Le Paradis' Interview with Brian De Palma

It was early this year, on February 6th, 2002 to be exact, that the idea first took hold. During the press conference at Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, where a retrospective of his films was then taking place, someone asked Brian De Palma if he himself had chosen BLOW OUT to open the event. In the course of his reply, De Palma mentioned that the film is held in very high regard by his most enthusiastic fans, according to the results of an internet survey of his films. The survey he was referring to was the one which had been conducted semi-annually, since March of 2000, by Le Paradis.

Needless to say, this first public acknowledgement of our website by the director took us by surprise, and looking back, planted the seed for a quixotic months-long quest. Thereafter, securing an interview with De Palma became a mutually abiding obsession. We came close a couple of times. The low point came in September, when De Palma, in Toronto for the gala closing night screening of FEMME FATALE at the International Festival there, actually granted our request, but too late for us to be able to finalize plans. The idea had been to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the website with the interview, but as the release date for FEMME FATALE arrived, our hopes seemed all but dashed.

Amazingly, fate took a shining to us in the days immediately following the release. During an interview conducted by Bill Fentum De Palma reaffirmed his willingness to speak with us, and thanks to Fentum's intervening, and some quick thinking by all concerned, arrangements were made for De Palma to contact Tony, the English-speaking, American half of Le Paradis, at his home on Sunday, November 10th. De Palma was in a very generous mood. He spent well over an hour on the phone, answering all of our questions with enthusiam, patience, and a warm sense of humor. We talked about FEMME FATALE of course, but also touched on a myriad of other topics: His new project TOYER, our own favorite films CASUALTIES OF WAR and THE UNTOUCHABLES, the current state of cinema, our website, and the internet in general, even some of Mr. De Palma's shopping habits. You'll see what we mean. It'll all make perfect sense when you read it.

Thanks to Bill Fentum, without whom...

And thanks also to Geoff Beran, Romain Desbiens, Patrice Doré, Brett Leitner, Clémence Risler, Annie Rodrigue and Christina Tremblay and everyone else who had a hand in helping us to get this done.

Most of all, thanks to Brian De Palma. For FEMME FATALE, which by the way, enjoyed a very impressive fifth place debut in the current edition of the survey that started it all. Also, for all the other great movies through the years, and lastly, for reaffirming the faith that all of our crazy efforts have been worthwhile. Enjoy!

Carl & Tony

Le Paradis : FEMME FATALE is literally a dream of a movie. We've seen it several times since Wednesday, and can't get it out our systems. What is it about dreams and dreaming that fascinates you so much as a subject matter in your films?

Brian De Palma : Hmm...That's an interesting question. Well I guess I have to be specific and refer to FEMME FATALE. I had this idea to do a noir movie, but I felt that noir only works in a surrealistic way. Which meant that I had to create a dream, and put the noir story in the dream. If you look at these old black and white movies, with their sort of fatalistic storylines and very stylized way of shooting, I thought the dream device would be the best way to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. So I put the noir melodrama in the brackets of her dream sequence and I used a lot of things that sort of happen when you have a dream. Certain things you experience reappear in your dream in kind of strange juxtapositions, and that's why the noir story appears the way it does. It doesn't seem that many of the people who have written about it have quite seen that. Somehow they don't see where the brackets of the dream are, so they write about the movie like it's a straightforward, realistic noir melodrama, but in reality it's a kind of surrealistic rethinking of the noir form. There are things that don't make sense until you think about them later, much like in a dream. You have all of these images that you have to ponder later: "why was that there" but the driving sense of it is essentially pretty simple, you know, she steals the diamonds, these guys are after her, and they're going to kill her. All the things that happen, are more or less consistent with that very simplistic, fatalistic storyline.

Le Paradis : In some ways the movie plays like an homage to some of your earlier thrillers, and in others it's a marked departure. Do you see it as distinct in relation to films like OBSESSION and DRESSED TO KILL, or is it more of a natural progression?

Brian De Palma : Well, I sort of approach it like it's a fresh thing. Obviously, the way that I work you're going to see recurring images that appear in my other films . I thought I was fairly rigorous in trying to tell the noir story in a way that I felt was consistent with the genre, and at the same time stylizing it enough and leaving strange iconic symbols within the dream sequence to tip off the audience for when they think about it later. For instance, the whole idea of the papparazzo pursuing her is a figment of her dream imagination. Basically, Antonio’s character is a very focused and obsessive artist sitting on a balcony taking the pictures that make up the photo montage that appears at the end of the movie. Her experience with him in the reality section of the movie is as some guy that takes a picture of her while she's on the steps getting the information about the passport from Veronica, but in her dream he becomes this obsessive character that's destroyed her life.

