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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:
Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online
De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes
De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry
De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"
Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue
Washington Post
review of Keesey book
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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:
Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario
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De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002
De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006
Enthusiasms...
Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense
Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule
The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold
Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!
Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy
Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site
Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records
4K ULTRA HD LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) Original lossless 1.0 mono soundtrack Optional lossless 5.1 soundtrack Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing Brand new audio commentary by critics Drusilla Adeline and Joshua Conkel Audio commentary by critic Maitland McDonagh Beyond Good and Evil, a brand new visual essay by critics BJ and Harmony Colangelo The Empathy of Dressed to Kill, a brand new visual essay by critic Jessica Crets Strictly Business, a 2022 interview with actress Nancy Allen Killer Frames, a 2022 interview with associate producer/production manager Fred C. Caruso An Imitation of Life, a 2022 interview with actor Keith Gordon Archival interviews with actors Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto The Making of a Thriller, an archival documentary on the making of the film Unrated, R-rated and TV-rated comparison featurette Slashing Dressed to Kill, an archival featurette examining the changes made to avoid an X rating Photo gallery Theatrical trailer Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx Collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Sara Michelle Fetters, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Matthew Sorrento and Heather Wixson
Charlize Theron just wowed Michelle Pfeiffer by dressing up as her iconic character in Scarface.Theron, 49, threw a gangster-themed party she dubbed “The Godfatheron” and transformed into Pfeiffer’s Elvira Hancock, the wife of Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino in 1983's Scarface.
The Mad Max: Fury Road star also stepped behind the lens to do her own photo shoot while dressed up as the character and posted the stunning images on her Instagram on Dec. 11. The carousel featured nine shots of herself as Hancock followed by a still of Pfeiffer, 66, as she appeared in Brian De Palma’s classic gangster film.
“An ode to the best to ever do it. Love you @michellepfeifferofficial ❤️,” Theron wrote in the caption.
Pfeiffer responded, sharing her appreciation for the uncanny resemblance.
“WOW. Im speechless. Love you too❤️🔥,” she commented on the post.
Released on Dec. 9, 1983, Scarface — which is famous for the line, “Say hello to my little friend!” — turned 41 this year and is often cited as one of the greatest gangster films of all time. In addition to Pfeiffer and Pacino, the movie stars Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Steven Bauer and F. Murray Abraham.
Theron invited a number of her celebrity friends to her Godfather-themed shindig, including January Jones and Kate Beckinsale, who both received “Godfatheron” makeovers of their own — albeit digital ones.
“Parties should have a theme and @charlizeafrica delivers every time. TheGodfatheron🕴️💃🏼🎲🃏,” wrote Jones, who posted two images on Instagram where she appears to have been given her own Old Hollywood/film noir looks courtesy of AI.
How did you decide on the visual language of the supernatural?Koepp: I like the idea of an unsettling movie. And when you make them, it’s all about how well can you create an atmosphere. The more real it seems, the more unsettling it’s going to feel. The idea of having the kid start the movie talking to the presence was in the script. Brian De Palma, who I was working with a lot then, read the script and one of his first ideas was, “Why doesn’t he look right down the barrel of the lens whenever he is talking to the ghost?” And I knew enough to hear a good idea and take it when I was handed it. And then the rest was a collaboration between the production designer and the director of photography Fred Murphy. We just tried to really get everything very, very specific and accurate.
Were there other inspirations or influences from folks that you had worked with, be it De Palma or Steven Spielberg? I guess every filmmaker to some extent steals from Spielberg.
Koepp: They’re not that hard to spot. “Close Encounters,” obviously there’s a great deal in common — there’s something wrong with dad. He’s obsessed. He’s wrecking the house. There was a moment in “Poltergeist” where when the weird things first started happening in the house, Craig T. Nelson comes home and there’s JoBeth Williams on the floor with the kid and the football helmet and lets the kid slide across the floor and she whoops and jumps up and down. It’s fun at first, and I think it’s very true to human nature. If something extraordinary happens, it’s fascinating and exciting, you can’t leave that out just to have the spooks and scares and jumpstarts. So Spielberg, obviously not so much for visuals or shots, but for thematic things like extraordinary things happening to normal, regular people. And there’s some of “The Shining” in that.
As a writer of many stories full of fantastical ideas, what’s your barometer for storytelling where you give a character a choice that may not be the most believable choice, but you know that it serves a story?
