Joan saw you at a movie screening scarfing down popcorn, and that’s when she decided that she wanted to cast you as Izzy. Do you have any memory of that? What do you think struck her about you?
I always loved that she said “scarfing,” as someone with deep food shame. Great. I love it. And she continued to say that all through our promotion. This image of me feeding my fat face. Anyway, yeah, she had been looking for a long time for her Izzy. She knew her pickle man, Sam, but she didn’t know who her Izzy was going to be. I was with girlfriends in the Upper West Side, where I lived. I didn’t have makeup on. I was probably high. [Laughs.] So I was just very relaxed. And yes, I was scarfing down popcorn, and she got in touch. When she met me in Spain, she told me that that’s what clinched it for her. I think she previously thought that I was maybe precious or because I was, at the time, a little bit of a princess of Hollywood — being married to the prince — she just didn’t know that I was just a regular down-to-earth gal.

You think your image was such that you were kind of untouchable?
I think there was a good thing about being married to Steven and a bad thing about being married to Steven. The good thing about being married to Steven was that I was married to Steven. We had a family. We had love. The bad thing was people got very awkward with me, whether we were divorced or married. It’s like, “Do I want Steven Spielberg’s camp in my backyard when I’m shooting this movie?” I think it became harder for me to get work, both married to him and not married to him. I was just grateful when Joan just pushed through all the bullshit and just wanted who she wanted.

She saw you outside of that paradigm.
Yeah. I mean, I think Los Angeles, the movie industry, feeds on a lot of fear. I remember once I wanted a job, it was a little PBS movie. Noel Black, who did Pretty Poison, a really interesting director, was going to do this Sherwood Anderson short story, “I’m a Fool.” It was going to be me and Ron Howard acting in this very sweet period piece. We’re in a rowboat with parasols, all that. I went to meet Noel Black having just finished shooting the last scene of Carrie, in which I’m in my mother’s arms screaming my head off. My real mother, by the way. And so I’m screaming, take after take after take. When I arrived that evening for this meeting, I have no voice. I can’t speak anymore. But I was so confident. I didn’t feel like a fraud. I felt like I was the real thing. I went into this office and I had so much confidence, and I literally just talked Noel Black into giving me a part. In a whisper, rather than having to read for the role.

I think that was very indicative of the way hiring and all works in Hollywood. If you come in and you’re scared, they’re going to think, Oh, you don’t know what you’re doing. You need to exude confidence to get past other people’s fears. But I had a hard time later, and Joan was a real savior for me. She kind of gave me hope that I could still work in the business.

It’s really interesting, though, because some of the sort of lore of the movie is Joan talking about how she was having trouble getting financing, and Steven was able to get financing from Warner Bros., right?
Joan remembers it a little differently. What happened was, obviously Steven read the script with me. And Steve Ross, who was the head of Warner Bros., was like Steven’s surrogate father — his other father. We vacationed with Steve. So, I mean, it was a no-brainer to give him the script because we knew he’d love it. And he loved it, so that’s how the financing came out.

But it was funny, because Warner Bros. had never made a low-budget film like this. This movie cost $5 million to make, and the press alone cost more than that to promote it. They were kind of awkward with it at first. I don’t know if they really gave it the full push they could have. They were all very nervous about putting a Jewish movie out there. Joan did feel very confident after Moonstruck came out. It was a very Italian movie.

I read somewhere that the studio was initially like, “Well, why don’t we make them Italian?” That they were very uncomfortable with the Jewishness of it. There were obviously rom-coms about Jewish people — Nora Ephron movies, movies infused with a Jewish sensibility — but this is one of the only super, super Jewish romantic comedies where it’s two people and it’s specifically about being Jewish.
And there’s a bris.

Yeah, exactly. What do you remember about the pushback on that — on the Jewishness?
That was not while I was involved. I think once I became involved, everyone kind of shut up a little bit. I think I had enough cachet at that moment to help get it going. Or I guess knowing Steve Ross helped a lot. But because I wasn’t brought up in the Jewish faith, it wasn’t something that meant so much to me one way or another.

Your father was Jewish, right? But you were brought up —
Christian Science. I went to Christian Science Sunday school. I learned all about Mary Baker Eddy and Science and Health. And because of the power of positive thinking, I’m like the opposite of a hypochondriac. That’s what I got from it.