Le Paradis : All of the elements in the dream are drawn from familiar things and people she encounters at the hotel but cast in a completely different light.

Brian De Palma : All of these elements. The people she sees in the first part of the movie reappear in the dream. The locations are recapitulated, and also in the dream sequence, where I'm having her dream, you think it's actually happening, you don't say, "Oh, I'm in a dream sequence." This is another thing that throws the audience off because they think "Well, this is looking like it's real," even though it's a dream..

Le Paradis : The movie has been garnering the usual kind of mixed reviews you always seem to attract but what's different this time is you're getting high praise from people like Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader and John Powers in the L.A. Weekly. In the past they've not exactly been fans of yours, yet they both claim to love the new movie. On another front the film has been taken up by the folks at Le Paradis and the other websites, your diehard fans, as a career-capping masterpiece (best film since CARLITO'S WAY according to the last survey). To what do you attribute the diversity of all of those reactions?

Brian De Palma : One is always mystified at the polarization in the reactions. They seem to come in with some kind of agenda about what they think this Brian De Palma movie should be, and they don't just look at it. I, of course, give many interviews where I say my movies are driven by visual ideas, and this one's also driven by dream logic, but that seems not to make much of an impression, and they just go in with their template of "De Palma clichés" that they just recapitulate: "Hitchcockian, voyeurism..." you hear it over and over again, and it doesn't appear that they're looking at the movie with the naked eye.

Le Paradis : There's definitely something provocative about your work that really brings out the worst in some of these people.

Brian De Palma : Yes. Definitely.

Le Paradis : Which in and of itself is a compliment.


Brian De Palma : Yes. I think so. 'Cause the stuff they really seem to like, you just have to shake your head and go, "huh?"

Le Paradis : You obviously challenge their notion of what a "good" film is supposed to be.

Brian De Palma : Yeah. I'm always sort of playing with the form all the time, which doesn't make for comfortable viewing. My movies kind of challenge your relationship to the form that you're watching.

Le Paradis : Aside from RAISING CAIN in 1992, you hadn't made the kind of erotic thriller such as FEMME FATALE that you all but specialized in for a time in the early part of your career. Was this a conscious decision on your part? Had you grown tired of the genre or did you just wish to explore other types of films for a while?

Brian De Palma : Well it isn't really as planned out as that. I'd spent a very intensive year making MISSION TO MARS, and I just wanted to go somewhere else and just see what happens. I do this lots of times in my life, I sort of pick myself up and go somewhere else, with no particular plan. When I got to Paris I was living in a hotel off of the Champs Elysées, and I got this idea to make a contemporary film noir. I thought well, how am I going to do this? Then I got the idea to put it in this extended dream sequence, that will explain the stylization. Then I had this idea I'd had for many years: a femme fatale gets involved in a heist, there are the usual double crosses, she takes off with the loot, and escapes across the country. She's hiding out, stumbles into a small town, she's sitting in a bar, and a little old lady comes over to her and says, "Irma, I'm so sorry about your loss." And Laure shakes her head, wondering why this woman is calling her Irma. She goes to the bus stop to get out of town and the guy selling her the ticket says, "Irma, aren't you going to the funeral?" Now she realizes she looks exactly like Irma. She stumbles into Irma's life, Irma is suicidal, and she steals Irma's life. That was the idea I'd had for many years which became the whole front section of FEMME FATALE.

Le Paradis : Touching on that, you've described FEMME FATALE as being in the school of films like MULHOLLAND DRIVE...

Brian De Palma : Right.

Le Paradis : Which we understand you hadn't seen until after you finished shooting...

Brian De Palma : No I didn't see it until...I guess it was...I finished shooting FEMME FATALE in May, and I didn't see MULHOLLAND DRIVE until the following January, and I was knocked out, because I could see that Lynch was working in the same territory that I had explored.

Le Paradis : Now at one time it was reported that you were planning to have Lynch play the role of the film Director in the Cannes sequence.

Brian De Palma : That's true.

Le Paradis : If that'd worked out he would have presumably been there presenting...

Brian De Palma : MULHOLLAND DRIVE

Le Paradis : Which would have been the movie-within-the movie in FEMME FATALE...

Brian De Palma : That's correct.

Le Paradis : You can't get more postmodern than that, can you?!

Brian De Palma : (laughs) No, you can't.

