FANG: Can you discuss your career during the years leading up to Sisters?
KIDDER: I was very young, and working nonstop. I started acting professionally in Montreal and Toronto, then moved to Hollywood at 18 with a couple of hundred bucks on me and a heart full of hope. I was very young and naive and thought, "Well, of course I'll get roles; I mean, I deserve it!" I landed a part in a Norman Jewison film [Gaily, Gaily], did a lot of low-budget movies and TV and then met Brian De Palma, who was one of those people making interesting independent movies. He loved Alfred Hitchcock-- you can see that in his work-- and he and I started seeing each other romantically.
FANG: What did you initially think of the story of Sisters?
KIDDER: Brian told me he wrote Sisters specifically for me. When he said that, I had to laugh: You thought of me to play this woman who castrates men after making love to them?! Well, ain't that nice! But I loved it. On Christmas morning, Brian came downstairs with the script, handed it to me and said, "There's your Christmas present." Then we went off and made the movie, and it was a lot of fun. It was one of his very early films; the money for it came from his mom, who owned a toy shop, and it was a wonderful time to make movies and a wonderful time to be young.
FANG: What was De Palma like as a director, and what was the most influential advice he ever gave?
KIDDER: Brian being my boyfriend didn't at all influence the way he directed me. I think his main brilliance is his true understanding of actors and what they can bring to a film. It truly is a joy working with him, and it shows in all of his movies; he just has that knack for tapping into something completely honest and real. Some of the younger directors these days agonize over getting those wonderful shots that were mastered by the likes of Brian and his friend Martin Scorsese, but what they don't get is that Brian and Marty are also extremely clued in to the fine art of working with actors, not just telling them where their marks are and whatever.
FANG: Was De Palma precious about his screenplay? Did he let you ad-lib at all?
KIDDER: There is one major secret about Brian that many people just aren't aware of, which is that he is one of the funniest people I know! He loved to inject his scripts with strong humor that played nicely along with the horror or suspense. He was always adament about what he wanted and why he wanted it, and if you thought of changing it or altering the words or whatever, you'd better also have a great reason to back it up. The character in Sisters I played was supposed to be Swedish, but I couldn't do a Swedish accent! I tried learning it, but it was just too hard, so I said, "Brian, can we make her French?" I grew up partly in Quebec so I was always around French-Canadians, and Brian was cool with that. His response was, "Fine. I just want her to be foreign."

"Rachel McAdams had the bad luck to spring to stardom just as the so-called female-centric studio release was becoming something of an endangered species. She of course came to fame in 2004 and 2005 with a flurry of high profile vehicles. She was, in 2004, a defining villain in Mean Girls and the co-lead in the generational romantic drama classic The Notebook. She had three major roles in 2005, including the heroic lead in Wes Craven’s Red Eye, a supporting role in the Sarah Jessica Parker-led ensemble The Family Stone, and the 'prize to be won' romantic interest in New Line Cinema/Time Warner Inc.’s Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy smash The Wedding Crashers. Take one guess which role would come to define the next decade of would-be stardom. She took a break from acting for a couple years and returned in two low-budget independent films. Married Life was a martial fidelity drama starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and McAdams as the would-be temptress. The Lucky Ones (Lions Gate Entertainment) was an underrated and little-seen drama co-starring Tim Robbins and Michael Pena about three Iraq war vets adjusting to life after service.

"She returned to so-called mainstream movies in 2009 and it is at this point the pattern began to emerge. By 2008/2009 we were seeing a real lack of not just female-centric films but movies that required more than one role for a woman matching McAdams’s respective gender and/or age. She is a young blogger journalist in the (terrific) Russell Crowe/Ben Affleck/Helen Mirren/Robin Wright thriller State of Play (Universal) who exists mostly to be schooled on the purity of old-school journalism and she was 'the girl' in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros. She reprised that role in a glorified cameo for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, because the film didn’t have room for two major female roles and Noomi Rapace taking that slot this time. She was the co-lead in The Time Traveler’s Wife in 2009 (even though for all intents-and-purposes it is Eric Bana’s story) and she co-starred as a memory-impaired young spouse alongside Channing Tatum in The Vow. She did have a genuine lead vehicle in 2010, starring as an ambitious morning show producer trying to work with Harrison Ford’s cantankerous news vet in Morning Glory.

"And aside from Brian De Palma’s blink-and-you-miss it 2013 erotic indie drama with Noomi Rapace entitled Passion, that’s it for lead roles or even arguably co-starring roles for Ms. McAdams. She played the girl-to-be-discarded in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris and one of Ben Affleck’s handful of would-be love interests Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, played 'the girl' in the father/son time-travel drama About Time, and was basically the only woman in an otherwise male-centric ensemble in A Most Wanted Man, which was notable for being Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final starring role. [Editor's note: this description really gives short shrift to that film's other distinguished female turns from Nina Hoss and Robin Wright.] Her output for 2015 involves being the one woman in a sea of dudes (Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, and Billy Crudup) in the 'Boston Globe investigates Catholic Church sex scandals' drama Spotlight, being the married former lover of star Bradley Cooper as he also 'bonds' with Emma Stone in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha for Sony, and the aforementioned 'gets accidentally shot so Jake Gyllenhaal can have a sad' role in Southpaw. Oh, and she’s also in the cast of True Detective season 2 as the lone female cop in a cast that includes Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, and Taylor Kitsch.

