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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


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Came In From The Cold

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Scarface: Make Way
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italkyoubored

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De Palma a la Mod
site

Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Ambrose Chapel
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Wednesday, November 8, 2017
TWEET - BATTLEAXE VOICE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetbattleaxevoice.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 11:36 PM CST
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017
HIRSCH MASTER CLASS IN PARIS NOV 19
BRACKETED BY SCREENINGS OF 'OBSESSION' & 'FALLING DOWN'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/hirschmasterclass.jpgPaul Hirsch, who has made 11 films with Brian De Palma, will present a Master Class at Cinéma Grand Action in Paris on Sunday, November 19th. The Master Class (at 6pm) will be preceeded by a screening of De Palma's Obsession (4pm), and the night will close out with a screening of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (7:30pm).

The press release quotes Hirsch about Obsession: "The film was turned down by every major studio when it was originally finished. I then had the idea of substituting a single shot in the film, and convinced De Palma and the producer to do it. It was then picked up by Columbia. How changing one shot changed the meaning of the story, and transformed a picture no one wanted to distribute into one they did, is an interesting example of the significance of editing."

And then also a brief quote from Hirsch about Falling Down: "Falling Down is very relevant to current events in America today. It is one of my forgotten films, by and large, but I think it was sort of prophetic. And it represented a distinct editing challenge in its own way."


Posted by Geoff at 10:42 PM CST
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Monday, November 6, 2017
'FEMME FATALE' AT TRAILERS FROM HELL
ALLAN ARKUSH COMMENTARY KICKS OFF BRIAN DE PALMA WEEK AT TFH
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/fftfh.jpg

Trailers From Hell kicks off its Brian De Palma Week today with a brand new Allan Arkush commentary for the American version of the trailer for De Palma's Femme Fatale. Arkush begins by contrasting David Thompson's review of the film with Roger Ebert's. Later this week, the site will highlight Edgar Wright's commentary for The Fury trailer, and then Larry Karaszewski on Get To Know Your Rabbit.

Posted by Geoff at 8:37 PM CST
Updated: Monday, November 6, 2017 8:39 PM CST
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Saturday, November 4, 2017
SATURDAY TWEET - DE PALMA / BAUMBACH
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetdivorce.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 9:36 PM CDT
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Friday, November 3, 2017
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER EXCLUSIVE 'DOMINO' IMAGE
DE PALMA'S LATEST IS IN POST-PRODUCTION
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/thrdomino.jpg

The Hollywood Reporter today has an "exclusive image" first-look at Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in Brian De Palma's Domino, which is currently in post-production. The image was provided to the site by IM Global. Here is the text that accompanies the image, reported by THR's Ashley Lee:
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is on the edge in The Hollywood Reporter's exclusive first look at Domino.

Carice van Houten and Guy Pearce also star in the suspense-filled crime thriller, directed by Brian De Palma.

Currently in postproduction, the fast-paced crime thriller stars Coster-Waldau as Christian, a Copenhagen police officer seeking justice for his partner's murder by a mysterious man called Imran. He teams with Alex (van Houten), a fellow cop and his late partner’s mistress, to hunt down the murderer, but are unwittingly caught in a cat-and-mouse chase with a duplicitous CIA agent who is using Imran as a pawn to trap ISIS members. Soon, they're racing against the clock to get revenge and save their own lives.

Danish scriptwriter Petter Skavlan (Kon-Tiki) wrote the screenplay. Schønne Film's Michel Schønnemann produced, with Joel Thibout, Jean Baptiste Babin and David Atlan Jackson and Peter Garde serving as executive producers. Its co-producers are Jacqueline de Goeij for Zilvermeer Productions, Els Vandevorst for N279 Entertainment, Antonio Perez for Suroeste, Leonardo Recalcati for Recalcati Multi Media and Roberto Capua for Light Industry Motion Pictures.

Global Road Entertainment (formerly known as IM Global) is selling international rights to the film at AFM.