Le Paradis : Why didn't it come off as planned?

Brian De Palma : Well, when I first asked him, he said, "sure, I'd love to," and then he realized he'd have to be there a couple of nights in order to finish the sequence, so he said, "It's too much time, I can't do this." Then I drafted my French director friend Regis Wargnier.

Le Paradis : Well it worked out tremendously. He's great in the movie. Especially his double takes as he keeps glancing at the empty seat next to him.

Brian De Palma : Yeah.

Le Paradis : In writing FEMME FATALE, you've said that the initial inspiration came when you accompanied your girlfriend on the Red Carpet at Cannes...

Brian De Palma : Right.

Le Paradis : She was escorted by bodyguards, because she was wearing expensive jewelry, and you thought about the possibility of someone attempting to steal it, which led you to your opening sequence. Is that an isolated occurrence, or do you often work that way, building on incidences from real life?

Brian De Palma : I do it all the time. Most of the ideas in the movies that I make come from experiences that I've had. The whole creation of the montage/painting at the end is something my brother and I worked on five months before shooting the movie. I spent months and months exploring Paris to find locations, so a lot of it is from me just walking around the streets and interacting with the environment and the people.

Le Paradis : Working in Paris on an independently-funded project really seems to have freed you to test your imagination and your technical skills to their limits. It's liberating just to watch the movie. How was the experience of actually making the film?

Brian De Palma : It was a lot of fun, I really had a good time. The whole project was blessed in a way, because I just went there basically to hang out, I got this idea, and I wrote it quite quickly. Through a friend I met Marina Gefter, who took me to Tarak Ben Ammar, who loved the script and said let's make this. It just all came together quite fortunately. Which is not usually the case in these instances. It takes a long time to put together these deals, where you're getting advances from distributors in various countries. He put the whole thing together all by himself. And then we went through a long casting process. That was, I'd say, the most extensive aspect of the movie, putting the cast together...

Le Paradis : And obviously Rebecca Romijn-Stamos was not your first choice.

Brian De Palma : She was the last person that we saw.

Le Paradis : But it turned out to be an inspired accident, if you can call it that...

Brian De Palma : That's exactly right. This whole movie was full of inspired accidents...

Le Paradis : Right, right. Well, she's terrific in the movie.

Brian De Palma : Thank you.

Le Paradis : Is the use of DOUBLE INDEMNITY in the opening shot a way for you to signal to the audience just what kind of movie they're in for, or does it have an added significance?

Brian De Palma : It has many significances. It sets up the whole conceit of the movie. Many times I've been in bed watching some old movie, and I've fallen sleep while watching it, and the movie becomes part of my dreams. So that idea I set up right from the get go. This is going to be a noir dream. These movies are dreams to us now, and since DOUBLE INDEMNITY is the quintessential film noir movie, it's a beautiful place to start. I liked the way she's reflected on the television screen against the images of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Something I discovered as I was shooting was these kind of paralleled juxtapositions that just flowed out of the way the camera was moving. It was perfect.

Le Paradis : The way the gunshot in the movie goes off just as the words "Femme Fatale" hit the screen is another great touch...

Brian De Palma : Yeah.

Le Paradis : You literally jump out of your seat every time.

Brian De Palma : (Laughs).

Le Paradis : Also in that first scene and for a few minutes afterwards we never get a full-on glimpse of Laure's face. Like Eliot Ness in THE UNTOUCHABLES, she's introduced to us from behind and with silent gestures. Is this sort of withholding of information something you do to keep an audience off guard?

Brian De Palma : Yeah, yeah. You want to give a very dramatic entrance to your character. Really the first time you actually see her is when she's kissing Veronica in the bathroom. Before that we are sort of behind her, or she's moving past us, or we're above her, and then she comes on with this passionate kiss.

Le Paradis : Did the work of any French directors of noir-inflected films such as Melville, Clouzot or Chabrol influence the style of the film?

Brian De Palma : You know, of course I've seen those movies. They're all sort of in your head somewhere, but I can't point out any specific references I was thinking about. I repeat a line from DOUBLE INDEMNITY in Laure's speech: "I'm rotten, rotten to the heart." But that's about it. It's such an easily identifiable genre, and there are so many variations.

Le Paradis : The theme of the double or doppelganger is as prominent in this film as it's been throughout your career. What do you think is the origin of this obsession, and why does it turn up so often in your films?

Brian De Palma : That's a question I don't have an answer for. I've been asked that a lot, and I've thought about it, but I can't really put my finger on it. Most of these things that appear over and over in my movies, much like after a long analysis, you can finally figure out where it came from. It may take you years to get your hands on it...

