You released a Brian De Palma documentary last year, and spent a few years before that revisiting his films. Did that influence Meyerowitz in any way?

Noah Baumbach: Somebody said to me the other the day that they saw Brian’s influence in the movie. I thought that was interesting. It’s not something I thought of consciously, but there are a lot of long camera moves and stuff I’ve done before, but I felt maybe I and Robbie Ryan, who shot it with me, were more successful at doing some things I’ve been trying to figure out. Brian obviously is known, rightfully so, for his great long pans.

And that thing which Brian says: you can’t play chess without showing the chessboard first.

Noah Baumbach: Right, right. Yeah, his whole thing of suspense is contingent on you understanding the space to know what’s really at stake. So often, people rush to the suspense without setting it up. Brian loves to set up a room and show you everything.

EMPIRE MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2013, 'RAISING CAIN' RECUT
Nick De Semlyen has a great little sidebar interview with De Palma in the September 2013 issue of EMPIRE magazine. De Semlyen asks De Palma what we would find in his browser history cache. "They're doing live trials online now," De Palma replies, "so I've been watching the Zimmerman trial. I'm not really a YouTube guy, though I did see somebody re-edited Raising Cain into the original order in which I cut it. I looked at it and said, 'I should have left it that way.'"

'DEXTER', 'MAD MEN', 'WAR AND PEACE'
Asked if he watches any TV shows, De Palma replies, "I watched Dexter in the beginning and was fascinated by it. But when they extend these shows for six or seven years, they sort of run out of ideas, so I didn't watch the whole John Lithgow series. Even Mad Men is getting a little tired now. These things are ten times longer than War And Peace.

'HITCHCOCK'
De Semlyen then asks De Palma if he saw Hitchcock. "Yes," De Palma replies. "I bought the book to see if it was actually real, what happened. I don't remember Hitchcock having problems with his marriage during the making of Psycho. So I thought it was interesting, but is it true?"

'THE DEMOLISHED MAN'
When asked about Ridley Scott's Prometheus, De Palma tells De Semlyen, "I didn't think it was as good as the original. It's not like Godfather I and II. There's a science fiction story that I've always felt would make a terrific movie: an Alfred Bester book called The Demolished Man. It's about a society of Espers, who can read people's minds. And then a great economic titan figures out how to kill his wife and not get caught. The rights are all tied up at Paramount."

JASON STATHAM FAN
De Semlyen concludes by asking De Palma if he's a fan of Jason Statham, who he was going to direct in the remake of Heat. "Oh yes," replies De Palma. "I've always wanted to make a film with him. I've seen both Cranks and loved them. In fact, I don't think there's a Jason Statham film I haven't seen. He's been doing too much action stuff, driving cars and beating up people. He needs a more Steve McQueen-type part. But it didn't work out."

The same issue also includes a positive review of Passion by Ian Nathan, who says that during its second half, "Passion is transformed into a butterfly of hyperactive noir."

Here's more from Chinen's informative Tate obit:

The precision and ebullient feeling in Tate's drumming made him a first call, in the studio and on tour, for many of the finest singers of the '60s and '70s, including Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee. He also had credits on some notable pop albums, like Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly and Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon. He was the drummer for Simon & Garfunkel's famed 1981 reunion concert in Central Park, which sold millions of copies when it was released as an album the following year.

A generation of kids grew up hearing Tate's voice on the soundtrack for Schoolhouse Rock!, the series of educational cartoons broadcast on Saturday mornings by ABC. The songs were largely composed by Bob Dorough, who sang more than a few of them himself. But Tate was featured on some choice selections, including "I Got Six" from 1973, "Fireworks" and, in a vocal performance as soulful as it is numerically instructive, "Naughty Number Nine."

Tate's career as a vocalist was much more than a side hustle, though, stretching back to 1968 and his debut album, Windmills of My Mind. The title track — a cover of the theme from The Thomas Crown Affair, which won the Oscar for best original song that year — presents Tate the singer in full bloom. He's a suave, companionable stylist, with unlabored phrasing and a careful attunement to lyric and mood.

