It’s Die Hard in a casino!

This week, hosts Phil and Liam are stepping into the swirling, neon-drenched chaos of Brian De Palma’s SNAKE EYES (1998) - joined by none other than Travis Woods, the highly acclaimed film writer who is literally writing the book on De Palma.

During a high-profile boxing match in Atlantic City, corrupt local detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) witnesses the assassination of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, who was being guarded by his best friend, US Navy Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise). With thousands of people trapped inside the casino, and a hurricane on the way, the building becomes a deadly pressure cooker, and as Santoro unearths a dark conspiracy, he must decide whether to take a pay off and look the other way…or risk everything to expose the truth.

What follows is a pressure-cooker thriller set almost entirely inside this one building, packed with impossibly complex tracking shots, split diopters galore, and some of the most ostentatious filmmaking flexes of De Palma’s career. We break down how Snake Eyes really is both “Die Hard in a casino” and “Die Hard 2 in a casino”, why it’s a perfect showcase for Cage’s full-throttle charisma, and how De Palma - the king of cinematic maximalism - injects pure operatic style into a film that’s basically one long unraveling conspiracy. Plus, Travis takes us deep into De Palma’s career, his recurring themes of surveillance, voyeurism, and deception, and where Snake Eyes fits amidst the great man’s remarkable legacy. So throw on your loudest suit, place your bets, and join us as we go all-in on this gloriously demented, spectacularly sleazy thriller!

Here comes the pain, baby!

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)