Le Paradis : It might not even be your job to do that...

Brian De Palma : No, no it's good to know where it comes from. I can't point to a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experience in my life, but I do know I went to Italy once and saw a guy that was a dead ringer for my older brother, I mean, I thought it was him. So that's something that's stuck in my mind for many, many years- running into someone that looks exactly like you, and I've thought of many ways to use that in mysteries and suspense movies.

Le Paradis : Your Director of Photography on FEMME FATALE was Thierry Arbogast, who by the way did an incredible job. We’ve read that you've seen and liked his previous work with Luc Besson. Have you ever seen a film he shot called L’APPARTEMENT...

Brian De Palma : Yes, of course. I did see the film, and I've met the director.

Le Paradis : After working with Stephen Burum for so long was any kind of an adjustment needed with Arbogast or did you hit it off right away?

Brian De Palma : No, not at all. We hit it off very well. He'd been an admirer of my movies for years. His daughter's name is Carrie. He was very excited about working with me, and he shoots in that style anyway. We looked at many noir movies, to get that atmosphere. At one time we even thought of shooting in black and white for the whole dream sequence, but then I thought that would be too much of a giveaway. So we abandoned that for a very stylized use of color.

Le Paradis : Seeing as how your experience with FEMME FATALE was such a positive one, can you see yourself going back to make a film in the Hollywood system? Do you plan on working with a major studio in the future?

Brian De Palma : I like to go back and forth. I find value in both systems. This has been sort of "My European Adventure." I have plans to do another movie there, but I read stuff all the time from studio pictures. I like working with other producers, other writers. So it's the variety that appeals to me. I don't think you should be doing the same thing over and over. That's why you see me making these very strange jumps. You know, you read all this stuff like, "He's taking a job," or "He has to go make some Hollywood movie." I select this material because I think it's good. I could have misjudged the material, or misjudged my ability to pull the material off. It's not because I think, "God, I gotta make a Hollywood movie. What script do I have on my desk?" I read and develop stuff all the time and many times I don't do it because I don't feel it's good enough. Directors like myself who are constantly working over a long career, we see everything, and we discuss it amongst ourselves. With other directors of my generation it's always, "Did you see that script, did you see this script? What do you think we could do with it, da da da da da?" And you have to have a real desire, and think that you could bring something special to it. I could go through each movie I've made and give you the exact reasons I agreed to do them which would probably not make much sense in terms of the way people think I might have done them. For instance, take something like CARLITO'S WAY. Now, did I want to make another Spanish gangster picture with Al Pacino? Not particularly. I'd done it, and was happy with it, but I liked the script so much that I said I gotta make this, it's such a great script. So that's why I made CARLITO'S WAY, and I'm very happy about it.

Le Paradis : We'd say you made a good choice as well (laughs). On the subject of your next film, we've heard it's also going to be produced by Tarak Ben Ammar and will be shot in Italy.

Brian De Palma : This is material based on a book and a play by Gardner McKay called TOYER. People have been trying to do it for decades. It's a very intensive psychodrama between two characters, but no one's figured out how to open it up and make it work as a movie. I got an idea how to do it, and I pulled it off the shelf last year and adapted it. It took us quite a while to obtain the rights to the material because Gardner died last year and we had to deal with his estate and his widow. Finally, we were able to work out a deal. It's a very terrifying piece of material. It's been terrifying for over thirty years...

Le Paradis: Is this the really scary movie you've been referring to over the last year or so?

Brian De Palma : Yes.

Le Paradis: Any truth to reports that John Travolta might be starring?

Brian De Palma : Aah, well we're in the process of finding people now. Again, it has a lot to do with their availability, and when we're going to shoot. But, you know, that's what's going on right now. As soon as I have something to report, you will hear.

Le Paradis: (laughs) Thank you very much! If you don't mind, would it be okay to touch on a few other subjects?

Brian De Palma : Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.

Le Paradis: Great. Just to go back to a couple of your earlier films, one of the most riveting performances in any of your movies was that of Thuy Thu Le as Oahn in CASUALTIES OF WAR. Was that as physically and emotionally demanding a role as it looked?

Brian De Palma : Oh yeah, it was just agonizing. The whole movie was agonizing. It was very difficult to find a Vietnamese actress because they didn't exist. We looked all over the world, and found her in Paris.

Le Paradis: She's never been in anything before or since then, has she?

Brian De Palma : That's right.