Posted by Geoff at 11:03 AM CDT
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PODCAST - DE PALMA INTERVIEWS BAUMBACH
ASKS ABOUT HIS TITLES, HIS 'VERTIGO' MOMENT, TURNING DOWN A PART IN BAUMBACH FILM, MORE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/2017depalmabaumbachpodcast.jpg

In Episode 101 of The Director's Cut podcast, posted on SoundCloud two days ago, Brian De Palma interviews his friend Noah Baumbach. De Palma kicks things off by asking Baumbach about the titles of his films, and how he came up with them. Together, they go movie-by-movie through Baumbach's titles. De Palma then asks if he'd ever had a "Vertigo moment," (a movie that made him want to make movies), and Baumbach mentions Steve Martin in The Jerk. "Yes, you keep on referring to that," responds De Palma, "and I'm trying to get my head around it."

The conversation keeps flowing from there, with De Palma comfortably asking his friend questions about how he developed as a filmmaker (Baumbach eventually says his "Vertigo moment" might have been Truffaut's Jules And Jim). At one point, Baumbach recalls first meeting De Palma at Paul Schrader's 50th birthday party, and offering De Palma a part as a therapist in his new (at that time) movie. "And you said no," Baumbach recalls, "but you said, 'Don't worry, I turn everybody down. I turned Woody Allen down.' So I felt in good company."

That's all in the first 13 minutes-- listen to the full 39-minute podcast for much more.


Posted by Geoff at 3:08 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, November 3, 2017 3:11 AM CDT
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Monday, October 23, 2017
'THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS' & 'DRESSED TO KILL'
ELEVATOR SCENE IN ITALIAN GIALLO IS ECHOED & ENHANCED IN DE PALMA'S FILM


Thanks to Patrick for linking us to a recent Cahiers du Cinéma "Des giallos à gogo" video posted on YouTube, featuring the opening scene from Giuliano Carnimeo's Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (1972). Released internationally with the title The Case of the Bloody Iris, the film opens with a shocking murder of a woman on an elevator. The woman's blond hair, and the close-up of her face and her terrified eyes watching a knife in the hand of the killer, bear such a striking resemblance to similar shots of Angie Dickinson's elevator murder in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill, it seems apparent that De Palma must have seen Carnimeo's film sometime before storyboarding and filming this sequence. The killer raises the knife and then brings it down in a slashing motion across the woman's neck in very much the same way the killer does in De Palma's film. The people waiting outside the elevator until it arrives also reminds of Nancy Allen's Liz and her client waiting obliviously for the elevator in Dressed To Kill. In both cases, the female character who is first to see the victim in the elevator turns out to be a major character in the film, and the relative sequences serve as her introduction.

Yet the De Palma sequence also differs from Carnimeo's sequence in many ways. De Palma has added the Hitchcock touch of Liz witnessing the killer and then herself holding the bloody weapon, making her an immediate suspect. And he has mixed in several other elements: the meeting of the eyes between victim and witness, as one exits the film's narrative and the other takes it over; the deliberate echoes of Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene; the intercutting of Liz's conversation with her client and the horrible murder taking place in the elevator cabin while they wait (creating a dark comic irony); the entire movie leading up to Dickinson's Kate Miller getting on the elevator, feeling guilty about her one-night-stand, realizing she has left her wedding ring upstairs in the stranger's apartment, and being stared at by a young girl who seems to sense the woman's guilt.

In the earlier giallo, the victim is someone the viewer has never met before. In De Palma's film, the viewer has already become very intimately involved with the woman before she ever steps into that fateful elevator.


Posted by Geoff at 12:21 AM CDT
Updated: Monday, October 23, 2017 12:24 AM CDT
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Wednesday, October 18, 2017
VISUAL COMPARISON: 'PASSION' & 'GERALD'S GAME'

Posted by Geoff at 11:52 PM CDT
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Monday, October 16, 2017
BAUMBACH DISCUSSES DE PALMA INFLUENCE
"IT'S NOT SOMETHING I THOUGHT OF CONSCIOUSLY, BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF LONG CAMERA MOVES..."


