For De Palma, 75, the film “De Palma” serves as both an overview of his career and as something of a primer on a life in moviemaking, showing a transparency that is refreshing from such a high-profile figure.

“I hope that, much like the book [‘The Devil’s Candy’] about ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ you just have an honest portrayal of what the process is like, you don’t pull any punches, you say exactly what happened,” De Palma said. “That’s the only way to convey to young audiences or people interested in movies how the system works.

“As you know, film journalism is mostly spin. You talk to people, they say the experience was great, I love working with so and so, it’s the best experience I ever had. And not until you’re in the Hollywood old-age home do you have anybody tell you the truth.”

Justin Chang: “Casualties of War” (1989). Some of the signature themes De Palma played with in “Body Double” — a man’s inability to save a woman’s life, the tragedy of seeing but not really seeing — achieve their fullest, darkest expression in this devastating Vietnam War drama, which feels like nothing he’s done before or since. If De Palma here favors a searing emotional directness over his usual stylistic trickery, “Casualties of War” nevertheless takes his love for “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” to its most sobering possible conclusion: There is no voyeuristic thrill in the spectacle of sexual violence he confronts us with this time, only a crippling sense of helplessness. De Palma achieves something here that few directors could: Even as he paralyzes us in our seats, he somehow deepens our capacity to feel.

Mark Olsen: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1990). In Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary, De Palma shows his own penchant for insightful self-criticism when he laments that the biting social satire of Tom Wolfe’s original novel was watered down to make the movie’s characters more likable. Even so, watching “Bonfire” today it feels unexpectedly both buoyant and savage, a trenchant no-one-unscathed look at class, race, money and privilege that you can’t even imagine being made at this budget level today. While the all-access making-of book “The Devil’s Candy” clearly chronicles all that went wrong with the film, “Bonfire” is also a film that has become obscured by its notorious reputation. It proves an unspoken thesis of the documentary, that there are no minor De Palma films.

His apt analysis of what’s wrong with today’s computer-generated action sequences: “They’re pre-visualized. They’ve got it all in their computers. So what are you going to get? Many visual clichés.”

His equally apt appraisal of how his love of dramatic and visual structure sets him apart from other filmmakers. “The way you people make movies,” he tells his interviewers (and friends), “is you start with character and work outwards. I start with construction and work in.”

His take on Alfred Hitchcock, whom he studied and ardently emulated, some would say imitated: “People talk about Hitchcock being so influential. I’ve never found a lot of guys who followed in the Hitchcock school except me.”

His juicy stories about Tom Cruise and the veteran screenwriter Robert Towne during the making of “Mission Impossible.” Mr. Cruise comes off better than Mr. Towne.

The problem is that many of the clips Baumbach and Paltrow have selected are spoiler heavy - they reveal the endings of a number of De Palma’s films, which are plot-oriented and thus susceptible to major spoilage.

That makes me wonder just who this movie is for. If you’re brand new to De Palma the doc might very well turn you on to one of the greatest and most underappreciated filmmakers of the 20th century, but at the same time it could be robbing you of the sublime pleasure of experiencing De Palma’s machinations for the first time. If you’re a die-hard De Palma guy you’ll find little in here that’s new, although you’ll enjoy the experience of spending time with De Palma. I almost think the target audience for this film is the middle crowd, the movie dorks who have written off De Palma based on a few of his later films and the memeification of the idea that he apes Hitchcock (a charge easily backed up by De Palma’s own words in this film). De Palma feels like an attempt to reposition the legacy of a great filmmaker, an attempt that’s already working as the great rep societies on the east and west coast are doing major De Palma retrospectives in the wake of the film’s release.