Le Paradis: Which adds to the verisimilitude of her performance, and of the film itself. It's as if she's a ghost who exists only in that movie.

Brian De Palma : Yeah. It's a remarkable performance. She lives in Paris now. I think she married a dentist.

Le Paradis: (laughs) Well that kind of spoils it...

Brian De Palma : The mystique is gone (laughs).

Le Paradis: CASUALTIES seems to mark a milestone in your career, in that like BLOW OUT, you used all of your technical skills and your most familiar themes and visual motifs to make a movie in a more serious manner, and with greater moral implications than maybe you had with some of your thrillers. With CASUALTIES OF WAR, it seemed you were making your grand statement. Did the failure at the time of so many people, critics and audiences alike, to recognize it for the masterpiece that it was, and is, affect you in any way, personally or professionally?

Brian De Palma : Oh, it was... very sad. I'd spent years trying to get that movie made. I'd read the piece in The New Yorker in the late '60's. I tried to get a hold of the material then. It was bought and sold, and many directors were attached to it. It was only because of the success of THE UNTOUCHABLES that I was ever able to get it going. And it was only because of Michael J. Fox's commitment to it and the fact that Dawn Steel had taken over Columbia Pictures that it ever got made. Again it's one of those things where you happen to be in the right place, at the right time. Until then, nobody wanted to make the movie. The whole thing was just an agonizing experience, the shooting of it, the writing of the script. But I felt it was very important to express this view of the war, as written in this devastatingly sad piece by Daniel Lang.

Le Paradis: Absolutely. You mentioned THE UNTOUCHABLES. Some people have viewed it as maybe not as personal work as some of your other movies. But the utilization of perennial themes such as the double and the transfer of powers clearly connects it with even your most personal films. The scenes between Ness and Malone, the staircase sequence, the rooftop chase... Would you say that you transformed the script in such a way so as to express these themes? Or do you instinctively detect them in the material, and draw them out, when another director might not?

Brian De Palma : Well, you're attracted to certain material because of what you like, and consequently, the themes and the way of shooting the sequences... When you're working from somebody else's script, like in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, you see these huge set-pieces and you respond to them. My first idea for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was let's turn this whole thing upside down. In the first mission we'll do what never happens in Mission: Impossible: We'll kill everybody. So, in THE UNTOUCHABLES there was a very good character relationship between Eliott Ness and Malone, and of course it has all that fabulous Mamet dialogue. From there we sort of built it out into this western melodrama. It's like a John Ford movie, with good guys and bad guys. And then the opportunity to do certain set-pieces arose. Certainly the staircase sequence arose out of an economic necessity because it originally was going to be a train chase. And, you know, car chases and train chases are things that don't particularly appeal to me. I think as a genre there's nothing more that can be done with it. Everything has been shot. All you can do is repeat yourself. Billy Friedkin did it in THE FRENCH CONNECTION a hundred years ago, and you'll never make a better chase than that. Give it up. Don't even try. So I was not at all unhappy about losing this train chase, where the accountant gets on one train, and they jump in a car and start chasing after it. When it became not economically feasible, I said, "This is a sequence about getting the accountant, so why don't we just do it in the train station? Just get me a staircase…" and from there I just made the whole thing up, obviously inspired by Eisenstein. So, I find when I read scripts, being a director, you imagine the movie as you're reading, and when you see areas that you can expand into visual set-pieces, or come up with very visual ideas to tell the story, then you respond to it. The ones that don't lend themselves to that, you either shoot straightforwardly, or you don't do them at all.

Le Paradis: Five years ago, when Carl started this website, he named it "Le Paradis," because of the recurrence of that word or phrase in several of your films: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, SCARFACE, CARLITO’S WAY. Now, at the end of FEMME FATALE, there's yet another use of it in the cafe called LE PARADIS. There's a production still of it, which Carl's gonna use as wallpaper on his computer for the rest of his life!

Brian De Palma : (Laughs).

Le Paradis: Is there any story behind this? Is there a connection to Dante, or perhaps to Marcel Carné’s LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS?

Brian De Palma : No, it's again something that I've used movie after movie. People approach me and say, "What are we going to call the club?" And it's either The Paradiso, or Club Paradise, and the same thing with the cafe. It's just this thing that sticks in your brain, that you like, and you just keep sticking it in your movies. I can't give you an exact reason. It's not supposed to be a long study of Dante's Paradiso, or anything. It just seems right. I mean, why do some people wear khakis and others wear blue jeans? It’s something you like, so it keeps on popping up.

