I’d love to work with De Palma again. When I finished Badlands, Ed Pressman the producer said come and work with Brian De Palma on this film I’m doing, Phantom of the Paradise. Brian can appear kind of gruff. I showed up, kind of assigned to the project, and he asked, “What have you done?” Well, I hadn’t done much. I had finished Badlands. I had done a lot of Roger Corman and Gene Corman films up to then. I started working on that film, and I don’t pretend to know everything but I started presenting ideas about the character. We were doing this great thing about the music industry. I came out of my house one morning and there was this dead bird lying on the side of the road. And I picked it up, and I got this idea for an image for Death Records. It was actually a sparrow, but I was thinking of it poetically as a songbird, and I thought it could be a logo for Death Records. I took a picture with a process camera and made an image of it. And I think Brian responded to that. Long story short, three years ago one of my daughters shows up with a shirt on with that bird on it, and someone’s marketing it on the Internet 40 years later. That was a fun thing.

And then I had these ideas of Swan’s office desk being an old record, his bedroom being a turntable with gold record sheets. I never really knew what Brian thought but I was working like crazy. And we were about to do the scene when Finley [Winslow/The Phantom] breaks out of a brick wall—somebody has locked him in this office to write and fixed it so he’d never get out, and he does bust out. Well, I was new to film and I was making the bricks and mortaring them together during lunch. The grips came back, and they were ready to shoot, and I wasn’t quite finished. I was covered with mortar and sweat and stuff, and one of the grips started giving me hard time: “You’re not a professional: you should have done this a long time ago!” And I can’t tell you exactly what Brian said, but it was something like, “Shut up, he’s making the film look great.” It was the first time I knew he was excited with what we were doing, because it was really kind of out there—out there like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I called a friend of mine who was a costume designer, and said, “I’m doing this film with Brian De Palma, it’s about the Devil, Faust, and all that,” and she said, “You can’t use black and red, that’s for sure.” The way she said it, I just got it into me, “I’m going to use black and red” and so I did. Sometimes I just like to go against what everybody thinks. She was a woman of taste but I thought, I like black and red. Also, we didn’t have a lot of money, so you could black out something and not see it and it would work really well. Sometimes I wanted the sets to go black and the DP overlit them, and I get upset to this day when I see it, because there are things that were supposed to be black that are gray. All we had to do was just shut off a few lights. Working with Brian was great fun, and with Carrie, the same thing.

Brian called me afterwards to work with him, but our schedules just didn’t work out. I love Brian. He’s a wonderful filmmaker. He actually storyboarded every shot. At the time he would do it on 3 x 5 cards, with stick figures. You could go into his office and see the whole film laid out on the wall. Every scene. So I knew what he was going to shoot and it was easier to design the sets because I knew what he wanted and who the characters were and where the camera was going to be. And he stuck pretty much to that. And he would show up on set and he would get so bored waiting for lighting and waiting for people to get made up, because he’d already made the film in his mind. He really took advantage of the sets; probably more than anyone I worked with, he would use them and took a certain delight in them. He was a fun director.

You know, someone did a remake of Carrie. I know Brian knows the director who directed it. And someone was talking to him and to her about how they did the bucket of blood that gets dumped on her. And the new one, they engineered with effects and levers and stuff like that. And I think it cost them about $200,000 to dump the blood on Carrie. And someone was talking to him and her about the new dump, engineered with effects and levers. And they asked Brian how he did it, and he said, “Jack Fisk just climbed up a ladder and dumped a bucket of blood on her.” That low-tech thing we did in the ’70s because we didn’t have much money. Sometimes it works just as well or better.

Something I really loved about the commentary you guys did on Winter Soldier was you kept listing all the films and directors that influenced a certain sequence or how you broke a story or how you shot something, I was wondering if you could talk about some of the films that helped influenced how you approached this one.

ANTHONY: In general, just as a framing we always thought about Winter Soldier very specifically as a political thriller. This movie we think of more as a psychological thriller. It’s connected to what we’re doing in Winter Soldier, but it evolves into a more sensitive, complicated character thriller. Again, I think based upon the fact we’re dealing with our protagonists clashing with one another.

