UNMISTAKABLY DE PALMA IN THE WAY IT MOVES, BREATHES, LOOKS, & SOUNDS

Updated: Saturday, June 1, 2024 12:32 AM CDT
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De Palma interviewed
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On stage in front of the giant screen before the film last night, Paul Williams recalled the days when the film was released in 1974. "What was very good fortune for us, was that it wasn't a small hit, or even a big hit," Williams told the Canneds audience. "It was a film that, the people that loved it, would not walk away from."
Before he gained much deserved acclaim for films like Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables, Brian De Palma was best known for scrappy experimental films like Hi Mom and Sisters. The Phantom of the Paradise was an apparent attempt at a commercial breakthrough. But some audiences were weirded out by its garish ambience, and some jaded critics considered it a ho-hum satire of the music industry.In retrospect, it’s simply one of the strangest movies we’ve ever seen — and one of the coolest. Music producer Swan (Paul Williams, who also provides much of the haunting music) makes naive songwriter Winslow Leach (William Finley) sell his soul and his songs so that they can be performed by Swan’s pet protege, Phoenix (Jessica Harper). He seeks justice by becoming The Phantom of the Paradise.
The atmospherics are incredible — doomed and portentous, without ever veering fully into camp. It’s also fun to note that Williams would, just a few years after this, co-write “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog — and to wonder if, considering that De Palma and George Lucas traveled in the same circles, The Phantom influenced Darth Vader.
“You remember exactly what the anxiety was of the day,” Henry said of rewatching “Body Double” for the interview. “Seeing the shots that were difficult…I don’t know if you remember the shot that sort of like when Sam first takes Jake up to the house? It’s the looking and seeing the view, you see it from outside and whatever and then takes him over to the Hollywood sign and the camera then goes from inside to outside the house, and it’s this long shot that goes out as the score sort of kicks in, and looking at us in the window and then it connects to the other house. All of that, we were on Stage 16, the big stage of Warner Bros. They built both houses in this stage so that he could execute these kind of shots.”While the erotic thriller pays homage to “Rear Window,” Henry detailed just how much “craziness” was going on behind the scenes, including De Palma refusing to film the climax outside after one “freezing” night shoot.
“Speaking of that big stage, we shot the scene that takes place by the aqueduct, right where the grave ends up being dug,” Henry said. “We went out and shot the first scene scheduled there. I knew all of the freeway. It comes down on the mountains, that border, and they have some shots of it in the movie that are really, really cool. We were shooting up there, but it was freezing. It was so cold, and we’d be up there at like two in the morning, three in the morning, four in the morning, and Brian is like, ‘That’s it. We’re not shooting up here anymore.’ And so he then took the other corner of [Stage] 16 and built a piece of the aqueduct type. I think the schedule sort of widened a little bit for what was going be done on the stage that night, but it was so terribly cold out there.”
Upon being moved indoors, the “special shots” for that scene included Henry throwing dirt into the grave of Melanie Griffith’s character.
“I’m up on 25 feet, way up, so you get that long shot from underneath of the dirt coming down. Then all the stuff that took place there at that location instead of, you know, in the grave,” Henry said.