The Projection Booth

The Fred Caruso interview begins around the 1:36 mark. Caruso tells the podcast that it was his idea to include the Mummers Parade in the film's final act, as well as the fireworks going off in the background. Caruso says there was a big question from the studio and producer George Litto about whether Nancy Allen's character should die at the end. But De Palma said, look, that's the ending. If they like it, fine, if not, so be it. He also mentions that De Palma drew his own storyboards and had his entire office filled with them, from the first scene to last.

The Nancy Allen interview begins around the 2:06 mark. She talks about the heart and warmth that John Travolta brought to what on the page was a very dark piece. She also talks about how she and editor Paul Hirsch thought Travolta had to save the girl, but "John and Brian said nope, that's not happening." She also talks about the remake of Carrie (which she doesn't seem to have seen at the time of the interview), saying she is not a fan of remakes. She doesn't see the point unless you can somehow make it better, and doesn't think that is possible with Carrie. She and Paul Verhoeven did a Q&A after a screening of Robocop last year, and when someone brought up the upcoming remakes of that film and last year's remake of his Total Recall, Verhoeven said, "It's very depressing. I should be dead." Allen laughed and said she really gets that. Allen also confirmed that it was really her scream in Blow Out.

At about the 2:42 mark, there is a conversation with Dennis Franz, who at first says he does not remember much about Blow Out, having only watched it once around the time it was first released. But after the host mentions some things, Franz begins to remember a little more, including the fact that it was shot in Philadelphia, where Franz met his future best friend, who happened to be De Palma's driver at that time. Franz recalls De Palma calling him as Dressed To Kill was in theaters, saying, "Looks like we have a hit on our hands." De Palma asked Franz if he was interested in a part in this new thing he was working on. After listing off some of the potential roles, De Palma laughed. "Why are you laughing?" Franz asked him. De Palma said he had this character named Manny Karp. Franz immediately said, "I'll take it. You're laughing about him, I like the name, I'll take it." Franz told the podcast that once De Palma starts a job, he crawls into his shell and focuses, while Allen, who De Palma was married to at the time, enjoyed being social and having people over, which weighed on De Palma a little bit after long days on the set.

ON 'THE DEMOLISHED MAN'
Farris: "The film rights belonged to a Hollywood wannabe who was in the hotel business. I don't recall his name. Brian [De Palma] was attached to write the screenplay and direct and the project was set up at Paramount. Mike Eisner thought Brian's script needed work, although he was thrilled with the project, etc. I was brought in at Brian's suggestion. Read his draft, which I thought was excellent. I did a 30-page treatment, adding new angles but not straying far from the novel. Brian okayed the treatment. I did the new screenplay. Next thing I knew [Frank] Yablans was involved, took the project away from Paramount and gave it to Fox. There were heavy-duty politics involved in this move. But Fox passed and Brian was irate. For mnore on that story, you would have to talk to Brian. He never mentioned The Demolished Man to me again."

ON DE PALMA'S EARLY LIFE AND AFFECT ON HIS CAREER TRAJECTORY
In the interview (which was conducted via e-mail), Dumas tells Farris, "A friend of mine -- a grad student in film studies at the time -- once had an opportunity to as Oliver Stone about De Palma; Stone replied that De Palma was 'the saddest person' he'd ever met. (I assume that by 'sad' he meant 'despondent,' rather than something like 'pathetic.') Did he strike you as a melancholy sort?"

Farris responds, "Brian was 36 when he made The Fury. I found him to be somewhat shy, not overly talkative but humorous and engaging when his guard is down, intensely observant but not judgmental, far too intelligent to be anything but annoyed by the Hollywood game, impatient with anything or anyone that caused him to lose focus. And, I think, disappointed that his career hadn't taken off like that of his friends Spielberg and Lucas. Friends, but rivals, in what Brian has referred to as 'The Competition'.