(In fact, both of Tate's Grammy nominations were for vocal performances: Multiplication Rock was up for Best Recording For Children in 1973, and his version of "She's Out of My Life," from the Jimmy Smith album Go For Whatcha Know, vied for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Male, in 1986.)

Though he had the voice of a jazz balladeer, Tate muscled easily into soul and R&B. "Be Black Baby," released as a 7-inch single on the Skye label, is a funky exhortation that can now be found on the compilation Black & Proud Vol. 1 - The Soul Of The Black Panther Era. The song was also sampled on tracks by Big Daddy Kane and the Beastie Boys, and turned up in the 1970 cult film Hi, Mom! — an early Robert De Niro vehicle, directed by Brian De Palma.

Grady Tate was born in Durham, North Carolina on January 14, 1932, and began singing in church at age 4. Not long afterward, he began playing drums; he was entirely self-taught.

After graduating from high school, Tate served four years in the Air Force, playing in a show band whose resident arranger was the trumpeter Bill Berry. He returned to Durham to study theater arts, literature and psychology at North Carolina College. Then he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked briefly as a postal carrier before joining the organist Wild Bill Davis on the road.

Tate moved to New York in his late 20s, but not in pursuit of a musical career: he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts to study drama. His training as an actor was curtailed after saxophonist and flutist Jerome Richardson recommended him to Quincy Jones, who had just lost his drummer. The association with Jones led in turn to session work and a six-year stint with Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show Band on NBC, from 1968 to '74.

For a certain pop-culture fan base, Tate will always be legendary for his cool, undulant drumming on the soundtrack to David Lynch's show Twin Peaks. Angelo Badalamenti, the composer, recently relayed Tate's joke that the score only ever inhabited two tempos: "slow, and reverse." But in addition to his delicate brushwork on the original Twin Peaks series, Tate is featured in the soundtrack to Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired this year.

One track, named in his honor, amounts to nearly two minutes of drumming in the foreground, in snappy waltz time. The track, "Grady Groove," captures the inherent musicality in Tate's beat, a gift both rare and so natural that it can still be easy to overlook.

Survivors include Tate's wife, Vivian, and a son, Grady Tate, Jr.

Noah Baumbach has been making movies for more than 20 years, and in that time, has developed a distinctive voice in American cinema. His stories of neurotic New Yorkers are loaded with memorable moments of self-obsession and narcissistic showdowns. But Baumbach didn’t become a filmmaker overnight; he learned much about filmmaking from watching other movies. Raised by novelist Jonathan Baumbach and film critic Georgia Brown, Baumbach grew up surrounded by cinema, and it played a critical role in his evolving love for the medium.

The filmmaker looked back on some of these key influences during a conversation at the Film Society of Lincoln Center shortly before a screening of his latest effort, the ensemble comedy “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” which Netflix releases later this month.

The Movie Brats

Baumbach was born in 1969, which placed on the younger end of the spectrum of moviegoers influenced by the movie brat generation — the collection of mainstream filmmakers who produced iconic studio movies at a transitional moment in Hollywood history. “I’m the age of ‘Star Wars,’ and everybody’s the age of ‘Star Wars,’ but I was actually seven when it came out and grew up with it,” Baumbach said. “At that age, I wanted to make all kinds of movies.” He was also a big Steven Spielberg fan. “I could see all these movies — not ‘Jaws,’ I [wasn’t allowed] to see that — but all the others. They were so meaningful to me… ‘E.T.’ was my favorite film.”

Baumbach’s cinephilia blossomed in the late eighties and early nineties. That’s when he first discovered another ‘70s-era breakout, Martin Scorsese. “Like everybody, you’re seeing the luck of the draw,” he said. “It’s like, who’s your James Bond? What was your first Scorsese? I saw ‘King of Comedy,’ then ‘After Hours’ and ‘The Color of Money.’ Those were my Scorseses. Of course, then I went back and saw the others.”