That makes De Palma a kind of work of cinematic activism; it’s a full-throated defense of a man whose work towers over so many of his peers and yet is so often casually dismissed. I like that De Palma allows the filmmaker to take completely ownership of all the things at which a snobby critic would roll their eyes - his love of genre, his approach to movies that starts with plot and comes to characters second, his kinks and quirks, his interest in photographing beautiful women, his status as a self-described disciple of Hitchcock. All of the things that have been used to attack De Palma are true, but that doesn’t make those things bad.

For the last few years it’s been frustrating to see how people write off De Palma, even going so far as to devalue his earlier works. I love that De Palma takes a defiant stand against that movement, and that it even goes so far as to embrace his lesser films. If all that ever comes out of De Palma is a reappreciation of Casualties of War, it will have been worth it, but I suspect that De Palma will do much more for the filmmaker’s status than that.

Brand new 2K restoration from original film materials
High Definition (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD Presentations
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
Brand new interview with John Lithgow
Theatrical trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Nathanael Marsh
MORE to be announced!

De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s doc about celebrated filmmaker Brian De Palma, edged out the competition in three theaters this weekend. The A24 release grossed $30,856, averaging $10,285, making it one of the best non-fiction debuts of the year. The figure is also the weekend’s second-best per theater average, following Warner Bros.’ The Conjuring 2 at just over $12K. The top doc debut remains Sundance Selects’ Weiner, opening in 5 locations last month, averaging $17,105. Michael Moore’s Where To Invade Next is the year’s highest doc grosser at over $3.82 million.

“De Palma got off to a very solid start at the box office this weekend. Critics have responded with some of the best reviews of the year with the film at a whopping 97% on Rotten Tomatoes,” A24 said Sunday when reporting numbers. “De Palma, about one of the most celebrated and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, is being considered ‘one of the greatest films about a filmmaker ever.’” A24 will take De Palma to the top 50 markets and beyond in the coming weeks.

Matt Zoller Seitz interviews De Palma at RogerEbert.com

I recently saw “Blow Out” again, on a big screen, at Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, and Nancy Allen was there, and I was struck by the John Lithgow character—not just how sadistic he was, but the really unsettling way that you portray him. He really gets off on terrorizing women. The movie doesn't, though; the movie is appalled by him, I think. You have a lot of men in your movies who are macho, who are very macho, who are very often military, or they’re cops, or they’re a hyper-masculine sort of role model, and you seem really, really disgusted by their conditioning, by their behavior. Is part of your movies kind of a critique of the sorts of masculinity that other movies celebrate?

I don’t know. I don’t know if you can make a sweeping statement about these types of characters. John Lithgow’s character was very much based on G. Gordon Liddy. That was a very specific reference point, and I don’t think I ever had something quite like that again in a movie.

But in “Casualties of War” and some of the characters in “Carlito’s Way” and certainly in “Scarface” you see a kind of a ridiculousness to machismo.

They’re gangster movies; they’re war movies! Movies like that tend to be very masculine.

But you don't glamorize them, even though you sometimes find them funny or horrible. I was just curious about that, because I have read a lot about your work and have seen a lot of critiques of the kinds of stories you tell, and that’s one aspect I’ve always wondered about: your attitude about machismo, which feels like it's related to the way men terrorize women. You seem like somebody who is maybe not a political filmmaker in a way that some filmmakers are, but I wonder, could there be a political aspect to the way that you portray men and women?

It all came from the genre! You know? I don’t think there’s any through line, basically. I’m basically interpreting the material.
...
...It almost sounds like you’re saying the audience makes its choice, and you’re OK with it?

A movie is a work of art. It either exists and people keep looking at it, or it vanishes. So, I have very little to do with it, and a movie has basically got to find its own way. And many of my movies, people are still looking at 30 or 40 years later, so I guess there’s some value in it, because they’ve existed through the ages.
...
...Do you think there’s some truth to this idea that part of what a director does is preside over accidents? Or at least manage things that aren’t in their control?

Well you have to be incredibly prepared, because you have to have a plan when you go to shoot. But things happen: the weather, how the actor feels, what somebody ate the night before. You have to be aware and you have to be able to improvise, depending on what is happening in the moment.