So when you were put into this Jewish Lower East Side film, did it feel foreign to you?
It was a world I learned a lot about while doing that movie — the whole world in the Lower East Side. Well, the Lower East Side was a hangout of mine for a while, but it was more about the Fillmore East. I don’t think I got on the other side of Delancey Street. It’s interesting — Izzy was not religious, and she was trying to get out of that culture, but she was also drawn to the culture because she had her great love for her bubby. Susan Sandler talks about how the love of her bubby was her main love. I think about going down there and meeting Reizl Bozyk, who kind of became my bubby too. The most delicious, delicious grandma you could have.

The whole matchmaker thing — I didn’t really know that that existed. It was kind of bizarre, but it was bizarre to Izzy, too. So it was like, I could use all that. And her resistance to Sam was not just being a pickle man, and it wasn’t about being Jewish. It was more that she felt herself in this literary world, because she ran this bookstore, and she was involved in bringing artists in and exposing people. I think she just felt like that’s where she belonged. When she became attracted to the asshole writer Anton, it was more like she thought that was her lane. So she resists the whole matchmaking and the pickle man and everything. But then she gets off her high horse and feels something in her heart and learns a different value — being able to actually look at the person and say, “Oh, this is a good person and this is someone I could lose my heart to.”

And here is an excerpt related to The Fury:

How did playing this role or making this film change you at all? Did it change the way you related to men, to relationships, to Judaism, to New York?
Making movies is a lot of sitting around and waiting and working yourself up to do this one scene again. That kind of screeching up from zero is sometimes very hard. So I loved working in a lower-budget film like this, where you had to keep moving. I loved being the lead because I was in every scene, just about, so I didn’t have to sit around. I’m a theater actor, so I’m used to getting on the stage and doing the whole thing to the end of the thing. It’s a way I feel comfortable working. And that was the closest to that feeling that I’d ever had. I was not offered a lot of big pictures, but still, it was the independent, smaller-budgeted films I felt more comfortable in.

How did you feel like it changed your life or changed the trajectory of your career?
Well, you’d think it would’ve changed it in a pretty nice way. It was a really awkward time for people dealing with me. Because right after the film came out, Steven and I were divorced. And if you think they were awkward with me when we were married, they would literally walk across the street to avoid talking to me.

Why?
“What if Steven thinks I’m in Amy’s camp?” They didn’t realize Steven and I had parted as friends. But they just assume or whatever. I actually had to leave Los Angeles. That’s when I moved to New York.

You left because it was so awkward in L.A.?
I left because it was awkward and I thought, Well, if I can’t work in film, I’ll get back to my true love, which is theater. Which is what I did. I went back to New York to do theater. I assumed that film wasn’t going to be my medium.

Do you feel like that was the right choice, leaving L.A.?
Well, I really was never in love with living in Los Angeles. It’s a one-note town, and I was a San Francisco girl first. I moved to New York when I was 11, and then New York was home. I did my time in L.A. That’s how I feel about it. But I love living in New York. I just think it’s real life. I don’t have plastic surgery all over; when you’re out there in L.A., they all do that. They all just suddenly get worried about wrinkles, and I’m kind of embracing mine. I’m old enough to be able to not have to look young anymore, which is freeing. They’re not going to start a film on my ass in a bikini. Like in The Fury, when Brian De Palma told me that was our first shot. I was like, Oh, my God. That’s horrifying. I went on one of those fad diets. I think in those days it was — they used to shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh to break down the fat.

What?!
Swear to God, there were so many ridiculous fad diets.

They would shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh? What is the science there?
I think it broke down the fat, and then they put you on this specific diet that would rinse the fat through.

Did it work?
Well, did you see my ass in The Fury?

De Palma's greatest thrillers take after Hitchcock in premise and execution, but they often also reveal wide-spanning political conspiracies that feel more in line with the works of Alan J. Pakula. Pakula directed a trilogy of films about political conspiracies; Klute, All the President's Men, and The Parallax View. Snake Eyes most closely echoes The Parallax View, another movie about an assassinated political figure, and a man tasked with uncovering the shadowy network of people responsible.

Snake Eyes is an interesting cat-and-mouse take on the conspiracy concept, as De Palma and David Koepp's script reveals the main perpetrator to the audience fairly early on, while keeping Cage's character in the dark. This reveal ramps up the tension of the remaining sequences, as the two characters frequently come into close contact, with Santoro unaware of the immediate danger being posed to him as he closes in on the mystery. This choice attracted some criticism at the time, with people feeling that Snake Eyes ran out of steam by the end because of the choice to give away the resolution so early. In an episode of Mark Cousins' Scene by Scene for BBC, De Palma talked about this choice, explaining that the film fundamentally is not about the reveal and instead about "how finding that out affects their relationship."