JOE: The movies we’ve been referencing a lot on this one are Se7en, weirdly. We like smashing genres into each other, so if you can find something that’s really idiosyncratic in respect to superhero genre and you can smoosh it into it you usually wind up with something fresh and different. Se7en, Fargo, just as far as we’re not making comparisons in terms of quality we’re just talking influences, The Godfather, because that’s a sprawling film with a lot of characters that tells very intricate stories. Each character has an arc. What else?

ANTHONY: De Palma is also.

JOE: De Palma is the one carry over between both movies, because he’s so good at tension and empty space. Trying to think of who else…

ANTHONY: It’s hard to talk about it because then you give stuff away. We could probably talk about 100 of them.

JOE: We were referencing this sequence as our Rumble Fish sequence.

ANTHONY: We’ve been also referencing westerns a lot as we start to think about these character showdowns.

"It’s a crime that the site that gave us Narcos didn’t already have Scarface on file — then again, maybe that was a strategic move, as the TV show pales in comparison to Brian De Palma’s red-blooded epic. As he rises to the top of Miami’s drug trade, Al Pacino says all the lines you’ve heard teenage boys misquote elsewhere. A reboot was in the works a while back, but why would you want that? Just watch this."

Amy West, International Business Times

"Directed by Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables) and written by Oliver Stone (Platoon, Natural Born Killers), Scarface has arguably become one of the most iconic gangster movies of all time since its release, despite being nominated for a Razzie Award way back in 1984. So if crime drama is your thing, make sure you 'say hello' to one of the best in the genre.

"Watch this if you enjoyed: Carlito's Way, The Godfather, Goodfellas, American Gangster, Serpico, Training Day, Deep Cover, Casino and Once Upon A Time In America."

Jack Giroux, /Film

"How well does Scarface hold up? You can find out on March 1st. Admittedly, not all of Brian De Palma‘s rise-and-fall drug kingpin story has aged well. The montage set to 'Push it to the Limit' is a product of its time, but Al Pacino‘s performance remains monstrous and grand. It’s a larger-than-life kind of performance, which has earned its iconic status. Scarface is a highly-entertaining crime film. Maybe it’s not De Palma’s best, but Pacino’s performance is just so ferocious and fun."

But while there's an undeniable moralism in the roots of these kinds of stories, a closer look reveals something more complicated. Like horror — another boundary-pushing genre that has long offered a paradoxical balance of regressive and progressive — noir films also offered substantial, multifaceted, and groundbreaking roles to actresses at a time when depicting a flushing toilet on a movie screen was considered too risqué. When else could a woman play the villain? When else could a woman be overtly sexual? And when else could sex be depicted as such a blatant tool of power and pleasure, so utterly divorced from childbirth and motherhood?

And as modern storytellers reinterpreted the archetype with an increasingly sympathetic lens, it shifted. By the 1990s — a watershed era for the erotic thriller — femme fatales were routinely the heroes, not the villains, of their own stories. Take Sharon Stone's infamous leg-crosser in 1992's Basic Instinct, or Linda Fiorentino's should've-been-nominated-for-an-Oscar performance in 1994's The Last Seduction, or Kim Basinger's actually-won-her-an-Oscar performance in 1997's L.A. Confidential. By and large, the men in these stories are still hapless dupes — but this time, we're invited to empathize and cheer on the women who are savvy enough to exploit them.

And as the femme fatale archetype shifted toward female empowerment, some women began owning it outright. In 2002, Brian De Palma simply dubbed his Rebecca Romijn-starring erotic thriller Femme Fatale, confident that audiences would understand the shorthand. By 2011, no smaller a cultural figure than Britney Spears was proudly dubbing herself a femme fatale on the cover of her seventh studio album. "Sexy and Strong. Dangerous yet mysterious. Cool yet confident!" she wrote as she revealed the album's title. It may be oddly punctuated and capitalized — but for a definition of the modern femme fatale, it's as good as any.

And that brings us back to Hap & Leonard, with Trudy, its uber-femme fatale, springing the entire story into motion. In both the small-screen adaptation and its original literary source, Trudy initially feels like a throwback to those Double Indemnity days, when a woman could correctly be identified as "trouble" the second she walked up with those legs that end at the throat.