These days, Baumbach’s favorite filmmaker from that generation may be Brian De Palma, the subject of the documentary “De Palma,” which Baumbach co-directed last year. “I’m friends with Brian, but I couldn’t see those movies at that age,” Baumbach said, referring to his childhood. “I couldn’t go to ‘Dressed to Kill’ or ‘Blow Out.’ Those I caught later. The first Brian movie I saw was ‘Wise Guys,’ which was a strange one, a comedy.” However, De Palma’s meta gangster drama “The Untouchables” hit theaters in 1987, a sweet spot for the young Baumbach. “I was lucky that he made that one right when I could see it,” Baumbach said. “Even though my parents would tell it was ‘lesser Brian,’ I was like, not in my mind. It was great.”

It’s a little jarring to think that Noah Baumbach has been directing movies now for 22 years. In some ways, he still seems like that fresh-faced kid who released Kicking and Screaming when he was only 26. Somehow, behind a curtain somewhere, Baumbach became a full-fledged “veteran director.” (To put this in perspective, Baumbach’s at the same stage of his career that Scorsese was when he was making Goodfellas and Cape Fear.) Baumbach, like contemporaries such as frequent collaborator Wes Anderson, have now been doing this a long time. They are no longer the new wave of directors, they are just “the wave.” And now, Baumbach may just have made his best movie.

And that’s not a claim made lightly. Baumbach’s filmography includes Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, Margot at the Wedding – and one of the best documentaries ever made about a filmmaker, De Palma (co-directed with Jake Paltrow). But with The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), he’s arguably made his deepest and most complete film.

Dustin Hoffman plays Harold Meyerowitz, the father of Danny and Jean (Adam Sandler and Elizabeth Marvel), and their half-brother, Matthew (Ben Stiller). Their stories are divided in half, which builds anticipation because we have two of the biggest mainstream comedy stars of the last 20 years finally in a movie together, yet for a good portion of the film, they don’t share any scenes. Of course, Baumbach knows exactly what he’s doing. When the characters finally come together for the final act it’s truly powerful.

Baumbach does not like doing short interviews. So we had plenty of time to take a deeper dive into what he was trying to accomplish with The Meyerowitz Stories. And Baumbach can get a little skittish when talking about his movies and himself – like any normal person would – but it’s pretty obvious even Baumbach knows this movie is special.

The Meyerowitz Stories is currently playing at the New York Film Festival, as well as his partner’s film, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a movie that is also getting rave reviews. This is the first time the pair has had competing films (after collaborating many times) and as Baumbach admits, yes, it’s weird. Ahead, Baumbach also discusses who else he’d have loved to have made a filmmaking documentary about in the same style of De Palma. (It’s a legitimate “what could have been” reveal)...

...When it comes to a documentary based on a filmmaker, I’ve heard the phrase, “Well, it’s no De Palma,” used a few times. That’s got to be a nice feeling that you’ve made a documentary based on a filmmaker that’s so well received.

Well, it’s nice to hear. I love it. That’s a project that I can un-complicatedly talk about because I feel both proud of what we did with it, but also, obviously, it’s a celebration of Brian. Brian’s work speaks for itself. We didn’t create an advertisement for Brian, which some of these very entertaining documentaries sometimes feel like. You know, they’re there to remind you how important this person was. And I felt like, whether you know Brian or not, that would be clear by watching the movie. But also that wasn’t what we were setting out to do. But I loved working on it because it just meant picking cool Brian De Palma clips to go with what he’s saying – it’s a pretty good day at work.

Could you do something like that with someone else?

Well, yeah. I mean, it’s obviously singular to Brian. I think, yeah, there are people I wish I had actually done it with, people who I got to know who passed away who I loved talking to and talking about movies. Jake Paltrow and I and Brian are just very close, close friends. And the thing really is a document of our dinners, our hanging out, our asking him about what happened on this movie and what happened on this movie. I mean, we did it obviously in a more formalized way for the documentary, but it’s all stuff we talk about and talked about anyway.

So that’s obviously an important ingredient in why that feels so personal, in a way. I know from my own experience, and I know it from other people who I know who are well known and do interviews or whatever, it’s just, no offense, but you can’t kind of enter into the same kind of ease that you can with a friend – and a friend who does exactly the same thing as you. So that was really part of what makes that. I mean, you look at other great documents like Peter Bogdanovich’s interviews with directors…

Who you got to work with a couple years ago.

