Blow Out is a series of feints or false starts at one bad movie after another. Or it’s a bunch of bad movies simultaneously, when De Palma deploys his trademark split screen. The director lingers over all the abortive movie-making, getting distracted by the details just as Jack has been distracted from his movie-making job. We see Jack painstakingly assemble his crude movie, running the footage back and forth, marking the reel, rerunning the footage. We see Sam trying to get the right scream from actresses in a sound-proof box. And we see Burke stalking his prey, calling into the police so they think there’s a serial killer on the loose, and tapping and manipulating Jack’s phone.

De Palma obviously enjoys the mechanics of movie-making for themselves—the nuts and bolts scrabble for the right sound, the right visual, the right narrative, the right juxtaposition. There’s a pleasure in creation, even if what’s created is B-movie crap, or a jury-rigged reel made out of photos clipped from newsprint.

At the same time, bad movies are frustrating. The ineffectual scream is irritating and undercuts suspense. Burke murdering the wrong woman is a long tease that dead-ends. And Blow Out itself is an irritating watch in many ways, as the movie keeps getting distracted by the many other movies within it. The romance arc between Jack and Sally, in particular, is repeatedly interrupted and forestalled as they chase around the city in a series of pointless efforts to get someone, anyone, to look at and pay attention to Jack’s movie—an experience that many a would-be filmmaker can identify with.

The romance arc, and the film, end with Burke murdering Sally as Jack watches helplessly. He manages to kill Burke too late, and then holds Sally’s dead body as fireworks erupt for a patriotic Philadelphia celebration behind him. Fireworks are in film often a symbol for sex or consummation, but here there’s no consummation, as there was never really a romance. The horror went wrong and then the romance went wrong. Every movie is broken.

The final irony is that Jack does find his scream. Jack affixed Sally with a wire, and he therefore has a recording of her final calls for help. He dubs them into the original slasher, and Sam declares them perfect—just as De Palma must have signed off on Sally’s screams in the (supposedly) real film. It stretches credulity to think that Jack would use Sally’s screams for his B-movie job. He’s traumatized by her death, and there’s nothing in his character that suggests he’s capable of such ghoulish callousness.

But the gratuitous narrative flaw fits neatly into De Palma’s themes. Movies are spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximations of reality—or, worse, as the shower scene suggests, they’re spliced together, ad hoc, unconvincing approximation of other movies. Horror, romance, American greatness; for De Palma they all collapse into a scattering of dingy, unconvincing tropes, plot holes, exploitation, and frustrating loose ends. It’s tacky and depressing. And yet, there’s a joy in finding that perfectly right, wrong scream for that perfectly wrong, right scene. In Blow Out, the beauty of the movie, as perhaps the beauty of life, is in its failures.

Beaks: Getting back to PASSION, and the power struggle dynamic between Noomi and Rachel, there's that great kissing scene that Rachel turns back on Noomi. Was that scripted? 

De Palma: Absolutely not. The girls did it on the day. When Noomi grabs her and gives her the kiss of death, and Rachel kisses her back leering at Noomi's assistant in the doorway... (Laughs) I would just sit behind the camera and smile. "My god, these girls are really doing it!" They did a lot of stuff like that. The way she's playing with her in the car. "I want to be admired! I want to be loved!" She kisses her, and Noomi's like, "What the hell is going on here?" And Rachel picks up the lipstick and says, "You need a little color." (Laughs) It's hilarious!

Beaks: It's very kinky, and it's very much of a piece with your other erotic thrillers. By the way, how do you feel about being the "master of the erotic thriller"?

De Palma: Well, I don't think we can be that erotic anymore on the screen. We can't compete with cable. It's kind of amazing. We can't do the kind of nudity they do on cable. I don't know what's comparable to an X these days, but you'd get in a lot of trouble doing that stuff they do on cable on the big screen. Eroticism and pornography have sort of gone to cable television and the web, and I don't know if you can do much of it in movies anymore. You can only be very suggestive. But this is a movie about women for women basically, and you don't have to get too explicit. That scene where the guy uses the camera to videotape their making out in the hotel room, I basically just gave them a camera and said, "Just do whatever you would do." (Laughs) Believe me, they did some incredible things.

In a 2013 interview, Ain't It Cool's Mr Beaks asked De Palma about the Treasure screenplay:

Beaks: I know you wrote a remake of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE long ago that put an interesting spin on Huston's film. What's your feeling about remakes in general?

De Palma: Well, if you have a very good idea… obviously, TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is a fantastic movie. To remake that is a little madness. But I had a very good idea: instead of gold, I was going to make it about cocaine. You get it up there in the mountain it's kind of dealing with dust, but when you get it on the streets of New York it's like solid gold. And not only do you get corrupted because of the money, you get corrupted because of the drug. That gave me a really good idea. I came up with that idea so many years ago it's hard to remember. But it's very difficult to remake a classic movie. We were very fortunate with SCARFACE. Howard Hawks's SCARFACE is really good.

Beaks: Whatever happened to your TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE?

De Palma: I have no idea. I wrote it so long ago, I don't even remember what I even did with it.

Beaks: I found a copy of the screenplay.

De Palma: You're kidding! I didn't even know there was a copy of the screenplay.

Beaks: I'm always hunting for those scripts of yours that never got made, and a friend of mine tracked this one down.

De Palma: How is it?

Beaks: It's great! I love the twist you put on it. It starts out so much like the original film that I wasn't sure what you were up to, but then it begins to go its own way, and it's really terrific. If you could ever get that together, I'd love to see that movie.

De Palma: Man. I haven't thought that about that in thirty or so years. (Laughs)

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?