In a new interview posted yesterday by Variety's Jon Asp (from the Norwegian Film Festival at Haugesund), Trier is asked how he comes up with ideas. "I like working intuitively," Trier responds, "in what I call dirty formalism, or pop formalism. I jokingly say that our films should be like great albums with different songs. I am a big fan of Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now, which could be very specific conceptual things, but it was a warm formalism, it didn’t alienate you. I’m also a very big fan of Brian De Palma. I believe in the idea of doing a cinematic set piece, like Conrad’s diary, it’s like film in itself, or the car crash sequence with Isabelle, and the association of the son thinking of his mother and the last moments of her death, are whole set pieces, a film within the film. So it’s like an album. You have different songs, hopefully most of them are hits."

De Palma
Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow, USA, 2015, DCP, 107m
Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s fleet and bountiful portrait covers the career of the number one iconoclast of American cinema, the man who gave us Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Carlito’s Way. Their film moves at the speed of De Palma’s thought (and sometimes works in subtle, witty counterpoint) as he goes title by title, covering his life from science nerd to New Hollywood bad boy to grand old man, and describes his ever-shifting position in this thing we call the movie business. Deceptively simple, De Palma is finally many things at once. It is a film about the craft of filmmaking—how it’s practiced and how it can be so easily distorted and debased. It’s an insightful and often hilarious tour through American moviemaking from the 1960s to the present, and a primer on how movies are made and unmade. And it’s a surprising, lively, and unexpectedly moving portrait of a great, irascible, unapologetic, and uncompromising New York artist. In conjunction with this film, we will also be showing De Palma’s masterpiece Blow Out. North American Premiere

Blow Out
Brian De Palma, USA, 1981, 35mm, 107m
One of Brian De Palma’s greatest films and one of the great American films of the 1980s, Blow Out is such a hallucinatory, emotionally and visually commanding experience that the term “thriller” seems insufficient. De Palma takes a variety of elements—the Kennedy assassination; Chappaquiddick; Antonioni’s Blow-Up; the slasher genre that was then in full flower; elements of Detective Bob Leuci’s experiences working undercover for the Knapp Commission; the harshness and sadness of American life; and, as ever, Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and swirls and mixes them into a film that builds to a truly shattering conclusion. With John Travolta, in what is undoubtedly his greatest performance, as the sound man for low-budget movies who accidentally records a murder; Nancy Allen, absolutely heartbreaking, as the girl caught in the middle; John Lithgow as the hired killer; and De Palma stalwart Dennis Franz as the world’s biggest sleaze. This was the second of three collaborations between De Palma and the master DP Vilmos Zsigmond. MGM Home Entertainment.

The director was also careful to separate the work environment from the home front, though he admits part of the appeal in working with Gerwig is that oft-permeable barrier. “Making a movie is all-encompassing. When I’m writing and casting and prepping and shooting, it’s a huge part of my life, so naturally I’m thinking and talking about it a lot, everywhere. But when we’re doing it together, it can be almost easier,” he says. “We both have the same thing in mind. Even when we have dinner, when we go off-topic, if something comes up that strikes us, we’ll be, ‘That’s good, write that down.’”

While the easy relationship was a boon for the film, working on a Baumbach film is never easy, with or without Gerwig. “There were very challenging days on set – Noah is a demanding filmmaker,” says [Lola] Kirke, a relative newcomer to the film world. “On IMDb, it says one scene was shot in 65 takes. No, all scenes were shot that way. I don’t think I ever did less than 30, even of something like my hand putting pasta down on a table. … Noah and Greta are very particular about saying the lines as they are on the page – you have to be word-perfect.”

If some intimidation and repetitiveness was the cost of the film, then it was well worth it. Mistress America is built on tight, twisty language and the almost inpercetible tics that make up a personality – not something easily captured on the fly. It’s also the rare film focusing on two strongly defined female characters, neither of whom is fighting over something so trivial as a man or money.

"Noah and Greta were intent on telling another narrative, something that’s been reserved for more, like, art-house films,” Kirke says. “This movie lends itself to a wider audience because it is a comedy, and that’s the thing that Greta brings to Noah’s already stellar work: pathos and heart.”

