HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE READER'S PICS FROM NYC SHOOT

Updated: Monday, August 30, 2010 12:04 PM CDT
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![]() Hello and welcome to the unofficial Brian De Palma website. Here is the latest news: |
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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:
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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De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002
De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006
Enthusiasms...
Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense
Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule
The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold
Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!
Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy
Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site
Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records
De Palma had taken McKay's play and expanded it, adding De Palma touches such as flashbacks that repeated certain scenes from different perspectives, newly invented characters, and locations to provide set pieces for a true blue De Palma film.
In 2005-2006, as post-production work was being done on The Black Dahlia, there were rumored to be plans to shoot Toyer in Venice, Paris, and London. One new character is an English surgeon named Laura Manning, and it had been rumored in 2004 that Tilda Swinton was in talks for that role. With the various settings, of course, an international cast was planned, and Giancarlo Giannini had been rumored for the role of the Italian Inspector Scarlatti. With a four/five-year gap since the project was last considered, the casting has started anew, and it will be interesting to see who fills out some of these roles this Fall.
DON'T LOOK NOW & DONAGGIO
As noted earlier, De Palma had planned to have Pino Donaggio compose the score for Toyer, and I suspect that will still be the plan. Donaggio also scored Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set thriller Don't Look Now in 1973. De Palma briefly discussed Don't Look Now in 2002 with Rodrigue and Suppa. "I love the way Roeg shot Venice in that period," De Palma said. "I always wanted to shoot a movie in Venice in the winter."
THIERRY ARBOGAST, DANTE FERRETTI
Also in 2005-2006, Thierry Arbogast was set to be the cinematographer on Toyer, and Dante Ferretti, having just worked with De Palma on The Black Dahlia, was getting ready to jump onto the Toyer project, as well. Hopefully this dream team is still available... Incidentally, Ferretti will be honored at next month's Venice Film Festival. On the morning of September 10th, Ferretti will receive the Premio Bianchi prior to the premiere of Gianfranco Giagni's hour-long documentary, Dante Ferretti: Production Designer. The film will then be shown on Italian TV in October.
The De Palma Thriller: CARRIE - Tuesday, September 7 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and additional insights from critic Armond White
The De Palma Thriller: DRESSED TO KILL - Wednesday, September 8 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, actor Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto
The De Palma Thriller: BLOW OUT - Thursday, September 9 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and producer George Litto, with additional insights from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
The De Palma Thriller: RAISING CAIN - Friday, September 10 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir and editor Paul Hirsch
Keep up to date at Movie Geeks United!.
(Thanks to Jamey!)
Producer Scott Steindorff tells De Palma a la Mod that there is a new cast now in talks for Toyer. This was in response to my question of whether or not they are still talking with Juliette Binoche and Colin Firth about the lead roles in the upcoming film. It looks like we can expect to see some news of a new cast in the upcoming weeks. Steindorff also confirmed for me that Brian De Palma is the sole writer of the screenplay adaptation (so the long-ago unsubstantiated rumor of a Ted Tally revision was probably never true).
When I talked to De Palma in Paris in 2002, he told me that he "had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists." In later months, it was announced that he would be filming an adaptation of Gardner McKay's Toyer with producer Tarak Ben-Ammar, and it always seemed to me that this must have been the film De Palma had been referring to. "A kind of serial murderer" is different than saying "a serial murderer," and seems close to the premise of Toyer, which is about a serial killer who does not actually kill his victims, but has the surgical skill to lobotomize them. Hence, "a kind of serial murderer." There was also a rumor around 2004 that De Palma had planned to cast famous actresses in cameo roles as Toyer's victims (or should we say, Venice "tourists"?). This would be one obvious alteration to the original one act play, which has only two characters.
When De Palma said in the quote above that he "had an idea," part of that idea was undoubtedly visual. As he explained in the same interview, "you know, now you go through a process of reading a lot of material, books, scripts, writing… until you get something that’s going to get you interested enough to make the movie. And as you get older, it just gets harder. And you say, do I want to spend all this time making something I’m not really a hundred percent sure that it’s going to be moving what I’m doing another step. You know, 'What am I saying with this movie? Am I involving some kind of cinematic idea I’m working on?'" With Toyer, which he has tried to get off the ground repeatedly, it is a safe bet that De Palma feels he will be working out some new cinematic ideas.
Pino Donaggio had mentioned around 2004 that he had been asked by De Palma to write the score for Toyer, something he said he was looking forward to. In a 2008 interview with Joep de Bruijn at MainTitles, Donaggio said, "And of course I would have liked to do all other films by Brian De Palma. He keeps on changing composers, but there is still something out there. He came to Venice to talk to me about The Toyer. After that meeting The Black Dahlia followed and another one. I don't know, I'll wait for it."