There’s nothing like preparation for dealing with situations like that, so that you can shift from one thing to another painlessly.

Can you give me an example from your movies of something not going to plan, that satisfied you? Where you didn’t get to do what you wanted to do, but you still liked the result?

For “The Fury,” there was a very complicated panning shot that Carrie [Snodgrass] didn’t want to do, because she had to hit certain marks for it to work. She just couldn’t get her head around why she had to be at a certain place at a certain time, because it didn’t seem natural to her. So I had to sort of carefully adjust the shot to something that she understood in order to make it work, so that what I wanted to do and what she wanted to do was in harmony. And it all worked out fine. And she didn’t quite understand it until she saw the rushes.

The great disadvantage of directors of my generation, as opposed to directors working in the studio system, is that you don’t get to direct as many movies as they did. They were under contract, they were directing 52 weeks out of the year. So we think about what we’re doing and maybe get our chance out and do it once a year, if we’re lucky. Sometimes many years pass before you are directing [again]. You can learn a tremendous amount by just practicing your craft. And obviously the great directors of the generations before, either Hitchcock, Ford or Hawks, directed a tremendous number of pictures, nowhere near the number that we’ll ever get a chance to do.

Like any good work of criticism, “De Palma” will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain. It’s almost hard to believe that he could have made so many wild, haunting and provocative movies, but by the end of the documentary, you may want nothing more than to see them all.

De Palma, a new 107-minute documentary about the man, directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, aims to change that fact by putting him squarely in focus. The director discusses his entire body of work, from the short films he made as a student all the way up through his late-career passion projects, and Baumbach and Paltrow edit the film so that it becomes one long monologue.

The documentary’s commitment to being thorough is admirable. But that urge to be comprehensive is also how De Palma shoots itself in the foot.

De Palma covers everything. Everything.

De Palma has directed nearly 30 films over the course of his decades long career. And since Baumbach and Paltrow want to make sure they find time for all of them — including those De Palma is obviously disconnected from or not that interested in, like his mid-’80s comedy Wise Guys — they end up truncating some interesting discussions in the name of checking every last one of the list.

Occasionally, De Palma will start a tangent about how he sees directors, fundamentally, as voyeurs, or how he thinks movie critics are driven more by the tastes of their time and aren’t great arbiters of actual quality, only for Baumbach and Paltrow to force the movie back into dissecting every single one of his films.

I caught Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma (A24, 6.10) last night on Rodeo Drive, and pretty much loved every second of it. So much so that I intend to see it a second time at the Aero on Sunday night. It put me into film-maven heaven. It’s basically MCU footage of Brian De Palma sitting and talking about every film he’s ever made (process, personalities, politics, technique) and regaling the viewer with whatever anecdotes come to mind. No personal revelations or intimate details are offered — the film is strictly about nuts and bolts and personalities.

My only gripe is that De Palma moves too briskly and is over way too soon. (I would have preferred a running time of 120 or even 160 minutes rather than 107.) I’ve shared plenty of complaints about De Palma’s films over the years, especially the ones made after Snake Eyes, but they were all magically set aside as I watched the doc. I just sat there and kind of melted. The film is so much fun if you know the terrain.

As promised, I saw Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma (A24, 6.10) for the second time at the Aero on Sunday night. It’s easily the most enjoyable portrait of a director doc I’ve seen in years, and of course your average T-shirted, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing megaplex stooge will avoid it like the plague. As clever as De Palma often was and as memorable as many of his careful choreography sequences are/were, I don’t think he ever topped this death-of-Frank-Lopez scene. One of the reasons it’s my all-time favorite is because it’s not show-offy. It’s plain but with a strong “uh-oh” undertow. You can really feel the hot breath of death on the back of your neck. And the “what about Ernie?” thing is a perfect mood-lightener.