Yes, well, I’ve known Peter for a long, long time. And those are unbeatable, too, because they’re just so much about filmmaking. You have them answering the questions and talking about the things that are, I think, really about filmmaking. And that’s always, for me, the stuff that I’m most interested in reading or watching.

Who do you wish you would have gotten a chance to do a documentary with?

Mike Nichols. Bob Altman. I got to know them pretty well, and I think they both would have made – and very much in their own ways – you could have done an interesting, great version of what we did with Brian.

“For me, when I was a kid, it was Blade Runner, it was Tron, it was The Shining,” Leto told Rotten Tomatoes. “It was these kind of elevated genre movies really blew my mind, as well as films like Clockwork Orange and Scorsese [movies] and the early work of Brian De Palma. But Tron is another one that I feel like is a world that we’re not done with yet. There’s so much more to explore and to see there. I would absolutely love to expand upon the world of Tron and see what we could do to bring that to life.”

It was Donaggio’s feeling that Carrie was a film concerned more with the tragedy and drama of Carrie’s existence than horror, and this sentiment is reflected in the romantic Italiana of his locker room music. Instead of commenting on Carrie’s violent trajectory in his opening theme, which many other horror composers would feel obliged to do to immediately establish an atmosphere of dread, Donaggio’s unassuming theme instead implores us to feel empathy for the lonely Carrie. The opening theme, which really is Carrie’s theme, returns throughout the film in fragments and in variation, and is heard predominantly in moments where compassion is being shown towards Carrie. In one of the film’s most tender moments, for example, Carrie’s gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) takes Carrie aside and gives her a pep talk in a bid to help build her self-esteem. In this scene, the theme is stripped down and orchestrated using instruments with a warmer tone. Carrie’s flute melody is heard once again, but instead of strings and piano being in support, the accompaniment is performed by acoustic guitar and a resonant Rhodes keyboard. Such tender orchestration allows for Miss Collins' kindness and the intimacy of the moment to be greater realized.

As well as scoring that reflects Carrie’s innocence, Donaggio’s score also highlights Carrie’s violent tendencies and supernatural abilities. In an obvious homage to Bernard Herrmann and his score for Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Donaggio uses “stabby” string stingers whenever Carrie feels threatened and utilizes her telekinetic abilities. When she knocks the school principal’s ashtray of his desk; forces an annoying boy off his bike; throws her Mother on to the bed, a high-register string motif is heard that resembles Herrmann’s string writing in the infamous shower murder scene in Psycho. Elsewhere, the strings are used for atmospheric effect, their dissonant, sustained harmonies creating a disturbed ambience, particularly in scenes within Carrie’s home where her puritanical mother, Mrs. White (Piper Laurie), seeks to control and punish Carrie. The destructive nature of Mrs. White’s religious fundamentalism is also commented upon in Donaggio’s score. When Carrie is locked in a closet and ordered to pray for her sins after Mrs. White learns that Carrie has menstruated for the first time (the beginning of the end, in Mrs. White’s view), a church organ erupts on the soundtrack accompanied by unsettling low register, tremolo strings, implying a direct connection between Mrs. White’s fanaticism and Carrie’s telekinesis.

In the film’s climactic prom scene, Donaggio’s romantic music and dark scoring play off each other to indicate the fragmentation and eventual coalescence of the two aspects of Carrie’s psyche. Sentimental love ballads are heard (sung by Amy Irving, who plays “Sue” in the film) [ala-mod editor's note: the songs are actually sung by Katie Irving, not Amy Irving] that underscore the burgeoning love affair between Carrie and her date Tommy (William Katt). One of the songs is a version of the film’s main theme, entitled “Born to Have It All” on the film’s soundtrack release, with lyrics given to Carrie’s flute melody that convey both the romantic longing Carrie is experiencing as well as the horror that is about to take place:
You were born to touch
To want too much
Let the bodies fall
You were born to have it all

