - I was always battling that, and also the ratings board, in terms of nudity and violence.
Q: After 29 movies, do you still see yourself as anti-establishment?
A: Absolutely. I just had a knockdown drag-out with HBO, considered the - how shall I call it? - the gold standard in contemporary ... I don't know what you call it. Filmmaking?
Q: Is it such a bad thing to repeat yourself?
A: No. It makes a lot of sense economically. But it does nothing for you aesthetically.
Q: What did you think of Kimberly Peirce's 2013 remake of "Carrie"?
A: I thought I was at the right time, with the right cast, and had the right instincts about the book. They've remade "Carrie" on television. They've made four-hour versions of it. They've made sequels. They all pale in relationship to the original, so I must have gotten it right. There's no way to duplicate that.
Q: What was the motivation behind your remake of the original 1932 "Scarface"?
A: A remarkable script by Oliver Stone. I originally worked on the project where we were going to make it into a period gangster picture, which is a tired genre. Then I walked away because I didn't think I had the kind of controls I needed. It came back to me a year later with Oliver's script. It was so visceral, and such a good idea using these Cuban refugees that came over and started the drug trade. I said, "This is great. I'll be happy to do this."
Q: Watching clips of some of your most violent films, they seem almost quaint compared with today's film violence. What do you think about contemporary horror?
A: Times change. I was making movies in the height of the women's liberation movement. Anything that you did in relation to a woman in a movie was considered, politically, bad news. I always felt that a woman in peril was a lot more interesting - to me - than a guy in peril. Time will shake out those pictures. How much are we going to be watching "Saw IV" in five or 10 years?
Q: What are some of Hollywood's other bad habits?
A: They never really understand choreography in relation to action sequences. It's very important to lay out where everything is, to do it very slowly, so the audience is oriented, so they know who's shooting at who, where they are, where the peril is. I did it in "Carrie" at the prom, where I very carefully laid out where everybody is before the bucket of blood and the nightmare begins. Hitchcock's crop-duster sequence in "North by Northwest" is instructive. He takes a tremendous amount of time to orient you to the space you're in just before Cary Grant gets shot at. Most movie action sequences are just noise.
Q: How has your background as a former physics student - a self-described "science nerd" - influenced the way you make movies?
A: Film is so visually oriented. You have to go to the space. I used to lay out sequences with architectural programs. I could design complete sets and figure out where everybody was, like the poolroom shootout in "Carlito's Way." I spent months and months looking at that set and changing the dimensions and moving the furniture until I had an idea how to lay the sequence out. That is basically because of my scientific training. I'm not intimidated by all these complicated computer programs.
Q: Your films are known for the recurring theme of voyeurism. What's another cinematic fascination of yours that we may have overlooked?
A: Megalomania. Where you create a world that's an extension of your reality. I saw it, personally, with the success of the people around me, where you create your own castle and your own court, and you isolate yourself from reality. You go from your home to the limousine to get to where you're going, and then you get into the limousine to get back. It leads to madness, basically. It leads to "Scarface." You're surrounded by people telling you you're a genius, and you do excessive, crazy things.
Q: As a teenager, you stalked your own father, who was cheating on your mother, hoping to document him in the act of infidelity. How does the theme of the voyeur manifest itself in your films?
A: One of the primary elements of movies is the point-of-view shot. It's in no other art form except video games. You're giving the audience the same information that the character is seeing. It works very well for following people. If you're watching a woman, it's very engrossing to be following her. Needless to say, beautiful women are something that cinema's been using since its inception. The history of cinema could be called the history of men photographing women.
Q: What's the legacy that you would hope to leave?
A: There was a candidness to the book that was written about my adaptation of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" ("The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco," by Julie Salamon). With most of movie journalism, you're listening to spin and to people telling you how wonderful everybody I worked with was. You get the most honest reviews from people who are in the Hollywood old-age home. I remember there was an interview once - maybe with (actor) Cameron Mitchell - and he was being interviewed in the old-age home. The question was, "What was it like working with X?" And Cameron Mitchell said, "He was a maniac."
Q: Are you saying this entire interview is premature? You're not in the old-age home yet.
A: I'm very close.