“So I guess I’m the warmup,” said Martin Scorsese Thursday night at the Director’s Guild of America theater on 57th Street. That Scorsese was anything less than the main event speaks to the man he was introducing: Brian De Palma. The director of Body Double, Scarface and Carrie, among many, many others, was getting his own film treatment with a documentary on his oeuvre by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow.

Simply titled De Palma, the doc is a live motion version of the director’s IMDb page, filmed as one long interview spliced with clips of his films. Though he was known for his bloody psychological thrillers (he was constantly combating the ratings board, often ending up with an X-rating), De Palma also had quite the reputation as a mentor—which is how his relationship with Baumbach (Frances Ha, Mistress America) and Paltrow first started. As well as with Scorsese: “Brian was the one who took my film, Who’s That Knocking at my Door, and me seriously, and sort of became a mentor in a way, supporting me all the time—arguing usually—but supporting, guiding me. And the biggest thing, introducing me to everyone he knew in Hollywood,” said Scorsese. “He would come in and help me edit Mean Streets; I was constantly having severe asthma bouts and he would come pick me up at the hospital, drive me home; he arranged for a mutual friend to introduce me to Rob DeNiro, which led to those films; he gave me the script to Taxi Driver.”

Betker later talked with Jake Paltrow at the after party at The Russian Tea Room. When asked if he could recall the first De Palma film he'd ever seen, Paltrow replies, "It was Body Double, and I saw it on VHS. I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies and I talked my parents into letting me see it because I was a big Hitchcock fan. And I said, 'Oh, there’s this movie by Brian De Palma,'—who they obviously knew and liked—'it’s a little like Rear Window…' And then I was sort of scarred by it, I mean in a good way, it really stuck with me."

When asked if he and Baumbach had to direct De Palma at all while making the film, Paltrow replies, "In a movie like this, the editing is the directing. The filming of it is just an extension of these conversations you’re having at dinner. And trying to just maintain the same intimate thing where everybody feels comfortable to talk about things in a way you wouldn’t with an interviewer."

When asked if his own directing has been influenced by De Palma's, Paltrow responds, "More and more in a way. Brian’s feeling about visual storytelling, and this idea of making these movies in a sort of visual way first has become a stronger influence now as I get older. Even though he’s always been an influence, I think I understand what he’s talking about better now than I did before. When he talks about the Hitchcockian visual story telling, it’s related to that."

Brian De Palma’s 1978 thriller The Fury is his greatest film. It has exemplary visual rhythm, emotional excitation tied to the concept of loyalty, and complex references to film history — plus, it has proven to be politically prescient. The Fury takes on the post-counterculture generation’s innocence (or naïveté) in its story of two psychically gifted teenagers, Gillian and Robin (Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens), who become pawns in government subterfuge and are pursued by a parental rogue agent (Kirk Douglas) and a sinister agency chief (John Cassavetes). The Fury’s unforgettable climax — the most cathartic ending in movie history — turned the post-Vietnam generations’ long-stifled, potentially dangerous energy into metaphor.

De Palma himself might be unaware of The Fury’s prescience; working from his Sixties-based affinity for youthful sexuality and suspicion of government, he was mostly conscious of creating a quasi-political satire, and so in the new interview film De Palma (released by the independent distributor A24), the now 75-year-old director underrates The Fury among other movies in his filmography. He fails to appreciate its astonishing accomplishment as a work of psychedelic emotional depth. (He prefers the conventional anti–Vietnam War cynicism in his 1989 Casualties of War.)...

...An artist’s work is its own defense. Otherwise, that’s what critics are for. But De Palma attests to the lack of critical thinking in contemporary culture. Tired, old complaints about De Palma’s kinetic, teasingly erotic, and often violent style become the basis of forcing the guy to say things like “I did grow up in an operating room; I saw a lot of blood.” Yes, De Palma was the son of a philandering New Jersey orthopedic surgeon (as depicted in his 1978 family comedy Home Movies), but, more importantly, he was the artistic son of several key filmmakers who were also fearless about bravura provocation.