"A friend of mine since high school had played the female lead in Hi, Mom! and had briefed me on her experiences with him during filming. As a fledgling director he gave her a tough time. But he was younger then, and still unravelling the emotional knots of growing up in a prosperous but dysfunctional family. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze him. Adolescence wasn't paradise for most of us. But having heard from Brian about certain incidents in his early life, which are strictly his business and will not be related here, it's clear that they profoundly affected the direction, or trajectory if you will, his career has taken. For complex studies of where his fascination with, and terror of women has led him creatively, try watching Sisters, Dressed To Kill, and Raising Cain one after another.When Dumas asks how these things came up in the context of writing films together, Farris answers, "That grew out of discussions over lunches at Musso and Frank's, relevant to the script of The Fury and how much of the relationship between Gillian and her mom should be in the movie. Also there is something about me that often has near-strangers eager to talk about moments in their lives they wouldn't confess to a priest. Basically I guess I'm just a good and uncritical listener."

FARRIS & DUMAS DISCUSS OTHER DE PALMA FILMS
Dumas asks Farris what De Palma films he had seen prior to working on The Fury. "I had seen Sisters, Obsession and Carrie," replies Farris, "brilliant exercises in what can be done when you have almost no money to spend. Other than what my actress friend had told me about Hi, Mom! I didn't know anything about Brian's student-film years."

Dumas then continues, "Have you kept up with all of De Palma's movies since then? You mention Raising Cain, which I still think is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, like Preston Sturges remaking Psycho -- did you have a similar reaction to it? I wonder what you thought of the particularly political ones, like Casualties Of War and Redacted and even Snake Eyes, and I especially wonder what you thought of Scarface, given its initial failure and its unprecedented second life on home video."

Farris then responds, "Scarface is my second-favourite De Palma movie, after The Untouchables. It has a near-hallucinatory quality, wonderful script and a visual flair to make any of his rivals in 'The Competition' envious. I also liked The Bonfire Of The Vanities. That one was a lose-lose situation for Brian, based as it was on an overhyped, revered 'masterpiece.' If you don't 'get' Brian, then you hate the movie. Pauline, where were you when he needed you?

"Casualties Of War is another good one. Haven't seen Redacted. As for Cain, I think it's a minor masterpiece waiting in the wings to be properly acknowledged by film scholars. The only movie Brian has made, and at a very stressful time, that is so obviously about himself."

UNREALIZED PROJECT: 'WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN'
Near the beginning of the interview, while telling Dumas how The Fury came together as a film project, Farris mentions another adaptation he and De Palma had been working on together. While working on the screenplay for The Fury between 1975 and 1976, Farris says, agent Bob Bookman "put me together with another client, Brian De Palma, to work on an adaptation of the Mary Higgins Clark best-seller Where Are The Children? which Brian was attached to direct. I spent a couple of months on a screenplay that would work. By then Brian was bored with the project. Carrie had been released and was a big success and he wanted something more challenging than a fairly mild mystery. 'What are you working on?' he asked me.

"So on January 17 we all met in Frank's office, agreed that day on Kirk Douglas as the lead, called him, and then the real work began. Seven drafts of the screenplay later, Brian began filming on a beach in Chicago."

Where Are The Children? was eventually made in 1986 by director Bruce Malmuth, with the screenplay credited to Jack Sholder. The film starred De Palma's friend, the late Jill Clayburgh, who had played the female lead in De Palma's first film, The Wedding Party. The plot/storyline synopsis on the IMDB has a similarity or two with the plot of De Palma's Femme Fatale, regarding a woman who loses her children (they are later found dead). After being convicted of their murder and then having that conviction overturned, the film moves ahead "seven years later," where the woman has changed her identity and hair color, and has a new life married to a realtor. One day she opens the newspaper and is stunned to see her picture in the local section.

SPOILER ALERT: Femme Fatale has a woman who has a premonition that she has assumed the identity of a look-alike who has committed suicide following the death of her child. The story moves ahead "seven years later" where a paparazzo takes her picture and it gets plastered in the streets of Paris, causing her to fear retribution from the thieves she had swindled in her earlier life.