But the first three episodes of Hap & Leonard reveal Trudy to be something a little more complicated. The sex appeal is key to the character. So is the sex. But while [Christina] Hendricks herself describes Trudy as a "classic femme fatale," she dismissed the suggestion that she was merely "window dressing," and later explained that she was drawn to the role for its complexity. "She’s trying to be a better person," Hendricks told Variety. "She’s self-aware. She knows she’s a bit of a mess up. She’s made a lot of mistakes and she’s trying to fix it."

Today, if you cast a wide enough net, you'll find the basic DNA of the femme fatale being conjured up and subverted all the time. Take Gone Girl, an icy thriller that drops a femme fatale into a modern disintegrating marriage. Or Justified, Hap & Leonard's fellow southern noir, which introduced a femme fatale that ended up being the show's ultimate hero. Or last year's Ex Machina, an indie noir sci-fi thriller with a femme fatale that happens to be a robot. That's the beauty of archetypes; as soon as you feel like they're set in stone, someone comes along to reinvent them all over again.

(Thanks to Hugh!)

"Phantom Of The Paradise” (1974)

Jack Fisk: When I finished “Badlands,” the producer asked me to come work with De Palma on "Phantom of the Paradise." I'd been doing some stuff with Roger and Gene Corman, but I hadn't done that many films at that point. But I got so excited about doing a musical with Faustian themes, and I loved “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” so I wanted to do a set influenced by that.

We shot a lot in Los Angeles, in Dallas and in New York. I had a minimal budget and no crew, really. I did most of the building myself. One day, the company went to lunch and there was this scene where Winslow breaks out of jail through a brick wall. I was there while everyone was eating lunch, putting brick and mortar on. When the crew came back and I hadn't quite finished, one of the grips started going on about how inexperienced I was and how stupid I was to be doing this at lunch. Suddenly, Brian snapped at him to shut up and said, "Jack's making this film look great." To this day, that was one of the major affirmations that what I was doing was having an effect on the director, that Brian —who could be kind of dour— was suddenly taken with this sort of approach.

On that film, I had an art director who wasn't getting sets done, so Sissy came in and started sewing sheets for Swan's bedroom, the satin sheets that look like records. She did it overnight on a tiny little sewing machine that we had at home. We were doing things like that for the whole shoot. I was so exhausted around that time —I remember flying to Dallas and thinking, "God, if I'm ever going to die in an airplane, make it now." But, you know, I didn't die. [laughs]

“Carrie” (1976)

[Because of 'Phantom'] Brian actually thought of Sissy as a set dresser. When I got together with Brian on “Carrie,” Sissy called him and said, “Brian, I'm coming in for a test for "Carrie," but I've also got an audition for a Vanquish commercial where I can make $10,000. Should I do that or come in?' ” She thought he'd say, "Oh, please come in. I gotta see you." But what he actually said was, "Well Sissy, I think you ought to do the commercial." She got so upset that she sat down in our living room in Topanga Canyon and read the book of “Carrie” from cover to cover. She didn't sleep, got up the next morning, put Vaseline in her hair, and put on a little sailor dress that her mother had made her in seventh grade. Then she went into where they were testing, only wanting to test for one part, for Carrie.

The next day, I met Brian and the producers and cinematographer at the lab where they were looking at the tests. Her test came on, and she just killed it. You looked at her and it was Carrie, but it was a Carrie that you cared about. The lights went up, and everyone turned to Brian, who said, "She's Carrie." He didn't expect to cast her though, so much so that they never negotiated a deal with her. Sissy was waiting in the car outside to hear what happened, and I ran out saying, "You got the part, you can ask whatever you want!" And then a few days later, Sissy, Piper Laurie and Brian started rehearsing, and the rest is history. We just love Brian. He became such a good friend.

Later on, when we were filming the scene where Carrie menstruates for the first time, Sissy was looking for some direction on how to play the scene. And Brian, in a very sort of male way, said, "It's like you're being hit by a truck." And I said, "Well I was run over by a car once!" So Sissy asked me to describe to her how I felt. And I started telling her about the whole thing, and then that turned into me in the shower right beside her in the scene, telling her about getting hit by a car when I was 14. They had me hold in my hand the fake blood that she reaches down into, so it was kind of ridiculous. The bad thing about that was that I was wet the entire time; the good thing was that we finished the scene. I just think Brian was relieved that he didn't have to give her any more description.