"The vast majority of McAdams’s mainstream roles in her post-stardom career have been 'the girl' in an otherwise male-dominated cast. That is arguably because that was becoming even more of the so-called status-quo right as she was becoming a would-be movie star. Her relative lack of mainstream starring vehicles is mostly due to the fact that so few female-centric star vehicles get made in Hollywood anymore. There are few female-centric films that get made in Hollywood, especially the kind of somewhat melodramatic dramas or thrillers that used to give someone like Ashley Judd a career. The kind of mainstream films, be they romantic comedies, family melodramas, and everything in-between, that once starred Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock are all-but-extinct in modern Hollywood. The Hollywood of the 1990′s had room for Meg Ryan vehicles, Sandra Bullock vehicles, and Julia Roberts vehicles with room to spare. They were romantic comedies like French Kiss, family melodramas like Something to Talk About, or even supernatural comedies like Practical Magic. Those films don’t get made anymore, to the point where now even something like a female-driven romantic comedy like Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck is considered a 'big deal.' [Once] you age out of the young-adult literary adaptations and/or the newest live-action adaptation of a Walt Disney animated feature, you’re basically stuck playing 'the girl.' And just as importantly, the male-centric films that do get made usually have room for just one or two major female roles in the cast."

AS 'MAD MEN' WINDS DOWN, CHERNOV SUGGESTS THE 12 GREATEST ADVERTISING MOVIES
At Agency Post, Matthew Chernov (who a couple of weeks ago included Dressed To Kill's Liz Blake on his "12 Hookers with Hearts of Gold" list for Variety), anticipating the final season of AMC's Mad Men, yesterday posted "The 12 Greatest Advertising Movies Ever Made," or "a list of 12 movies that could teach Don Draper a few things about the business." Included on his list is De Palma's Passion. "Brian De Palma’s welcome return to the erotic thriller genre is actually two movies in one" states Chernov. "The first is a stylish black comedy about advertising executives stabbing each other in the back to get ahead. The second is a surreal horror film about a masked psycho slashing necks to get revenge. Swedish sphinx Noomi Rapace plays a mousy copywriter whose conniving boss steals credit for her viral ad campaign, setting in motion a gruesome string of murders. As the body count rises, Passion proves that advertising can be a cut-throat business."

Also included on the list is Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope. Chernov writes, "Robert Downey Sr. wrote and directed this counterculture satire about a lone black man on the executive board of an advertising firm who’s accidentally put in charge by the white members during a secret election. Renaming the agency 'Truth and Soul, Inc.' the new chairman fires his fellow board members and institutes a policy forbidding them to accept business from companies that manufacture alcohol, tobacco and war toys. Eventually, the U.S. Government takes notice and declares the firm a threat to national security. Shot in black and white, the outrageous TV commercials seen throughout the movie appear in color."

The next day, band member Gustavo Cerati called him and said he really liked that one, but wanted something more "romantic." So Daffunchio then "wrote a second version, and this time I thought of Dressed To Kill by Brian De Palma."

And the rest is history-- you can hear the song on YouTube.

"Lewis in fact is a law-abiding black family man who wants to finance his own car-wash business. He is only pretending to be an ex-con, but King, an aloof white millionaire who lives in a Hollywood mansion, willingly believes Lewis’s miscreant shtick.

"With 30 days to go before King’s prison sentence begins, Lewis and King riff on a masculine survival crash course. The title comically alludes to a cultural shift in values since Bob Rafelson’s 1975 Stay Hungry: A defensive coarsening replaces the former all-American drive to succeed; the reference to erection suggests that we now pornographically fetishize macho traits. These traits include language, dress, and grooming styles from baldness to beards that have trickled upward from prison subculture. As Ferrell’s King learns to cuss, fight, and display “mad-dogging” facial expressions, he relishes “an ambrosia of primal sensations.” ... It’s the perfectly clueless flip side of Hart’s Lewis admitting “I don’t have to be a thug to portray a thug.”

"Though Get Hard is a minor film, it’s pertinent social satire. It reveals how easily The Wire’s stereotypes can arouse predictable responses, including the usually unacknowledged mix of fear and pleasure — satirized adroitly by Hart, Ferrell, and writer-director Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder). King has the statistic “one in three black men will find themselves incarcerated” in his head along with the usual attendant fantasies. The frequently, shamelessly, hilariously nude Ferrell makes himself the exposed buffoon-victim of racial and political stereotypes, as he haplessly mimes the black thug of popular imagination — one of the best parodies of its kind since the 'Be Black Baby' sequence in Brian De Palma’s 1970 Hi, Mom!"

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the screening, Film Comment's Violet Lucca interviewed Pankow last week, and posted it online yesterday. In this terrific interview, Pankow talks about editing two great set pieces in Carlito's Way: the pool hall scene, and the Grand Central sequence. He discusses working with actors such as Pacino, being attuned to their subtle nuances and physicality. He talks about how the split screens in Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale were very carefully planned beforehand. He talks about working with De Palma as the ideal working method, and De Palma's skills as a visual sotryteller. He talks about getting the right sound for the crowbar to the head wielded by Sean Penn's character in Carlito's Way ("That’s very giallo," jokes Lucca). He talks about working with Jerry Greenberg, and how he really came into his own during the editing of The Untouchables-- and how he made De Palma laugh with his initial cut of Sean Connery's death scene. Go read the interview now-- it's great stuff.

Well, it looks like Gordon may get his shot to be the tone and style-setter. After directing and executive-producing the pilot episode of A&E's new American version of The Returned, Gordon has been signed to a development deal with A&E, Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reported last week. "It includes a blind script commitment for Gordon who would write, direct and produce the potential pilot," according to Andreeva. Stay tuned...