When asked by Dumas whether the scenes involving the song-and-dance couple were ever filmed, Farris tells him, "Donald O'Connor and, I believe, Gloria De Haven were signed to play the song-and-dance couple and construction was underway on their apartment set when they were cut from the script, a few days before we began shooting in Chicago." Dumas further asks whether any test footage might have been shot, and Farris answers, "Test footage on O'Connor and Gray? I don't think anyone tested for The Fury. Brian knew who he wanted and what they could do."

Farris indicated above that he wasn't quite sure about who the female half of the song-and-dance couple was. According to Dumas, Farris had originally stated that the female was Dolores Gray, but just before the booklet went to press, Farris told him he was mistaken, and that it was actually De Haven. However, according to a 2005 article at Classic Images, it was Vivian Blaine. The Classic Images article also suggests that the scene with the couple may have been shot and then left on the cutting room floor.

"The Fury starring Kirk Douglas and made at Fox cast Donald O'Connor and Vivian as a song and dance movie team, similar to Marge and Gower Champion," writes Classic Images' Colin Briggs. "With a very gory horror plot, it was based on the best selling novel of the same name. When the film was previewed it was way too long and as their parts were expendable (they both meet an extremely gory end) their scenes were excised. Vivian's comments: 'My fans were disappointed but have them know, the pay was tops.'” (Thanks to Bill Fentum for sending in this article a while back!)

WILLIAM FINLEY'S DUNWOODIE ASSASSINATION SCENE CUT DURING EDITING
Farris also reveals a couple of cut/altered scenes, saying that the bus ride in the final act was originally written as a ferryboat ride across Lake Michigan (it was cut due to "budget and logistic considerations," according to Farris). "as for locations," Farris tells Dumas, "Brian wanted to do the beach scene in the Chicago Museum of Art. No Chance. As you know, the scene with Dunwoodie shadowing the girls and tuning into Gillian psychically he later adapted to great effect for Dressed To Kill. Dunwoodie's assassination and a nice overhead shot of his sprawled body with beachgoers walking around it were cut in editing." (Note: this sounds very much like the way the death scene of the former Castro confidante killed by Tony Montana in the refugee camp near the beginning of Scarface was staged and shot. The character's physical features suggest that this dying figure could have been played by Finley himself.)

There's a lot more great stuff in this interview. I'll do a second post about it tomorrow.

ON REMAKES & 'TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE'
"I like to get my hands on films that have already been made, characters already defined, because there is always something you can add, remove, update. My big dream is a version of Treasure of the Sierra Madre by John Huston, with characters not rewarded by a gold mine, but cocaine, the gold of our time. The idea surfaced with Scarface, which was just back in theaters, restored : the remake of Howard Hawks, which I made thirty years ago with star Al Pacino. I was prompted by the prospect of placing myself in the Cuban community in Florida and within that universe of cocaine, which is harvested in the mountains at no cost, but once arrived in the city, is worth millions, and the foolish way the smugglers are unable to abstain."

ON WORKING WITH ORSON WELLES AND BERNARD HERRMANN
"I consider those my two Oscars, of which I've never even received a nomination. At thirty-two years old I made Get To Know Your Rabbit with the great Welles, a terrific actor, a great talker, a brilliant director who in 1940, the year of my birth, made the best movie ever filmed, Citizen Kane. I was excited and worried about him: in debt, discarded by Hollywood, he agreed to shoot for a couple of weeks to collect a bit of money for his next film. My other stroke of luck, the year after, the soundtrack for Sisters was composed by Herrmann, the wizard behind the music from Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest. I never saw his face: he always kept his head down when he spoke. A volcano of sudden rages, his reaction to bad decisions. Much like Welles. The difference? Herrmann maintained his wrath through to the end of the objective, while Welles, after the first outburst, would give in. He was unshakable in the face of the new industry requirement to write at least one ‘successful’ film song - like 'Mrs. Robinson' from The Graduate or 'The Ballad of Easy Rider' - imposed since the sixties because of the dominance of the music industry on film. Herrmann was categorical: 'I do not write songs but film music!' He left the U.S. for London, where he set to music two Truffaut films: Fahrenheit 451 and The Bride Wore Black"

ON BEING AN 'ECONOMIC REFUGEE' FROM HOLLYWOOD
When asked if he considers himself an exile in Hollywood, De Palma replies, "No, rather an economic refugee. I moved there early in my career to raise dollars, now I’m learning the lesson of [Woody] Allen: 'Take the money and run.' Hollywood is a disease that is too contagious: you stay there one more minute and you find yourself shooting the next Schwarzenegger film without even knowing how it happened."