For his part, Baumbach isn’t quite ready to completely abandon his independent work. “We’re both going to do things separately, but it’s something we’d definitely like to do,” the director says of future Gerwig collaborations. Until then, he is putting the finishing touches on a project a world apart from Mistress America’s sunny humour: a documentary about thriller master Brian De Palma.

Now if someone could only get the three of them in a room together, we’d have something truly special.

The morning after this party, it was announced that De Palma would be honored with the Glory to the Filmmaker Award at next month's Venice Film Festival, with the world premiere of the Baumbach and Paltrow documentary on De Palma to follow immediately afterward.

A few days before the Baumbach premiere, Sonia Moskowitz snapped this photo (at right) of De Palma and an unnamed friend on August 8, at the Authors Night for the East Hampton Library.

Martin Scorsese is thanked in the opening credits of Bombay Velvet, but that’s far from the last time this splashy Bollywood gangster spectacular pays its respects. As it charts the corrupt historical development of Mumbai into a Western-styled megalopolis, Anurag Kashyap’s garish but engrossing film reflects the transition through blatant hat-tips to Hollywood crime cinema, ranging from Jimmy Cagney star vehicles to Scorsese’s own underworld sagas. The result — co-edited, no less, by the latter’s right-hand woman, Thelma Schoonmaker — may lack the charging formal brio of Kashyap’s 2012 Cannes sensation Gangs of Wasseypur, but it’s clear why the pic has already achieved substantial international distribution. Its Locarno festival date could usher in a second wave of cinephile appreciation.

“Our love story will be epic; our life, a smash hit,” our hero informs his paramour toward the end of a sprawling narrative that has already seen its fair share of drama writ large. It’s a line perfectly representative of a script that’s bigger on suds than subtlety, and hyper-conscious throughout of its medium — its every character living in a movie of their own making. When another states that “life is not Double Indemnity,” he’s only partially correct: Life, at least as Bombay Velvet knows it, simply follows a different frame of genre reference, as Kashyap packs proceedings with unveiled allusions to gangster-cinema touchstones. A recurring line of dialogue is appropriated from The Roaring Twenties (itself excerpted on screen), a climactic shootout slavishly restages Brian De Palma’s Scarface, and so on and so forth.

Some may see this as idle pastiche, though it aptly reflects the characters’ own painstaking attempts at occidental self-styling: Young street punk Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor, grandson of golden-age Bollywood idol Raj) is rechristened “Johnny” when he begins work as a lackey for a sharp-suited local crime lord, ultimately managing the American Art Deco-style jazz club that gives the film its name. (Not for nothing, in this ersatz world of spangly imitation, does Bombay Velvet also sound like a cut-price brand of gin.) A sizable portion of the film’s heavily knotted plot, meanwhile, revolves around the aggressive urban planning of Mumbai’s city center in the 1960s and 1970s, whereby land was reclaimed from the sea for an overtly Manhattan-aping CBD.

Flashback 2003: Angry NWA rapper calls for boycott of Def Jam Scarface CD
"I saw this shit on BET talking about Music Inspired By Scarface and I said, 'What the hell?' Def Jam know they're wrong with that shit and they had us, NWA, on that shit with a gang of new artists. The movies that inspired me was KRUSH GROOVE, BEAT STREET and WILD STYLE, not no damn SCARFACE, and Def Jam is just doing anything for money. None of them Def Jam fools ever asked me or any other member of NWA if that bullshit-ass movie influenced us. Def Jam need to think before they do some bitch shit like that, because niggas like me will check their ass. So if y'all see that bitch-ass record - leave that shit in the store."

-MC Ren (The collection of music "inspired by" Scarface features the track "Dope Man" by NWA.)

"Following the ceremony," writes Variety's Leo Barraclough, "the festival will present the world premiere, out of competition, of the documentary De Palma, which is directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow. The film grew out of the time the two directors’ have spent with De Palma over more than 10 years, in which they chronicle De Palma’s six-decade long career, his life and his filmmaking process."