Le Paradis: On several successive internet polls of your work, that we've conducted on our site in conjunction with Bill Fentum's site, BLOW OUT has repeatedly been singled out as you're best film.

Brian De Palma : Yes...

Le Paradis: How does this assessment sit with you? Is it surprising to you that the film has continued to grow in estimation, given that it was not a commercial success? It's as personal and obsessive a film to your fans as it appears to have been for you at the time you made it.

Brian De Palma : Well, you have to look at them. I look at my movies when they come out on DVD, just to see what the color is like and stuff like that, and I start watching them. And I can see why BLOW OUT is... you forget the incredible visual and physical design of the movie. You've forgotten about it because you've made so many movies since then, but then you look at it and you go, "My God!" So much of it is so beautifully designed, and there’s a very important idea that runs through the piece. What I tried to do is find a purely filmic way to bring that idea to the consciousness of the viewer. The idea of synching the sound to the picture, which is such a basic building block of cinema. Anyone who's worked in movies, synching rushes...you know trying to synch sound to lock in a sequence, it's something unique to the cinema. Here I created a sequence where it's the solution to the crime, and that's why I think it's so ingenious, and why it sticks in the viewer's mind so much, because it so cinematic. And I think why FEMME FATALE will have that ability too, is because it works so much on the subconscious. The great movies that I remember are the ones that went right into my subconscious, and I don't know why they obsess me, or why I keep thinking about them, or why in a postmodern way I keep trying to recreate them, like VERTIGO, for instance. It's just something that's inexplicable. These images have taken seed in your subconscious, and you can't get them the hell out. That's why I think when you make a movie you have to find a way to use that ability that film has to seed the subconscious. There are a few great directors that have been able to do it, and that's why we never forget these movies.

Le Paradis: We’ve heard that you like to visit the De Palma forum on Bill's site from time to time...

Brian De Palma : I certainly do!

Le Paradis: What do you think of some of the discussions that go on there?

Brian De Palma : Well, I think they're very informative, and between Geoff's site and Bill's site, I find every piece of information I need to know about me. Also your most astute understanding of my movies seems to appear in these discussions. You guys are way ahead of whatever the critics are doing, because you seem to understand what's going on before your eyes, and are able to communicate it to each other. I have a great belief in the web as a kind of great repository for our legacy. We will exist on the web. After all is said and done, we're not going to be some library in some university, we're going to be on the web. I find the people that are doing this stuff are the most responsive and the most intelligent critics of what I do. They're not hopelessly sychophantic fans. They get into arguments. My movies tend to polarize people, and what they have to say about this and that. I was quite astounded, as I said at the beginning of this, that nobody made any reference about when Laure goes to sleep in FEMME FATALE.It's not like she drifts into the dream without me setting it up, with these very loud sounds and repeating images, repeating zoom shots, so they would get it. I think I read one critic, and it might've been on the forum, that mentioned that. Everyone else, even the good critics seemed to miss all that. To me it's like, "What are they looking at?" Is this red flag I'm waving not big enough?

Le Paradis: (laughs) The signs are all there: overflowing fish tanks, every clock reading 3:33...

Brian De Palma : But it befuddles these people. It's like the frogs in Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA. They go,"What is that?!" Well open your mind up a little. y'know? What about the plague of locusts? These things happen. One just scratches one's head, and you think, are these people so out of touch with the historical developments in our culture over generations? All they can make references to is "Friends" and "Saturday Night Live?" This is the whole range of their experience? It just amazes me.

Le Paradis: On our site, Le Paradis, there's a more esoteric take on some of the themes and subjects of your movies. We have many sections that deal with different aspects of your filmmaking. For instance in the Second Sight section, I don't know how familar you are with it, but...

Brian De Palma : I've seen it. I've gone through the site.

Le Paradis: Great. Well in there, we point out elements in your films that are easily missed on first viewing, just as we've been discussing with FEMME FATALE...

Brian De Palma : Oh boy, you'll have a field day with that one!

Le Paradis: (laughs) They're things that are noticed later on, making repeat viewings all the more rewarding. On the forum, people have named their favorite examples. Do you have your own personal favourite "Second Sight?" Something you may have put in for an audience to see the second time around?