ON 'HAPPY VALLEY'
"It’s inspired by a true story, that shook the United States: that of Joe Paterno, model coach of a university football team overwhelmed by a pedophilia scandal that destroyed his forty year career, leading to his death two years ago. It is the descent into hell of a man whose past was exemplary: a fascinating story, worthy of Ibsen or Arthur Miller. It could breathe fresh air into Hollywood today, which is busy squandering millions on big screen comic books, toys and a new set of Batman. When I finished Mission to Mars, I said to myself: 'You spent a hundred million dollars: pulverized in Space. But what's the point?' This is the question that chases me when, in order to test the absurd, I shove my nose into the blockbuster of the moment: are there really people who buy tickets to see this stuff?"

ON SKYPING WITH DE PALMA

Anders: When you first came on board this project, were you daunted by the idea of doing a remake, or excited by the challenge of what you could do with it?

Peirce: Well, probably all of the above. I mean, I’m not necessarily for or against, you know, reimaginings. I was a literature student, so it’s like, I love rereading Oedipus. I love Shakespeare. I love the original Scarface, I love the new Scarface. I love both Imitations of Life. So, to me, it’s just an opportunity. Then the question is, is it a good opportunity?

And, so when they came to me, you know – the first thing I thought was I adore Brian De Palma. I think he’s a fantastic director. I love his original, and I actually am friends with him. We’ve gone to dinner a number of times in Little Italy, and like a lot of the directors, he was really supportive of me – so I felt I had to talk to him about it.

So I emailed him, and he said let’s Skype – which was great, how progressive he is. And we had a beautiful Skype. I wish I had recorded it. Obviously I would have had to ask him, but I was too engaged in the conversation, and, you know, just me and him on the Skype talking about it. He was really supportive, and he said, I think you should do it, and that was great. So once I really cleared that hurdle and I knew, kind of, professionally it was clear, then I picked up the book, which I had read as a kid – I was a big reader, in a book club. And I was a literature student at the University of Chicago, so I think I had reread it around then.

ON THE FIRST TIME SHE SAW DE PALMA'S 'CARRIE'

Anders: When was the first time you saw the De Palma movie, and what was your initial reaction? And were you comparing the movie to the book when you first saw it? How did that inform your approach to remaking it? It’s such a cult movie, and it’s almost sacred to a lot of people. And a lot of have that feeling about remakes anyway, but how did you handle that?

Peirce: I think, and it’s funny, I’ve been going back to my memory to try to figure out when I first saw it – I believe that I saw it in Japan, because I left the states when I was 18. I was at the University of Chicago, and with my boyfriend. We moved – we just wanted to get out. Interestingly he was Korean, but he had studied Japanese history, and he knew that we could just move there and I could take photographs, we could teach, and we could support ourselves. So we just went. And I spent the first year and half in Japan saying, screw America, like – well not – take that off (joking tone). Not so much screw America as “I need to be independent of this system which is so much about success and a very narrow channel.”

And so, once I freed myself of that, interestingly after a year and half of starting to learn Japanese and photographing all over the place, I had a huge craving to come back to the states and be an American again. But it was like I was able to be an American but with kind of a newfound understanding of my own identity, and in many ways my stories are about identity. So, I love America – I had to reunite with what I loved about America. And when I was overseas, I started going to the American consulate all the time, and I started consuming American culture. I was rereading J.D. Salinger, I saw De Palma’s movie. It was almost like I was looking for the most American pieces of literature and film to kind of reorient myself.