Whilst Carrie and Tommy bond, several of Carrie’s classmates are conspiring to rig the vote for prom queen and king at the school dance in order to exact a horrible prank upon her. We hear atonal disjointed strings as Norma (P.J. Soles) goes from table to table collecting votes from the prom-goers. The camera tracks her movement around the auditorium until she arrives at the stage, where Chris (Nancy Allen) and Billy (John Travolta) are waiting underneath to pull the string on a bucket of blood hanging above the stage that is intended for Carrie. As the camera moves up to reveal the bucket, we hear a fragment of Carrie’s flute melody on a sparkling glockenspiel, as if the melody was suddenly electrified, and it is cut off abruptly on a dissonant chord. It’s a warning of what is to come, that the last vestiges of Carrie’s innocence are slowly being eroded. And as Carrie and her date Tommy walk to the stage when they are announced as prom queen and king, the same interchanging of Carrie’s theme and the menacing strings occurs on the soundtrack before all hell breaks loose and Carrie can no longer remain the cowering girl she once was.

Two film series are presnted at the museum in association with the del Toro exhibit: The Films of Guillermo del Toro, and Nightmare on Dundas Street Movie Nights, the latter of which includes a Friday the 13th of October screening of De Palma's Carrie.

Here is the website description of the del Toro exhibit:

From the fantastic to the frightful, don’t miss this rare glimpse into the world of renowned filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and his cabinet of curiosities. Taking inspiration from del Toro’s extraordinary imagination, At Home with Monsters reveals his creative process through his personal collection of art, artefacts, books, props, and ephemera, all culled from Bleak House, del Toro’s creative haven located in Los Angeles.

This unique exhibition explores the creative mind behind one of the most inventive filmmakers of our generation revealing his influences, from the Medieval era to contemporary culture, and his particular obsession with horror, fantasy and the rich heritage of the Victorian era.

“To find beauty in the profane. To elevate the banal. To be moved by genre. These things are vital for my storytelling,” says Guillermo del Toro. “This exhibition presents a small fraction of the things that have moved me, inspired me, and consoled me as I transit through life. It’s a devotional sampling of the enormous love that is required to create, maintain, and love monsters in our lives.”

Rather than a traditional chronology or filmography, At Home with Monsters is organized thematically, beginning with visions of childhood and innocence and the Victorian era that so deeply inspires del Toro; continuing through explorations of death and the afterlife, magic, occultism, alchemy, Frankenstein and horror, monsters; and concluding with a celebration of comics, movies and popular culture.

“Guillermo del Toro believes that we need monsters,” says Jim Shedden, co-curator and the AGO’s Manager of Publishing. “To him, the imperfections of monsters are found in all of us, whether we see them or not. At the same time, despite his empathy for the tragic monster, del Toro is fascinated with truly terrifying and invulnerable monsters. By witnessing his incredible creative process, we can make unexpected connections among different genres and narratives, high art and pop culture, and blur boundaries between fantasy and reality.”

Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Insight Editions. The 144-page volume is edited by Britt Salvesen, Jim Shedden, and Matthew Welch, with contributions by Guillermo del Toro, Keith McDonald, Roger Clark, and Paul Koudounaris.

Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Two types of tickets are available for the event:

$35 for Unreserved Orchestra Seating with Commemorative Poster, Q&A and After-Party Attendance.

$100 for VIP Reserved Seating with Private Pre-Party, Dressed to Kill Blu-Ray DVD + Photo Opp with Nancy Allen and Cast, Commemorative Poster, Q&A and After-Party Attendance.

A news item from the other day, clipped from an unnamed Italian newspaper, has been making the rounds (see tweet below from journalist Mimmo Melis). The item mentions that Domino will be at Cannes next year-- this follows a news item from Almeria a couple of months ago suggesting the film would premiere at next year's Berlin Film Festival. Obviously, with the movie still filming, it is much too early to say for sure one way or the other. Here's a full translation of the brief news item:

Domino films

The set of Domino, the new film by Brian De Palma, moved yesterday between Mari Pintau and Terra Mala. Armored scenes and roads closed to traffic: it was only the crew that spun the scenes of a pursuit. It is impossible to see the protagonists Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Carice van Houten.

The film, which will be presented in Cannes in 2018, is a thriller set in several European cities. The only Italian stop is Sardinia. The set on the coast was guarded by the Municipal Police, who escorted car crews from Mari Pintau to Terra Mala. To see the beauty of the beaches Quartu immortalized in the film, it will be necessary to wait for the release in theaters.