This month, New Jersey-born director Brian De Palma is the subject of two major, separate tributes. The recently opened Metrograph cinema in New York’s Lower East Side has a full retrospective encompassing his five-decade career. This body of work is markedly diverse, spanning experimental curios (Greetings, Hi, Mom!), Hitchcock-inflected thrillers (Dressed To Kill, Body Double), gruelling war dramas (Casualties of War, Redacted), and, of course, the visually spectacular, more mainstream fare for which he is best known (Carrie, Scarface, Mission: Impossible).
In addition, Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) and Jake Paltrow have made a new documentary, De Palma, a strictly chronological ride through its subject’s career in the form of a long, sit-down interview punctuated by well-chosen clips from his films. Given the pyrotechnics that characterize some of the film-maker’s biggest hits – consider blood-drenched Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) laying waste to her bullying peers in a telekinetic rage; or coke-ravaged Tony Montana (Al Pacino) imploring a cartel death squad to say hello to his little friend – it’s a little ironic to see him take centre stage in a work so conspicuously calm and cool.
When I met De Palma in the roomy upstairs lounge at Metrograph, the 75-year-old cut a laconic figure with his grey beard, navy turtleneck, beige hunting jacket, dark-grey tracksuit bottoms and green-and-white sneakers.
It’s a little strange to interview someone after watching them being interviewed for two hours, so I ask whether it was an odd experience to have the camera trained so intently on him for the first time. De Palma is swift to draw back the curtain on the fairly mundane workings of the enterprise: “Noah and Jake were interested in this new digital camera, so Jake bought one. They wanted to make a record of all these stories that I’d told them over the years when we’d had dinner together, so they sat me down in Jake’s living room. Jake operated the camera, Noah did the sound, and they would just ask me questions.” The close friendship between the three men accounts for the doc’s cosy vibe; it’s a feature-length tribute that never purports to be a critical analysis.
The film’s most moving moments find its subject in a reflective mood. He admits to being wounded by the critical and commercial flop of his adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s modern classic The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which took less than $16m against a budget of $47m. So, what does he think of critics?
“You like it when you get a good review,” he replies with a shrug. “I was in an era when a bad review could close an independent movie, and you’d take it very personally. Critics haven’t had that kind of effect on movies for a while. Well, they have an effect on the small ones, but not the big blockbusters.”
“I always felt that a critic’s appraisal of your movie is measuring you against the fashion of the day,” he continues, “and that fashion will change. If the movie had any true things that connect with the viewing audience they’ll be watching it 10, 20, 30 years later.”
In the film, De Palma also gets personal, discussing his non-existent relationship with his surgeon father, and describing his family as “egotists who didn’t care what damage they were doing”. He also confesses that the character played by young Keith Gordon in the Psycho-riffing chiller Dressed To Kill – an amateur teenage sleuth – is largely autobiographical: he would secretly follow his adulterous father around and record his indiscretions. In effect, it’s the origin story of a career voyeur.
Despite some of the painful home truths which emerge, De Palma says that making the film was an enjoyable experience, and it shows. Though it can sometimes feel like a glorified DVD extra, it’s elevated by its subject’s engagingly homey demeanour (“Holy mackerel!” he shouts on no less than five occasions), and the relish with which he spins a fount of tart, juicy anecdotes about colleagues. We discover, for example, that the actor Cliff Robertson, playing a traumatized character in Hitchcock homage Obsession, was supposed to have a ghostly pallor – instead, he insisted on showing up for filming with a rich mahogany tan. Robert De Niro, who, in 1963, made his acting debut as an eager, porcine 20-year-old in De Palma’s The Wedding Party, couldn’t be bothered to learn his lines for the same director by the time he played Al Capone in 1987’s The Untouchables.
Exasperated, he also mentions how studio execs, keen to cash in on Scarface’s popularity in the gangsta rap community, wanted to re-release the film with a rap song on the soundtrack. “I’m not a big rap fan,” he sighs, which judging by his delivery is probably understating the case.
Downstairs at Metrograph, in its plush main screen, Paltrow says that he’d “fallen for” De Palma long before meeting him, and describes his movies as an “elemental” influence on his own work. Baumbach, meanwhile, points to an aspect of De Palma’s films that’s often missed by critics and audiences alike: “They all have a sense of humour about them even when they’re very serious. Sometimes people have not known whether they’re supposed to laugh or not. They’re so wild. Even the shock ending of Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave … it’s scary, but still so funny too.”
De Palma, who speaks in a husky, long-voweled Newark drawl, has an unexpectedly giddy, high-pitched laugh which erupts for the first time when I inform him, much to his surprise, of the short-lived pop music career embarked upon by Craig Wasson, star of his 1984 thriller Body Double.
Yet his mood turns serious when we discuss the extremely hostile contemporaneous response to the film, much of which was founded on accusations of misogyny and female objectification – accusations that have recurred in discussion around his work. In its most controversial sequence, a woman is murdered by a man wielding a gigantic, phallic power drill. “Body Double was reviled when it came out. Reviled. It really hurt,” he says. “I got slaughtered by the press right at the height of the women’s liberation movement.” I ask whether he feels the backlash was at all justified, and he’s quick to shoot me down. “I thought it was completely unjustified. It was a suspense thriller, and I was always interested in finding new ways to kill people.”
His comment is simultaneously amusing and slightly unnerving. Yet it’s fitting for an artist so unstinting in his belief in the pure artificiality of cinema. “I always said that film lies 24 times a second,” he says. “That’s the antithesis of what Jean-Luc Godard said, that it’s truth 24 per second. That’s nonsense! Film lies all of the time.”
Before our time runs out, we talk briefly about his early avant garde work, including the hair-raising Be Black, Baby!, a mock-doc segment of his 1970 film Hi, Mom!, in which a group of black activists subject a group of middle-class Wasps to a harrowing experience of “authentic” blackness. De Palma cites this sequence as a progenitor of reality television, and compares it, rather unexpectedly, to a current TV staple: “It’s no different to Survivor today, where you see two people on the beach whispering to each other, except we know they’re surrounded by a camera crew and re-enacting something that they said earlier. We made it look like a documentary – like it’s real – but it’s completely ridiculous. The audience accepts it anyway.”
De Palma’s last film was Passion, a lurid erotic thriller released in 2013. In 2015, he was rumoured to be on board to direct the Chinese-funded action thriller Lights Out, but progress appears to have stalled. I ask whether there’s anything new on the horizon. “I rewrite other people’s scripts. I’m developing things,” he says, before relaxing into his chair, looking every inch a man at ease with himself.
“If it doesn’t work out, I’m just enjoying my life.”
De Palma is released in the US on 10 June. A Brian De Palma retrospective runs at Metrograph in New York from 1 to 30 June
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