I fell back in love with love with everything that I had loved, but it was almost like I saw it with a new pair of eyes. And particularly with the De Palma thing, very much like seeing 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita, it was just like – I think what it did was it gave me permission to dream, and to dream in terms of cinema, which was “wow you can do anything. You can be free.” So I loved it, I know that I was equating it with the book because I had read that at a different time, but it was really my kind of coming back home to America.

ON TRYING OUT MULTIPLE ENDINGS

Anders: So, I read a rumor on the Internet that you shot five or six different endings to this film that weren't used. Is that true?

Peirce: That is a rumor – there are not 5 or 6 endings. We definitely spent a lot of time thinking about the ending, but there aren’t 5 or 6.

But there are alternate endings?

There’s definitely – we explored different avenues to get the ending right. But not that level of them. But I like rumors.

ON TOMMY GOING TO CARRIE'S HOME TO ASK HER TO PROM

Anders: In a lot of ways, this film is structurally similar to De Palma's film, but then there are some new scenes. Like the scene where Tommy comes to Carrie's home, to ask her to the prom, and she's afraid her mom is going to come home. This is very different than the De Palma version. Can you talk about the things you played with like that, and changing certain scenes?

Peirce: And if you know of any specific ones, you should bring them up, because I had forgotten about that one, but that was a really interesting challenge. So, well first of all, we had the De Palma movie, but even before that we had the Lawrence Cohen script. And Lawrence Cohen had done a beautiful job adapting this novel. So I approached that original script with great delight and respect.

That was a scene where, pretty early on, we started asking, "Well, is it really realistic if the mother were in that house, that she wouldn’t come to the door?" And we were like, "Not really." So then it was like, "Well, the mother shouldn’t be there." But once we took the mother out, it was like, "Well, the mother’s presence should be there." So then I was like, "Well, the only way to have the mother’s presence without her in a house, which is unrealistic that she’s not coming to the door, would be to have her coming home." And since I put her at the dry cleaner, and I have her go to the school – well we already had a basis for her being out of the house. And then it was like, well we identified her with that damn car. So then we were like, oh, well she’s coming home from work, Carrie has been told that she needs to go right home and never talks to strangers, and the car coming could actually be a threat.

So that’s, I mean, I love screenwriting for that reason. Because it’s really about problem-solving. We can’t have her in the house, we have to have her outside the house. Her walking down the street wouldn’t really work, being in the car is much more threatening, as we’ve identified her in the car. You can throw them at me, I can tell you how we’ve problem solved.

UNCREDITED SCREENWRITER DID SOME WORK ON 'CARRIE' REMAKE
Anders: Meanwhile, Carrie's mom is always hurting herself with a seam ripper. Where did that come from?

Peirce: That came from a guy named Scott Silver, who did some writing on the project which was amazing. And that was a whole area – and Julianne and I took it farther. We loved it. What I loved was, from a character standpoint, she said, "I will use corporal punishment on my daughter, but I’d rather use it on myself first." And that was just such a beautiful way of looking at the character, and she’s created her own religion. The religion is very important to the movie, but if you look closely, it’s her religion. Even as the daughter says, “That’s not even in the Bible.” Right? That means she’s been telling Carrie all this scripture that might not actually be in the Bible all these years. And the child might finally be wising up to it, and that’s what’s fueling her adolescence.

Carla Meyer at the Sacramento Bee interviews Kimberly Peirce

Excerpt from the article by Meyer:

ON THE GETTING-READY-FOR-PROM MONTAGE

Bibbiani: One of the more famous scenes in Brian De Palma’s film is the prom montage. You incorporated a prom montage into your version as well. Was there any temptation to try to do it differently, or is that just the best way to try to convey the build-up to a prom?

Peirce: Well, I don’t know. If you want to run some other ideas I’d certainly sample them. I mean, this was me just… I looked at it, and I tried writing different versions and I played with some different ideas, and this to me got us to the prom. You know what I mean? What everybody would be basically doing, what they would be doing in a fantasy story, and… I mean look, I’m very open if there was a better idea but that’s the best idea I came up with and it seemed to work. It seems like you’re with those kids, and you can’t really spend too much time in that area.