This disappointing documentary never explores the inspiration De Palma drew from Orson Welles (flamboyant, self-conscious technique and Shakespearean morality); Fritz Lang (paranoid examination of social decadence); and Jean-Luc Godard (political wit folded into aesthetic examination). The confluence of their ideas is ignored in the documentary’s emphasis on De Palma’s unabashed parallels to Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense devices.

Aesthetics and political morality are rarely discussed in relation to De Palma’s movies (his hits Carrie, The Fury, and The Untouchables have notable resemblances to the work of Luis Buñuel, John Boorman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Sergei Eisenstein as much as to that of Hitchcock). Instead, shallow critics and film buffs concentrate on his borrowing Hollywood narrative and so never appreciate him as a distinctive figure of late-20th-century filmmaking. This is proof of cultural illiteracy in our technically advanced, supposedly sophisticated age; as such, it’s a sociological problem. Too much time is wasted on De Palma’s defending his misunderstood movies and answering philistine charges about fame, sexism, and brutality.

Today, in “the Golden Age of Television,” filmmakers are no longer regarded as visual artists; neither are they respected for their social perception. De Palma demonstrates an even worse situation: celebrating a filmmaker as a celebrity. Emphasis on behind-the-scenes gossip (such as the story of De Palma bilking Paramount out of money before eventually turning down an offer to direct Flashdance) ignores the possibility of serious artistry. De Palma says: “You’re battling a very difficult system [in Hollywood], and all the values of that system are the opposite of what goes into making good original movies.”

Failing to clarify De Palma’s Godardian–Langian–Wellesian challenge to the politics and morality of the Hollywood system makes De Palma a documentary for political naïfs and fame-whore pseudo-cinephiles. It is conceived to please millennial careerophiles. Dubious hero worship ignores how De Palma was spurred by political and aesthetic curiosity. He recounts his career journey, yet never gets to the nitty-gritty of the genre revisionism that was the hallmark of his films and those of the Seventies directors he name-checks. (“There was Marty [Scorsese], and then there was George [Lucas] and Francis [Coppola] and Steven [Spielberg]. What we did in our generation will never be duplicated.”)

In his concluding paragraph, White brings it all back to The Fury, "an Expressionist thriller and much more: a potent distillation of the personal and political conflicts that define De Palma’s sensibility and linger in the social miasma of the new millennium. De Palma always works on his sexual and political subconscious. As with any movie artist, every film is political, every film is a public address. But De Palma offers a layman’s inquiry, not a critic’s nor an expert’s. That the makers of this documentary could let De Palma disparage The Fury proves they’re inadequate to appreciate his movies at all."

SRAGOW: DE PALMA'S FILMS ARE "TIME CAPSULES THAT GO OFF LIKE FIREWORKS"

Michael Sragow, Film Comment

Happily, Baumbach and Paltrow’s quick-fingered succession of excerpts and the director’s running commentary explode conventional wisdom while conveying both his virtuosity and indelible engagement with his times. You can’t see this sampling without savoring how issues like race, political executions, and urban crime recur explicitly and implicitly in his work. Although De Palma’s movies may seem, at first glance, “dated,” they turn out to be enveloping and immediate—time capsules that go off like fireworks. Supreme entertainments like Carrie and Dressed to Kill contain unexpected resonances. Who would have guessed that in Carrie, [Piper] Laurie’s remarkable paradox of a performance—her passionate portrayal of a repressed and repressive religious zealot—would reverberate even more strongly in 2016 than it did in 1976?...

