THE DE PALMA DECADE
Yesterday, IndieWire posted an exclusive excerpt from the Carrie chapter of Laurent Bouzereau's new book, The De Palma Decade. Here's Jim Hekphill's intro to the excerpt:
Filmmaker and historian Laurent Bouzereau has been thinking and writing about Brian De Palma for most of his life, ever since he wandered into a movie theater to see “Obsession” and acquired an obsession of his own.Since then, Bouzereau has probably devoted more hours to exploring and explaining De Palma’s oeuvre than any other critic; he was the author of the first English language book-length critical study on the director, “The De Palma Cut,” and has produced endless hours of supplementary features for Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of De Palma classics like “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” and “Body Double.”
Now, Bouzereau has synthesized all he’s learned about his master’s origins in “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.” It’s a book devoted to the period in which De Palma created and perfected the visual language for which he would become famous in movies including “Sisters,” “The Fury,” and his masterpiece, “Blow Out.” Bouzereau moves not in chronological but thematic order through De Palma’s 1970s and early 1980s output, grouping films together according to their visual and philosophical preoccupations and looking under the hood to see how and why De Palma achieved his effects.
Bouzereau does so via a combination of interviews and his own observations after over 40 years of study; as a result, “The De Palma Decade” becomes not only a critical biography of De Palma but a sort of autobiography for Bouzereau himself as he traces his own evolution as a moviegoer (and a gay man responding to De Palma’s complicated treatment of sexual orientation) via his responses to De Palma’s work. Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s section on “Carrie,” in which De Palma and members of his cast and crew recall the casting of one of his most iconic films.
Read the rest of the article at IndieWire.