I liked the montage. I hope I didn’t sound too critical.

No, you can be critical. I’m always looking for the better idea. I come up with the best idea I can, and make sure that it’s kind of realistic and it’s fun, and if something better comes along I’ll try that.

ON CHANGES TO CHRIS AND SUE

Peirce: I really wanted Chris to be a real person, so I make her a vulnerable girl. You pointed out the relationship with the father. Every time somebody takes care of Carrie, Chris feels like she’s losing ground and it makes her pissed. It makes her want to retaliate, and so that’s why I think [it feels] like Chris is more grounded. And also I wanted it to be when Chris goes to prom… Did you notice I have a shot in there where she’s watching the prom and watching them dance?

Bibbiani: I noticed.

For a moment she’s like, “I should be down there dancing. What am I doing with this guy up in these rafters?” So she’s not only missing out on her prom because she’s a wounded girl that’s thinking, “Did I make a mistake?” But then when he’s laying out the dangers that this could cause, there is a moment where she thinks, “This is a mistake.” And then her true nature takes over which is, at the end of the day, she’s competitive with Carrie. She doesn’t want Carrie to get the power. She wants it back and so she’s going to retaliate.

You also really flesh out Sue’s subplot. I feel like in the De Palma version she’s always a good person.

Right.

In your version she’s learning a valuable lesson the hard way and making tougher choices.

Well that’s great. That was the goal from the beginning, because I looked at it and I said, wow, Sue is underdeveloped. We have to develop the fact that she… She starts, if you noticed, she pushes Carrie away because Carrie touches her shirt. She calls Carrie a freak first. She sets everything in motion and that’s why she has so much guilt, because even Chris says, “We’re not going to tell them who started this.” So she’s feeling guilt, she’s searching for the solution. She doesn’t choose the right solution. She should say, “I’m sorry.” She should befriend Carrie. But as a privileged person she couldn’t be bothered. It’s easier to donate her boyfriend. So she’s doing a good thing but she’s not doing the right thing, and of course she sees what she wreaks and then she wants to try to make good on it.

ON DE PALMA'S ENDING

Bibbiani: Brian De Palma’s movie is very famous for its final scare. You have your own version of that. What was the thought process behind the way that you handle the last shot, or moment of the film.

Peirce: De Palma did a brilliant job, you know? He did an amazing job with the ending. I knew that the ending was something that we had to be very careful with. We want to keep the audience inside this story as much as possible. What we found is that people loved our Carrie. I mean, they truly loved her and they wanted to protect her. I think that that’s probably partly because of Chloë Moretz being fifteen years old, surrendering to the role and being in it in the way a child can be in it. People felt very attached to her, so that was a concern of ours, and just how one stays in it with the audience. How long is the audience’s sense of connection to this character they love?

ON THE SONG AT THE END OF THE REMAKE

Bibbiani: I want to talk to you about the soundtrack. That’s something that would always concern me about connecting to a younger generation than me my own. What were your thoughts about the song choices? For example, the song that begins immediately after the closing credits?

Peirce: Not after the credits, but you mean as the credits start?

Yes, sorry.

No, no, it’s fine because there’s a beautiful score song after the end credits. That song in particular was… For me, the rock music gives the sense of… I don’t know if you can tell, but there’s a Carrie yell in there. So for me it was a rebel yell. It was something breaking free. It was fun. It was energetic. It had this wonderful quality to it. You can’t tell if that yell was part of the song. So the song has an energy that was really infectious. That’s what mattered to me.

Piya Sinha-Roy at Reuters interviews Kimberly Peirce

ON CARRIE SEEKING "OLD-FASHIONED REVENGE"

Peirce: "This movie is being made when there is different violence in our culture, it was very important to me that Carrie was not a wanton murderer. I put in a very strong culprit narrative, that's old-fashioned revenge, American justice, she's just trying to track down the people who hurt her."