FEST DIRECTOR BARBERA: "DE PALMA'S CINEMA IS PLAYFUL TO THE NTH DEGREE"

In a statement, festival director Alberto Barbera said:

"The child of an artistic era (the ‘70s) full of innovative ferment, Brian De Palma has made a name for himself as one of the most skillful directors in constructing perfect narrative mechanics with great creative freedom, experimenting with new technical solutions, rejecting the classic rules of the language, abandoning himself to aesthetic virtuosity, and celebrating his favorite authors.

"When watching a movie by Brian De Palma, we revert to being basic spectators. Although our eyes are wide open to avoid falling into the trap, we know full well we’re bound to fall into it anyway.

"De Palma’s cinema is playful to the nth degree; it is a pleasure for the eyes and at the same time a game that tantalizes the cinephile. He has never lost the curiosity of the experimenter as he reinvents the already-seen, and when it comes to constructing and manipulating images, this fundamental trait makes De Palma one of the greatest innovators who came of age in the shadow of the New Hollywood."

According to Broadway World, Daniel Riedo, CEO of Jaeger-LeCoultre, said, "Jaeger-LeCoultre is proud to pay tribute to Brian De Palma with the Glory to the Filmmaker Award. For ten years, our company has supported the seventh art and the Venice International Film Festival through continuous promotion of cinema's creativity and ingenuity. Precision watches and the maximum expression of the cinematographic art are fruit of the same passion. Both call for months and even years of concentration and patience, in order for the virtuosity of talented professionals to lead to the creation of masterpieces of aesthetic and technical perfection, destined to last forever."

De Palma has presented seven films at the Venice Film Festival: Sisters (in the section Proposte di nuovi film, 1975), Blow Out (in the section Mezzogiorno/Mezzanotte, 1981), The Untouchables (special event, out of competition in 1987), Raising Cain (the closing film in competition, 1992), The Black Dahlia (which opened the 2006 festival in competition), Redacted (which won the Silver Lion at the 2007 festival), and Passion (2012, in competition).

"Unlike other great conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View and Twilight's Last Gleaming, Brian De Palma's Blow Out has a demented sense of humor. In some ways this makes its theme of institutional failure all the more discomforting. The plot surrounding a political assassination grows more outlandish by the scene, lending darkly comic implications and an overwhelming sense of helplessness to a film about the worst kind of warped patriotism.

"While recording sound in the countryside for a horror film, audio technician Jack Terry (John Travolta) accidently captures a car crash on tape. The occupants of the vehicle careen off a bridge and into a creek. Terry saves aspiring make-up artist Sally ([Nancy] Allen) but the driver, governor of Pennsylvania and a presidential hopeful, perishes. His death sends a shockwave throughout the nation, but the real drama unfolds when Jack and Sally begin to piece together how and why he was killed.

"De Palma, ever the cinephile, utilizes the components of film sound (repetition, recording, scratching) to great effect in scenes of tension. There's the woozy 360-degree shot in which Jack slowly discovers all of his tapes have been erased by a proactive assassin (John Lithgow), and the diabolical ending where a character's murder is captured on tape only to be reclaimed for use in a schlock horror film.

"Long takes and crane shots are pivotal to De Palma's examination of corrupt power structures and personal vulnerability. Multiple murder sequences are shot from above, looking down at the victim who is unaware they are about to perish.

"Blow Out, which screens at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Aug. 13 and 14, at Cinema Under the Stars in Mission Hills, is unflinchingly cynical about how quickly our individual freedoms can be compromised. "I hate to be observed," Sally confesses early on, but in De Palma's film she really has no choice in the matter."

CINEMATHEQUE NOIR SIDEBAR: THE PARANOID CONSPIRACY THRILLER OF THE 1970S
Meanwhile, a little later this month (8:30pm Wednesday August 26, and 6:30pm Thursday August 27), Blow Out screens from DCP at The Cinematheque in Vancouver. Each night is a double bill with the other film in the sidebar, Alan J. Pakula aforementioned The Parallax View, which screens from a 35mm print before Blow Out on August 26, and after Blow Out on August 27. The sidebar is part of The Cinematheque's Film Noir 2015 program, for which they've crafted a limited edition T-shirt featuring Rita Hayworth as Gilda.