Brian De Palma : It's not so much that you put in things to be noticed the second time around, as you try to fill the screen with as much emotional and visual information as possible. And I'm afraid the viewer has been poorly trained in the last couple of decades with television and MTV. They're not used to looking at the big screen and just letting it wash over them. If someone isn't there to explain everything, they're kind of lost. They've really lost their ability to let the cinema to tell the story. So my frame is usually filled with things that are either metaphorical or expositional, or giving out signs or some kind of contrapuntal thing being addressed in the forefront of the scene, that many people miss the first time around. Split screen is a great example of that, because you can have two scenes running parallel to each other. Which is another way to deal with the visual aspect of film, and come up with different ways of telling your story. I think with the development of the next generation of games, where they're telling their stories so that you can approach them from any place, like Grand Theft Auto, you can rise up in the gang in all kinds of ways. There's so many ways you can develop a storyline. This opens up all these new avenues. It's like when Myst first came out, now you have to discover the story, much like an archaeologist does. Our linear forms are going to creak to an end, because it's a very limited way to tell a story. Of course, if you're dealing with emotion and drama sometimes you have to fall into a three-act form. These are things that I think about all the time. I'm constantly looking at the form, and I'm saying, what is particularly effective about these conventional methods that are so overused? How many movies have to open up with a panoramic helicopter shot? The mind boggles at the waste of screen time and the hopeless "clichés" we're presented with all the time. Visually, you know, we step outside, and we're on 5th Avenue, I mean, "So?" These don't really dramatize the things you can do with the camera. It just bothers me a lot, all the time.

Le Paradis: We have another section called "The De Palma Museum," which was inspired by an article in Studio Magazine, where you listed your various influences in movies, books and music. In it we learned that you considered "VERTIGO, REAR WINDOW and NOTORIOUS to be absolute and eternal masterpieces." Your obsession with VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW is well-noted, but your admiration for NOTORIOUS was a little surprising as it's Carl's favourite movie as well. Could you tell us a little bit about your love for that movie?

Brian De Palma : Well, I like NOTORIOUS because, with the exception of VERTIGO, it's Hitchcock at his most emotional. One must not forget the effect of emotion in cinema. The kind of art that stays with us is the kind that attacks us in a visual sense, but it can also attack us in an emotional sense. And I think it's important to understand that working in the Hollywood system can be quite beneficial. Hitchcock was an independent and wanted to control things as much as possible, but he'd been under contract with Selznick, and he had to make these movies Selznick's way. Out of that you can get something Hitchcock would not have been able to do on his own. It would force him into areas that he would not normally go, and I think NOTORIOUS is a prime example of that. He's got these two great stars. He's got this fabulous Ben Hecht screenplay. He's dealing with Selznick, who'd put the deal together with his stars and then sold it to RKO. He's also dealing with the studio bosses there, breathing over his shoulder, and he comes up with a film which might not be as filled with these great cinematic flourishes that he's so well known for, but it forces him to tell the story between these two people, and he finds ways. That incredible scene where they're at her place, and he practically shoots the whole thing with these tracking close-ups. He finds ways to do it that work for him, and that's when he comes up with something quite unique, and I understand the value of that.

Le Paradis: And within that system he turned out one of the bleakest romances in cinema history.

Brian De Palma : Yeah, absolutely.

Le Paradis: Speaking of the cinema, are you optimistic about the future of movies? Will we ever see a digital movie from Brian De Palma?

Brian De Palma : Of course, all this technology fascinates me. I think we're in a great era now, because you can make a movie by yourself with your digital camera and your Mac Final Cut Pro. You can shoot the movie, edit the movie, now all you have to do is write a decent enough script and get some good actors. It's much like putting on a play, can you round up the talent? You can even have venues, as we have faster and faster net connections, where they'll be playing. There are movies playing there now that aren't playing too well, but they're there. They're first attempts at storytelling, and I think this is fabulous, because now you can't say, "Well, I didn't have enough money to do this or that." It's all in your hands now. You can make a movie for $5,000 or $10,000. You can make it for even less than that. You have two people in a room, and it depends on what your appetite is, or what your resources are. Then the old problem is, much like a first novel, can you get anybody to read it? Can you get anybody to look at it? That's always the next step. So I think we're going to see all kinds of individual types of stories coming out. Movies will be made much in the novelistic form, where it's just you and some paper. Now it's just you, a digital camera, and your computer. You're going to tell the story, you're going to edit it, and you're going to put it up on the web, and it's going to be as good, or bad, as you are (laughs).

Le Paradis: If some benefactor, or benevolent studio head said to you, "Brian, I really love your movies. You're a genius, here's $80,000,000, go and make any film you want on any subject you see fit." What would that film be?

Brian De Palma : It would probably be either THE DEMOLISHED MAN, or MR. HUGHES.