One trick De Palma uses to keep Snake Eyes fresh throughout the runtime, even after the reveal, is that the movie will cut back to scenes we already saw from Santoro's point of view, but from another perspective. Around a corner, or behind a door that was closed as Santoro walked by, we realize another character was already in place, plotting something or narrowly evading a blown cover. De Palma makes great use of recurring sequences to slowly give out more information, something he also does in Blow Out when John Travolta's character obsessively re-listens to his audio recording to piece together his own mystery.

When everything comes together in Snake Eyes, it may feel a bit too convoluted on first viewing, but De Palma's choice to lay the story out as he did makes it far easier to appreciate on repeat viewings. The film received mixed reviews at the time, but it is one of De Palma's most thrilling and entertaining efforts, reinforcing his mastery of cinematic and visually striking thrillers. Nobody makes them quite like him.

Let us remember that in Michelangelo Antonioni's matrix film, Blow-Up (1966), a photographer records the signs of a crime that he only notices after developing the images. The analysis a posteriori of the enlarged photos makes it emerge – in the residual form of a “stain”, or what Roland Barthes would call point[I] – something that, however, had not caught the photographer’s eye during the immediate experience of the event. Perception is delayed and becomes dependent on a mediating device. The crime only appears in the image, in the photograph, in the representation, with all the shadow of doubt entailed by the perceptual decalation and the phenomenological reduction of reality to the two-dimensional surface of the photographic image.

Brian De Palma embodied the “syndrome Blow-Up" from Greetings (1968), which recreated the scene of photographic enlargement with an undisguised caricature tone and treated in a satirical way the theme of political conspiracy and paranoia – then in vogue, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kenedy and his shocking record in the most famous amateur film in history, the super-8 filming of Abraham Zapruder.

Then in A shot in the night (Blow Out, 1981), the plot becomes a serious topic and the dialogue with Blow-Up is improved: Brian De Palma reinvents the hermeneutic vertigo of Antonioni's film through the exhaustive anamnesis of an event also recorded as a sound recording, and not just as an image – the reflection on the gaze-frame and the point of view unfolds into an investigation about subjective sound and the point of listening.

So much Blow-Up , the A shot in the night they speak of a reality that is inaccessible, or that can only be reached later, with the help of materials recorded in image or sound. The number of apparatus, devices and supports needed to obtain the desired information multiplies from one film to the next, demonstrating that the mediation of perception by technology has become gradually more complex in the fifteen years that separate them.

In his book about Brian De Palma, French critic Luc Lagier observes that the multiplication of mediating instruments allows the director to emphasize the cinematographically constructed character of the plot's interpretation. To understand what “really” happened in the accident he witnessed and recorded, the protagonist of A shot in the night he subjects his recording to a series of manipulations and, in the end, what remains is no longer reality, but its fictional reconstruction. "In A shot in the night, De Palma shows that every element taken from reality, reconsidered in another context, is transformed”.[ii]

Once faced with the possibility of discovering a plot capable of giving coherence to the chain of signifiers that conforms reality to an unconvincing narrative – the ability to sew the open and ambiguous meaning of the world into a closed scheme is characteristic of the paranoid's hermeneutics – , the sound technician played by John Travolta enters a tireless investigative spiral, whose infernal machine only stops turning when he finally repeats the tragedy as farce, in the heady sequence in which his companion, who embarked on the detective venture with him, is murdered while the Fireworks light up the sky over Philadelphia during Independence Day celebrations.

The Fabelmans reaches similar conclusions about the power of transforming reality through cinematic manipulation, but the consequences of this change of point of view, in Spielberg's universe, are totally different from those we would see if it were a Brian De Palma film. In The Fabelmans, the discovery of betrayal brings mother and son closer together, creates complicity between them, and reinforces the emotional bond that unites them. The intimate catastrophe is transformed into the renewal of the parental contract. And the fact witnessed in the film is never in doubt: what was filmed really happened, with this belief in the cinematographic image as a revelation of truth being the inescapable condition for reconciliation on the plane of reality to become possible.

In Brian De Palma's cinema, it would be the exact opposite: the image would not give access to the revelation of truth, but to another image, which would, in turn, rest on another. Fitting of doubles, vertigo of copies (no original to back them up). There is no longer transparency, but rather “masked opacity”, a lapidary formula that guides this book. The “syndrome Blow-Up”, in De Palma, always adds to the “effect Vertigo” – the other axis of the Depalmian Mannerist gear –, to the obfuscating power of an image that, as in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, a body that falls (Vertigo, 1958), causes visual deception not because it hides something, but because it displays it in excess.