In the introduction of his interview with Noah Baumbach, Dazed's Nick Chen states that "Baumbach’s scripts are so meticulous and efficient, his visual approach can go underappreciated. There is, for instance, one specific directorial flourish towards the end [of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)] that I’ve never seen from Baumbach before, which is clearly indebted to his mentor, Brian De Palma. Chen asks Baumbach about the De Palma influence in this bit from the interview:
You released a Brian De Palma documentary last year, and spent a few years before that revisiting his films. Did that influence Meyerowitz in any way?

Noah Baumbach: Somebody said to me the other the day that they saw Brian’s influence in the movie. I thought that was interesting. It’s not something I thought of consciously, but there are a lot of long camera moves and stuff I’ve done before, but I felt maybe I and Robbie Ryan, who shot it with me, were more successful at doing some things I’ve been trying to figure out. Brian obviously is known, rightfully so, for his great long pans.

And that thing which Brian says: you can’t play chess without showing the chessboard first.

Noah Baumbach: Right, right. Yeah, his whole thing of suspense is contingent on you understanding the space to know what’s really at stake. So often, people rush to the suspense without setting it up. Brian loves to set up a room and show you everything.


Posted by Geoff at 11:50 PM CDT
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Friday, October 13, 2017
FRIDAY TWEET
DE PALMA BINGED 'BREAKING BAD' DURING DOWNTIME SHOOTING 'PASSION' IN BERLIN


Previously:
Nick De Semlyen - sidebar interview with De Palma in Sept 2013 issue of EMPIRE magazine

EMPIRE MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2013, 'RAISING CAIN' RECUT
Nick De Semlyen has a great little sidebar interview with De Palma in the September 2013 issue of EMPIRE magazine. De Semlyen asks De Palma what we would find in his browser history cache. "They're doing live trials online now," De Palma replies, "so I've been watching the Zimmerman trial. I'm not really a YouTube guy, though I did see somebody re-edited Raising Cain into the original order in which I cut it. I looked at it and said, 'I should have left it that way.'"

'DEXTER', 'MAD MEN', 'WAR AND PEACE'
Asked if he watches any TV shows, De Palma replies, "I watched Dexter in the beginning and was fascinated by it. But when they extend these shows for six or seven years, they sort of run out of ideas, so I didn't watch the whole John Lithgow series. Even Mad Men is getting a little tired now. These things are ten times longer than War And Peace.

'HITCHCOCK'
De Semlyen then asks De Palma if he saw Hitchcock. "Yes," De Palma replies. "I bought the book to see if it was actually real, what happened. I don't remember Hitchcock having problems with his marriage during the making of Psycho. So I thought it was interesting, but is it true?"

'THE DEMOLISHED MAN'
When asked about Ridley Scott's Prometheus, De Palma tells De Semlyen, "I didn't think it was as good as the original. It's not like Godfather I and II. There's a science fiction story that I've always felt would make a terrific movie: an Alfred Bester book called The Demolished Man. It's about a society of Espers, who can read people's minds. And then a great economic titan figures out how to kill his wife and not get caught. The rights are all tied up at Paramount."

JASON STATHAM FAN
De Semlyen concludes by asking De Palma if he's a fan of Jason Statham, who he was going to direct in the remake of Heat. "Oh yes," replies De Palma. "I've always wanted to make a film with him. I've seen both Cranks and loved them. In fact, I don't think there's a Jason Statham film I haven't seen. He's been doing too much action stuff, driving cars and beating up people. He needs a more Steve McQueen-type part. But it didn't work out."

The same issue also includes a positive review of Passion by Ian Nathan, who says that during its second half, "Passion is transformed into a butterfly of hyperactive noir."


Posted by Geoff at 5:28 PM CDT
Updated: Friday, October 13, 2017 5:33 PM CDT
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