Le Paradis: We've heard a lot about both of those. It's an obvious question, but is it frustrating to have a project that's so dear to you, languish for so long in development, or perhaps never get made?

Brian De Palma : Well, there's the story of CASUALTIES OF WAR. That languished for almost twenty years before I got it made, and THE DEMOLISHED MAN is a movie I've tried to get off the ground throughout my whole career. I wrote the first screenplay when I was a freshman in college, but hope springs eternal! MR. HUGHES is such a big project, you'd have to have an incredible hit in order to be able to make a movie like this, because it's so huge. Of course, now everybody's making a Howard Hughes movie, and they all last for about five minutes, until somebody figures out how much they're going to cost, and then they all seem to vanish away. So, much like Michael J. Fox got CASUALTIES OF WAR on, maybe through some serendipitous occurrence we'll cast someone, and one of these pictures will get made, because they're both really fabulous material.

Le Paradis: Some fans on the forum have bemoaned the fact that you haven't recorded any commentary tracks for the DVD releases of your movies. Even on the Special Editions, with all their bells and whistles, there's no director's commentary. It's a practice so commonplace now, that even on Adam Sandler movies the director provides a commentary! Is there a reason why you've chosen not to do this?

Brian De Palma : I guess it's because it's such a tremendous amount of work. I appreciate it when other directors do it. I was talking to Spielberg about this last night since he's also never done one. He feels that it's because he likes to keep a little of the mystery. I don't have that feeling, my thought is, "God Almighty, I have to sit here and go down memory lane with all this stuff! I don't think I can do this." Maybe later, when I'm sitting on my porch and I'm eighty-two, if I can still remember any of this stuff, I'll do one or two. So, basically it's a time problem, but there are some marvellous ones that are just full of fascinating information, you really have to appreciate them.

Le Paradis: Would you care to name some of the most recent DVD purchases that you've made?

Brian De Palma : (Thinking out loud) Uh, my last DVD purchase... Let me think... what did I buy? Well, I bought DON'T LOOK NOW, which I don't think had been out on DVD before. I love the way Roeg shot Venice in that period. I always wanted to shoot a movie in Venice in the winter. I also bought L.A. CONFIDENTIAL recently. That's a very good noir piece.

Le Paradis: And a good DVD too. Lot's of great extras on there...

Brian De Palma : And I bought MEMENTO. Oh, the most recent thing I bought was MULHOLLAND DRIVE! (Laughs).

Le Paradis: Oh! (Laughs). No chapter stops...

Brian De Palma : Yeah, I know! But MULHOLLAND DRIVE is the most recent one. I actually looked at it again the other day. Fascinating, really fascinating.

Le Paradis: DON'T LOOK NOW is an interesting choice. It's always seemed to be one of the closest things to a De Palma movie that's not a De Palma movie. Pino Donaggio did the score, and parts of it are similar to what he would later do in CARRIE. It's based on a Daphne du Maurier story, which is sort of the Hitchcock connection. Visually, it's a beautiful movie...

Brian De Palma : Yeah, absolutely. I haven't looked at that one. I have it here, but the last one I looked at was MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Le Paradis: Great. Well, there's still a ton of questions we could ask, but we know we can't keep you all day. We just want to say thank you for taking the time to do this...

Brian De Palma : Well… How did you two get together?

Le Paradis: On Bill’s forum. And after awhile Carl e-mailed me, asking if I'd like to help him out with an English language version of his site. He's from Quebec, so naturally French is his first language...

Brian De Palma : Where does he live? In Montreal?

Le Paradis: Yeah, in Montreal. I stumbled onto Bill's site almost three years ago now, just as a fan of your work. Carl and I hit it off early on. We started working together, one thing led to another, and now here we are talking to you!

Brian De Palma : Well, I try to talk with all of my websites... including my high school graduate in France...

Le Paradis: Romain! He's a great guy, a real character...

Brian De Palma : (laughs) Unbelievable! And Geoff, there's another one...

Le Paradis: Absolutely. Geoff's been a good friend too...

Brian De Palma : Have you met any of these people?

Le Paradis: It's mainly been through the forum, private e-mails, and the occasional phone call. We had plans to get together for a convention of some kind, and then an even a less formal gathering, centered around the retrospectives, first at The American Museum of the Moving Image, and again last year at Le Pompidou in Paris, but so far we haven't been able to put it all together. I'm sure we'll do it someday...

Brian De Palma : Right. Well, you're a great bunch, and keep up the good work!

Le Paradis: Thank you very much. And you do the same!

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