Koepp: It goes back to Hitchcock’s thing — in every thriller, and ghost stories are thrillers of a different type — where you must answer the fundamental question, why don’t they call the police? And sometimes the answer is they do, and the police don’t do anything, or they do and that makes it worse. Before my first movie, as long as you’re encouraging me to name-drop, Bob Zemeckis had said, “You’ve got to read ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ twice before you do anything.” His other advice was, “Go stand in an airport for 12 hours. That’ll train you to be a director.” I didn’t do the airport one, but I read “Hitchcock/Truffaut” a few times and I picked that up from there. And in “Stir of Echoes,” I have [Tom’s wife Maggie] say, “We’re calling the police.” And he says, “And tell them what? Run it by me. I want to hear how it sounds,” which I thought adequately addressed that. But I also think the answer for Kevin’s character was because he’s compelled and he has to know.
This film comes after you’d worked on “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World,” which used computer-generated effects in such an inventive and groundbreaking way. What was your experience like with CGI on this film?
Koepp: The CGI stuff we did was less fun, certainly, and less effective than practical solutions that we found. The thing where he pulls his tooth out was very old-fashioned kind of switcheroo makeup. And for the movements of the ghost, Fred and I watched this music video that we liked, and there was some very strange movement in it. So we shot at six frames a second whenever the ghost appeared, but we told the actress to move at quarter speed. So if she was walking across the room, it plays at apparently normal speed, but with a very bizarre shudder about her. Even when she’s just looking at him, there’s these tiny little movements in her face. And it was real, so that made it work better.
See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars
Brian De Palma is generally a bit dismissive of Alfred Hitchcock’s work after Psycho (1960), claiming it to be too artificial and old-fashioned. There can be little doubt, however, that at least one element of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) impressed itself deeply on De Palma’s unconscious: the use of an actor to project psycho-physical states of both adulthood and childhood, veritably regressing to relive a primal scene of trauma. Let’s look at the interplay between Marnie and Obsession (1976).
Regarding De Palma picking up on Hitchcock's cinematic language post-Psycho, I know there are more instances in De Palma we can trace back to these films, but it's always seemed to me that among the elements that make up the centerpiece sequence in De Palma's Mission: Impossible are strong vibes from both Marnie and The Birds. The way that Hitchock shows Marnie waiting in the stall of a women's restroom as everybody leaves introduces a strong sense of silence as Marnie then exits the ladies room, and gets the combination to the safe. As Marnie empties the safe, Hitchcock essentially splits the screen to show us that there is a lady mopping the floor on the other side of the room. Still in complete silence, Marnie has taken money from the safe and as she makes her way toward the exit, she notices the cleaning lady, and removes her shoes. More suspense, as Hitchcock shows the shoe about to drop out of Marnie's pocket - and then it does drop, breaking the silence - but the cleaning lady doesn't seem to have heard it. Between the silence, the suspense, and then the shoe drop, I think we can see (hear?) echoes in De Palma's CIA set-piece: the "complete silence," the suspense, and not only the drop of sweat, but finally, the dropping of the knife, which De Palma shows us in Kubrickian slow motion. In between, there is the creepy moment when our hero, Ethan Hunt, is waiting up above CIA analyst William Donloe like a bird of prey. This moment often makes me think of the playground scene in Hitchcock's The Birds, where flocks of crows have quietly gathered behind Tippi Hedren.
As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin suggest, these and other Hitchcock elements in De Palma's work are likely imprinted on his subconcious. Although it certainly seems that De Palma can recall any or most of these elements quite vividly, he has likely absorbed them so deeply, they are very much a part of his cinematic ways of thinking.
DOMINO -
In a fantastic text entitled The Place of the Spectator, Olivier Assayas argued that Brian De Palma tends to grant an archetypal value not to situations but to devices, claiming that the device is the only subject of cinema. This bold hypothesis, corroborated again and again by the eminently self-reflexive work of the director of Carrie (1976) and Mission: Impossible (1996), is confirmed again in Domino, a film in which the plausibility of the ‘situations’ counts much less than De Palma’s interest in reflecting on the ‘devices’ for capturing images that populate our contemporary reality: in this case, microcameras built into rifles or drones.
Appreciated for his elaborate camera movements, Brian De Palma, one of the most gifted directors of his generation, constantly engages in dialogue with other filmmakers through his films (Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Michael Powell or Buñuel).De Palma's universe frequently immerses us in bizarre, fast-paced stories with an unstoppable thread of cunning, irony, criticism, humour, horror and a highly refined technique.