DE PALMA HAD THE 'DRESSED TO KILL' ART DIRECTOR "BASICALLY DUPLICATE" HIS SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT

PROBLEM FOR EVERY ARTIST: HOW MUCH OF YOURSELF TO REVEAL IN QUEST FOR TRUTH

"We’re then treated to a tight close-up of McAdams’s face against a bedpost. She is, judging by her half-hearted squeals, receiving mediocre oral sex. Suddenly, a man’s head emerges in the frame wearing a hybrid Phantom of the Opera Kabuki mask.

"This all looks like the start of a beautiful lesbian affair—that is, until Isabelle crafts a knockout ad campaign for the phone, a campaign for which Christine immediately takes credit. Christine, it seems, needs to knock this out of the park so she can receive a promotion and transfer back to the company’s Manhattan offices. Isabelle doesn’t take the move lying down, and immediately uploads her commercial to YouTube. After it goes viral, it’s Isabelle who receives all the kudos from the company brass, and the proverbial claws come out.

'PASSION' COULD EASILY BE RETITLED 'MAD WOMEN'
"Passion could easily be retitled Mad Women, with its sleazy ad biz setting and estrogen overload. When the pouty Dani (Karoline Herfuth), Isabelle’s redhead sexy assistant—who also has a crush on her—calls out Christine on her shady behavior, Christine replies, 'You want to eat my c--t, don’t you?' before violently kissing her, ripping her own blouse, and threatening her with a charge of sexual harassment. It’s a pretty jarring scene—especially the usage of the c-word—coming from the typically virtuous McAdams, whose cute visage, replete with a small face, a beauty mark, and kind, blue eyes is disarmingly sinister when she flips the switch.

"Later, after Dirk refuses to service Christine, she calls up every man in her phone until someone will come over and pleasure her. The action then cuts to Christine on the phone in a bathtub, as two hands place a shiny diamond necklace around her neck. Then the man’s face comes into frame, and he’s wearing a black leather pig-shaped gimp mask.

"While Passion makes several leaps in logic and is, like so much of De Palma’s recent oeuvre, overstylized, with flashy visuals and a Hitchcockian score, this kinky B-movie is redeemed by Rapace and, in particular, McAdams, who will hopefully take a trip to the dark side more often."

Entertainment Weekly has a description of the teaser trailer that was shown:

The NYCC crowd got an exclusive first look at Carrie‘s teaser trailer, which begins with a helicopter shot showing the school gym on fire, but then shows a trail of destruction leading throughout Carrie‘s small town…ending with a close-up on a blood-covered Moretz. The teaser features a cacophony of voices talking about Carrie — including the memorable line “She wasn’t some monster. She was just a girl.” — implying, perhaps, that the remake would adhere close to the structure of King’s original novel, which was written in a pseudo-epistolary style. (Brian De Palma’s original Carrie film in the late ’70s jettisoned that structure in favor of a more straightforward linear narrative.)

Foundas persists, "But did he in some way remind you of yourself at that age...?" De Palma replies, looking over at Baumbach, "Well, I don't think it's that... I don't think you think that way. [Baumbach nods in agreement.] You just, you know... you're not the best specter on yourself, you know. I think what happens when people make autobiographical films, the problem is they have the least insight into themselves sometimes. They usually miscast themselves. {Laughter from stage and audience.] You know, it's like, 'Why did you use that person? That's nothing like you.' And I think you have kind of blind spots about that to some extent."

The discussion in the rest of the video gets into the process of finding locations (and which comes first, the location or the idea). Here, De Palma stresses that if you're willing to do the work, you can find visually striking places that will look good on camera. "And I've told this to my film students, too: You've got to walk the location. And you should physically shoot every angle you're going to use, because if you can't take a picture of it, and it doesn't look right, don't use it. So I haunt the location, I walk all around it, and then when I finally think that it works for what I want to do, then you can also shoot video, too, having the actors walk in the different places. I mean, this is something, if you are hard-working enough, you can test out everything. Certainly in the day of the digital cameras, there's no excuses for having a crummy location. What I find in so much of what I see, all the time, is like, nobody's thinking about what anything looks like. I mean, you know, New York: helicopter shot of New York. Wow. [Laughter] Now there's an idea. I mean, I think they did it in the thirties, maybe the twenties, I mean, how many helicopter shots have you seen of Manhattan? You know, or a car driving up to a house. And also, in the beginning of movies, where they waste all this time, of, you know, coming into the city. You see the second unit going out there, shooting all those, you know, arriving in New York, arriving in Chicago, and all the titles go across. The audience is, in the beginning of a movie, you're ready for anything. You're all excited. And suddenly you start seeing this terrible travelogue... [Laughter]. Drives me crazy."

After Baumbach speaks a bit about beginnings of films, Foundas explains that he is now going to show a clip from Baumbach's Margot At The Wedding and a clip from De Palma's Carlito's Way. In each clip, Foundas' focus is on the introduction of a character: Margot in the first, and Penelope Ann Miller's Gail in the second.

In a separate segment of the video, McAdams continues, "I hope it's a thrilling ride for them, and I hope De Palma fans will enjoy it. I hope there will be new De Palma fans because of it. I think he's doing a really unique thing. I think he's got his own stamp he's putting on his films, and I think it's very cool, I think it's brave, and brazen. So yeah, I hope new people will join the De Palma club."

"He said he was fortunate to be in a new group of directors, but 'it’s a small group and it’s not going to get any bigger.' For Passion, DePalma had passed the script to his fellow directors and originally included a convoluted dream-within-a-dream structure that they eventually convinced him to discard. 'They read it and they liked the script very much but I’d done this dream sequence and done a take off on Inception, a movie I quite liked. And the whole idea was the phone was in the safe in the third level dream and my fellow directors looked at me and said, "Get rid of that.”'

"'It took three of us, too.' Baumbach added.

"'It was unanimous, when you have unanimous consent [that’s what you do]. So it’s very helpful,' DePalma said.

“'There is an isolated experience to being a director,' Baumbach said. 'It’s very communal because there’s a crew, but it’s only you. You’re the one on the hook. And seeing it in the tradition of Brian and the people he came up with and hearing stories of how they worked on each other's movies. And Steven [Spielberg] came in on the set of Scarface and directed a few shootouts in the final big battle. Both it’s cool to hear those things and it opened us up. It made it less precious in a way, all of us, we can talk about it and help each other.' When Wes was having trouble coming up with how to visualize shooting wind for the climax of his latest Moonrise Kingdom he turned to De Palma who offered up a solution: make sure you have things in the air. Simple, but it works.

“'Essentially we feel the same about movies and moviemaking but we come at it in entirely different ways,' said Baumbach."