The early 1970s found [Salt] living (and partying) in Malibu, Calif., with Margot Kidder, who would go on to play Lois Lane in three “Superman” films. Drawn by Ms. Salt’s cooking and both women’s tendency to sunbathe topless were some dudes: Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg. (“To see those pale city boys running around on the beach with no clothes on was so charming,” Ms. Salt recalled. Said Mr. De Palma, “She cooked so well she could get us to do almost anything.”)
Salt went into television, acting for a long time on the TV series Soap before becoming disillusioned with it all, and eventually realizing that she never really wanted to be an actress after all. Here is how she told it to Riley at Backstage:
"I was doing nice guest shots on TV, but it just wasn't happening in a creative and fulfilling way," she says. "The roles I was up for—mostly mom roles—were dreary. And my enthusiasm for working on them and for auditions was very low." She had an epiphany. "Over the course of your life, you realize more and more who you are and how you want to spend your time," she reflects. "And it became clearer and clearer that I was very unhappy as an actress and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. When I was younger I thought it was because I wasn't successful enough. But as I got older I realized it had more to do with the fact that I just didn't love it."
The two interview articles linked to above are great, and for another really great interview in which Salt discusses working with De Palma in depth, check out Cult Film Freak. The undated interview appears to be from around the late 2000's (maybe even 2009). When asked which of the directors she worked with provided the most freedom for an actor, Salt replies:
Without a doubt, Brian De Palma. Back in the late 60's and early 70's there was much more freedom in filmmaking. Brian was always experimenting with new ideas and wanted equal input from everyone. He was willing to hear and try nearly anything you could think of that might help. But I also worked on more than one film with him, so we trusted each other very much and over time we created a formula that worked between us. There was chemistry there by the time production began on Sisters. John [Schlesinger] was also equally open to ideas and he was focused on getting naturalness out of the performances of his actors. But during the duration of the shooting of Midnight Cowboy John was also battling some personal issues that often hampered the flow of the film's progress. Some of the best directors I have ever had the chance to work with were those in television. Many of them are now making theatrical films. There was at least back then much more room for improvisation in television than there is now.
When asked which of her roles she likes best, Salt replied:
I loved playing “Judy Bishop” [in Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom!]. Of course who wouldn't want to work with Bobby De Niro? Naturally back then he was pretty much an unknown, but I still can't believe I shared the screen at one time with him. Of course I still say “Grace Collier” [Sisters] is up there at the top of my short list as well.
Elsewhere in the interview, Wright tells Jagernauth how he was originally not going to use much music at all in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, "because we saw that most fictional bands in films suck, and we thought we’d do a running joke on it." But as the music began coming in (from Beck and others), Wright started to see things differently:
I found out that once I had the songs, I allowed myself more time to let them breathe. So I think the first Sex Bob-Omb song, "Garbage Truck," maybe originally I thought they’d play the first verse and just before it kicked into the forest, [Matthew] Patel would interrupt, but then it was like, "no fuck it, let’s just listen to it." And when the songs started to expand, I thought, "wow, I’m really starting to get that vibe more like a sixties or seventies film." Some of those films like "Phantom of the Paradise" or "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," I would love it when they would go, "And now, the Strawberry Alarm Clock will play" or "Now The Carrie Nations will play" and it’d be like 10 minutes of the film. That was something that definitely developed once we had the material. I think in an early cut of the film, I think we played the whole of [Metric's] "Black Sheep." That’d be on the DVD, one version. In fact, when we shot the songs, we shot the full songs with all the artists, so we have different versions of them which we’ll put on the DVD.
In a separate interview with the Daily Comet's Dave Itzkoff, Wright again called out Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle and De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise as the "true antecedents" [Itzkoff's words] of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but said he was wary of citing those films in meetings with executives, because "you don’t want to reference things that are way too obscure.”
SCOTT PILGRIM REVIEWS COMING IN
Meanwhile, the reviews for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are coming in as the film is released this Friday. Armond White at the New York Press loves the film, contrasting it with the work of one of his favorite targets, Quentin Tarantino. The latter's films, according to White, are "pop-referencing movies" that "extract all social and political contexts," while Wright's pop-referencing is done as "a social satirist."
At The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Ed Symkus writes in his review that "Wright keeps the film sprinting along, throwing in a split-screen segment here and an exciting rock performance there — with another super-stylized fight right around the corner. There turns out to be as much talk as there is action, and by the time we’re introduced to the (sorta) villainous Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), the film has slickly turned into a diatribe against the cold, heartless record business. If you want to see anything remotely like it, check out Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise — a film that was as far ahead of its time for 1974 as Scott Pilgrim is for today."
11:09 – I much prefer Cruise in one of those rubber face masks. I find his acting much more satisfying. Nothing too De Palma-y going on right now. Though the scenery looks an awful lot like the scenery in Phantom of the Paradise. Though like Emilio, I question Cruise’s decision to go with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. Very curious.