Unlike what happens in Spielberg's cinema, in Brian De Palma it is necessary to distrust the image, never truly believe in it in the way of a child amazed at the appearance of a flying saucer. Vision as a tool of knowledge has failed, without the fable-man (Fabelman) being able to come to help or redeem it through the “magic of cinema” combined with faith in good feelings. The obsession with the image now leads to the abyss and tragedy, or rather, the tragedy of mise en abyme.[iii]

Or just frustration, as Brian De Palma learned early on, even before becoming a filmmaker. Wellington Sari describes, in an account similar to a cinematic script, the scene in which a young and inexperienced Brian De Palma perches in the top of a tree armed with a camera with which he intends to record his father's supposed adultery: “Through the viewfinder , the boy sees a man and a woman, framed by the window frame. Click. Click. There is an ellipse. When developing the photographs, a disappointment: is it a kiss? A warm hug? A little secret told in the ear? No, it's just an illusion caused by perspective. A complicit look? Embalmed by photographic rigidity, the gesture is lost in ambiguity. Mission not accomplished: the young man was unable to obtain images that prove that his father, an orthopedic surgeon, is having an extramarital affair with one of the nurses at the hospital. Jefferson Medical College. Nor did the tape recorder, installed by the boy on his father's telephone, provide irrefutable proof.”

The “mother scene”, thus, gives rise to the birth of the “watchman protagonist”, another prodigious expression with which Wellington Sari clarifies the modus operandi of Brian De Palma's cinema, in which the panoptic regime of vision, as the director almost didactically explains in Serpent eyes (Snake Eyes, 1998) e Femme Fatale (2002), it is less the guarantee of total transparency than the entanglement in a myriad of simulacra. The vigilant eye sees everything except what it was looking for. It's the police survey of “The Stolen Letter”, a story by Edgar Allan Poe discussed at the beginning of the book, when we comment on this paradox of vision that scrutinizes every millimeter of space, but misses the elementary, perhaps the trivial, invisible because too visible.

An excerpt from the book, words by Wellington Sari, via Google Translate:

...As in other witnesses of shocking images, such as Nancy Allen's character in Dressed to Kill, the eyes seem to act as diaphragms that need to open wider to receive the light of the unusual event that unfolds before them.

Let us also remember that excess light, or seeing too much, is problematic. Let us rescue the grains in Greetings (Lloyd finds the image of JFK's assassin in the abstract shaded area of ​​a photograph) or the ricochet of the light beam in Femme Fatale, a 2002 film (to really be able to see, in a world overflowing with images, Laure needs to close her eyes and dive into herself) as manifestations thought up by De Palma that serve to draw attention to the fallibility of vision. Here is another aspect of the masked opacity exercised by the filmmaker: every time the light of truth shines, a shadowy zone appears.

Gillian's illuminated eyes in The Fury are, in fact, symptoms of a dark, destructive power (which ends up exploding John Cassavetes' character). But in Domino (2019), already in the final sprint of his career, the director addresses head-on, and not through analogy, the issue of the fabrication of images as a terrorist act.

4.1. The great witness

The unusual Brazilian title for Roy Baker's film, Only God as a witness, is tempting: if the original A Night to Remember suggests an inner gaze in a literal translation, "a night to remember" would evoke the act of scrutinizing memory in the flow of time, the version chosen for our market aims at the opposite, at the definitive external point of view, that of the Creator. It is prudent not to get too attached to this delirious version, but to embrace its new analogy, at least for a moment: the title takes away from the lookout Fleet and his companion on the topsail their very reason for being. If they are the eyes of the ship and are excluded from the condition of witnesses, then they are nothing.

Or, to be more fair with the possible intentions of those responsible for the version, it adds a religious aspect to the shipwreck. 50. God, to the incomprehension of human beings, only observes the great tragedy. In other words, the effects of his own design. The divine point of view is the gaze of the Creator, but in cinematic jargon it is also the technical name for a camera angle (elevated, in extreme low-angle). De Palma's use of this resource should not seem, at this point, like anything new.

The constant presence of the eye that sees from the sky is a relevant access key to the creative thought articulated by the filmmaker. It is his mastermind certificate, a constituent element of the masked opacity.

The configuration composed of the protagonist-watchman figure and that of the Creator, who watches his own machinations with great wisdom and omniscience, is a cinematic situation, analogous to the director's position. It can be found both in the imaginary conjured up from the Brazilian version of A Night to Remember and in virtually any film that uses a camera (excluding from the equation, of course, the term protagonist-watchman, which we developed thinking specifically about De Palma's style). The simple recurrence of the use of God's point of view, as can be seen in the images selected from Body Double and Passion, could already be enough for the effect to draw attention to itself.