...De Palma creates a visual style so operatic and balletic that Dressed to Kill boasts the imaginative impact of surrealism, while remaining cunningly observant about life in New York circa 1980. What makes De Palma a master pop satirist is his refusal to preach and his utter lack of inhibition. When [Nancy] Allen runs into the subway to escape the killer, it’s a great out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire moment. Who would seek safety in the New York subways of the Mayor Koch era? De Palma captures the racial and social-political tensions of that moment without dilution or apology.

In De Palma, the director talks perceptively about his own influences. The documentary opens with De Palma’s memories of seeing Vertigo as a kid and coming to appreciate it as an adult. He says filmmakers love Hitchcock’s movie because it’s all about what directors do: Hitchcock creates a romantic illusion—and then kills it, twice. In the clips from the Master of Suspense, you can see everything De Palma learned from Hitchcock: his cunning use of subjective camera and his deployment of every tool at a director’s disposal, including blocking, lighting, cutting, and special effects to adopt his characters’ often dizzying perspectives. Hitchcock, though, rarely moved his camera as sinuously as De Palma, who drew on the work of many other directors, including Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, to create his own simultaneously voluptuous and incisive style. De Palma never sounds more Hitchcockian in De Palma than when he says he starts with “a construction,” not characters, then engages the actors to fill them in and root them in reality—unlike, he says, “you guys” (Baumbach and Paltrow), who start with characters and build films around them. It’s remarkably similar to what Truffaut told Hitchcock: “Your point of departure is not the content but the container.” This stance explains perfectly why he would clash with a character-is-action filmmaker of equal stature, Robert Towne, on the screenplay for Mission Impossible.

This film definitively illustrates that with De Palma, as with any talented movie artist, the truth about his work is often richer and more elusive than his statement of intent. Blow Out stems from a plot De Palma sees as “a construction”: a movie sound technician (Travolta) uses the tools of his trade to prove that a governor’s fatal car accident was a political execution. Every scrap of that construction seems personal to De Palma and becomes a matter of life or death to us. It kicks off with a parody of soft-core horror porn but ends with a portrait of a man trapped inside his own technology. Blow Out is such a mind-blowing movie because it does the reverse of what De Palma says Hitchcock does in Vertigo. De Palma and his hero don’t spend the movie creating an illusion but uncovering a reality moviegoers recognize as a mash-up—not of movie thrillers, but of all the Kennedy tragedies, Chappaquiddick, as well as the assassinations. The central relationship is not an obsessive romance but a tender friendship between the soundman and a makeup counter girl and escort (Nancy Allen) who is sitting next to Pennsylvania’s governor when a tire blows out and his car goes into the Schuylkill River. When Travolta’s character turns the death throes of a murdered woman into the “good scream” he’s been seeking for an exploitation picture, the soundtrack for the movie-within-the-movie becomes the hero’s continuous loop of suffering. De Palma describes the underlying sting of Blow Out: its subliminal message is that even if we stumbled upon exactly what happened in the JFK assassination, nobody would care...

...All of De Palma’s movies contain patches of sublimity or inventiveness, including the much-maligned Mission to Mars (00) and The Black Dahlia (06). De Palma provides a one-of-a-kind filmmaker’s perspective on everything from the runaway costs and escalating burdens of big-studio moviemaking—he made Carrie for $1.8 million, Mission to Mars for $100 million—to the haphazard ways an American movie artist-entertainer must cobble together a career from mixed opportunities and accidents. At age 75, he ruefully admits that filmmakers are usually remembered for movies they make in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. He talks straight from the shoulder about his cave-in to commercial worries on the epochal calamity of The Bonfire of the Vanities (90), and about his inability to find a satisfying ending to Snake Eyes. He tells Baumbach and Paltrow that endings are always a problem, and that you’re lucky if you find two or three that hit the bull’s-eye in the course of a career.

De Palma has the best kind of ending for a director documentary: it leaves us wondering what’s yet to come from this protean and multifaceted filmmaker.

Jason Mann, who was the chosen rookie director of last year's season of HBO's Project Greenlight, also attended the DGA screening of De Palma.