Episode 14 - Raising Cain (1992) & The Fury (1978) with Filmmaker Peet Gelderblom

On the latest episode of The G.O.A.T. Craig chats with filmmaker Peet Gelderblom about the work he did that lead to the commercial release of Brian De Palma's Raising Cain - Re-Cut. The conversation ends with a look at an exciting sequence from De Palma's follow-up to Carrie, The Fury.

The Palisades Fire roared through Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, and has burned more than 21,000 acres as of Friday afternoon.

Reports Tuesday night appeared to show Palisades Charter High School was engulfed in flames. A Los Angeles-based TV reporter and cameraman were fighting the fires as darkness fell. The cameraman, who went to Palisades High, said: "This is heartbreaking. This is my alma mater. The baseball field is totally gone, some of the buildings are gone."

Despite the carnage the Southern California fires have left in the surrounding community, there’s something the Pacific Palisades community can smile about — the home of the Dolphins is intact.

I went to the Palisades Charter campus on Friday afternoon to see what the status of the school was. What was left? What’s gone? How bad is it?

The answers: A lot. Not a lot. Not that bad — and that’s good.

The backside of the campus saw damage. A number of classrooms and some bungalow-type buildings burned down, but a majority of the campus is unscathed.

The football field and baseball field are fully intact. The front of the school, where a large grass quad sits, is as green as can be. The basketball gym is untouched. The aquatic center is in great shape.

"There’s no telling when students will be back on campus and in classrooms," Fattal writes. "It’s possible some athletic activity, like basketball and soccer practice can take place so those teams can play games, but the overall condition of the school is in good standing considering the apocalyptic images seen from this week’s wildfires in Los Angeles."

Casualties of War, Brian De Palma's devastating and brilliant 1989 feature film starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox, tells the true story of the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by a patrol of American soldiers. "When you leave the theatre," wrote Pauline Kael in her review, "you'll probably find that you're not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything." De Palma himself said: "It's a film I still have a hard time watching because it's so disturbing. It's one of the most horrific stories you can imagine."

Drawing on a wealth of rare material, including military archives, correspondence and unpublished screenplays, Nathan Réra revisits the 1969 book by Daniel Lang that documented the actual events, examines two films from the early 1970s inspired by Lang's work, and analyses a series of unproduced scripts written over a period of many years, before exploring in detail the making and reception of De Palma's film. More than just a production history, Réra's text delves into the aesthetic, ethical and political issues surrounding screen representations of the Vietnam War, and violence against women in the context of armed conflict.

This fascinating and unusual book uses Brian De Palma's unappreciated Vietnam masterpiece as a portal into the collision of history, journalism, politics and the moviemaking process. Nathan Réra brings academic rigor and a storytelling gift to this intriguing investigation into the long and painful transformation of a horrific incident into art.

- Julie Salamon, author of The Devil's Candy.

What began in admiration of Brian De Palma's remarkable film Casualties of War became an intrepid, rigorous investigation for Nathan Réra: a probe into the original, horrendous Vietnam War incident, the extraordinary, journalistic book it gave rise to, and the many attempts (realised or not) to bring this difficult, confronting material to the screen in all its complexity. Ending on a note of autobiographical revelation, this book delves deeply, emerging with an abundance of rich insights.

- Adrian Martin, author of Filmmakers Thinking.

He’s really equally devoted to both camera and his actors. He loves actors. So you get that sense that you can trust him. Because I was a huge fan of Brian’s, I felt like with this character, I could really go for it and take chances and get kind of wild, and that he would use the right takes. So I felt safe with him. I also think he’s a very intuitive filmmaker, in that he tests the range of his actors. In the first few days that we worked together, he would, you know, do a lot of takes and see what the range of my instrument was. And he knew, like, what takes I was better at, or how long I could go before I lost my concentration or had peaked. And I remember I was doing a scene with Carla Gugino in the stairwell, and it never really felt a hundred percent. But he said, “All right, we got it,” you know, and it was lunch, and all right, we’ll go and do the other scene. So I’m at lunch, and I’m thinking about the other scene. We came back from lunch, and he said we’re going to do that scene again. And it was quite brilliant, because then we did it, and it was all there – it just came together perfectly. And it occurred to me that that’s a very intuitive filmmaker, that’s so in sync with his actors, that he knows when they’re going to be firing properly.