Huffington Post's Giuseppe Fantasia also caught up with De Palma and posted the interview yesterday. Here's an excerpt, with the assistance of Google Translation:

"The crucial problem is climate change. We have not been up to a responsibility that we have towards the environment, and that consists of having to protect it, which is our crucial role. Someone like Trump does not want to put it in his head and even goes so far as to deny that this is the role of America. Children will have to face a world different from this one in which we have not been able to safeguard what is around us. Thumberg is right to point this out to us. We are the ones who are living the life unlivable to them. Isn't it terrible?"

Here at the Lido, where the 76th International Film Festival is underway, today Brian De Palma, director-symbol of New Hollywood origin, "father" of tension-rich impact shots, such as the characteristic slow motion shot or 360 ° rotation of the camera around a body, the worthy heir of Alfred Hitchcock whose styles and manners have been revisited. From Carrie - which featured his ex-wife Nancy Allen - up to Blow Out, Scarface, The Untouchables and Carlito's Way, just to name a few, his work has contributed to maintaining the thriller genre while making suspense his strong point. That word, which has a different sound depending on whether it is pronounced in English or in French, is preferable to fear, which has nevertheless always managed to be conveyed in its own way in his films. "I've always created it, even though I'm not a master like Hitchcock. When I make films, it's as if they were a canvas that involves the audience in the protagonists and their personas, and all facets of the characters. In any case, today, given the situation we are experiencing, there is something to be afraid of."

"In America" - he adds - "we have a crazy president, but unfortunately he is our president." And yet, we point out to him, there is a large slice of the population that voted for him and continues to love him. "We are living in a very particular period," he replies. "We have never had such a president and I hope he will not be re-elected." "We can call it the last bastion of white America," he adds. "America is a great country that is based on migratory flows and that has always tried to include migrants. What he is doing, as we know, is keeping them out, even though our country has always welcomed those who are different, it has always tried to integrate it. The mistake lies in having created a structure that is exclusive, rather than inclusive." Also in Italy, we point out to him, we are experiencing a situation in many ways similar. "I don't know much about Italian politics," he says, "but I keep myself informed and I obviously have my ideas..."

...

Fighting the many bad things that surround us is a "Mission Impossible," wanting to mention one of his most beloved movies, which was followed with later chapters. "Cinema helped me a lot," he explains. "It gave me so much and it gives me so much today when I do it, but there is one thing that it gave me and made me discover even better, which is beauty. I am a visual storyteller, I tell the story through images. My goal is always to create stories that speak through images and I learned to tell stories through images even when politics was going to disturb what was around me. The real challenge was to be able to create those images despite what was happening, often in a dangerous and ridiculous way."

"See Life Through A Different Lens" is the title of the Masterclass organized by Mastercard which included him as a panelist together with the actresses Rossy De Palma, Nadine Labaki and our Valeria Golino. "It's what we do with films: to see life with different eyes, from another perspective. We should always do it. It is a gift that not everyone has. I think of my job being to point the camera at someone or something and then show them how I live life. I'm inspired by Godard: cinema is in line with what is said in those seconds or minutes. Cinema," he concludes before saying goodbye, "is life seen from a different perspective.”

Few directors like Brian De Palma have explored so thoroughly the ways of narrating cinema. From the use of PoV, split screens, split-diopters, cinema screens, different types of camera angles, especially zeniths and low angles, perspective games, use of different artifacts to show different forms of vision: cameras, televisions, binoculars, mirrors, lenses, frames inside frames, etc. All in service of telling stories of thrillers, gangster and war, about obsessive, megalomaniac and voyeurist characters. This is the cinema of Brian De Palma.

For a director whose cinema would seem straight as a razor, Brian De Palma’s films radiate an undeniable queer energy. This unrepentant male gazer is perhaps an odd candidate for queer study, yet there are multiple avenues worth exploring that could help explain how De Palma has managed to penetrate the consciousness of many a gay viewer, this one included. I can name at least 10 gay-identifying critics off the top of my head who are entrenched fans, and I would argue that the intense appeal his films hold for us goes beyond visual voluptuousness or camp—though such matters are not incidental—and into a deeper, subconscious realm that rejects fixed identities, embraces marginalization, and acknowledges the integrity, even the necessity of social performance. De Palma’s dream states—and his dreams-within-dream states—are not merely alternate realities; they represent lives outside of normative functions. The false, bottomless narratives of some of his best thrillers—Sisters, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Raising Cain, Femme Fatale, Passion—contribute to an outrageous kind of sensuousness that short-circuits cognitive, linear reality.

Rare is the De Palma movie that prizes or reifies standards of normalcy, heterosexual or otherwise. There is a radical empathy at work, for instance, in Carrie (1976), which encourages identification with an ostensible “monster,” making it all but impossible to feel a deep, nearly spiritual connection to a mercilessly bullied outcast. Even Dressed to Kill (1980), a film that could easily be tagged as transphobic, functions on an emotional gut level primarily because it engenders sympathy for all of its main characters, each of whom is socially marginalized and thus in one way or another exists outside of traditional, progressive roles: Angie Dickinson’s sexually starved housewife, Nancy Allen’s persecuted sex worker, Keith Gordon’s lonely teen geek, and, most importantly, Michael Caine’s killer psychiatrist, whose trans identity, in the film’s crass, hothouse B-movie logic, is akin to a murderous split personality disorder, an extreme, R-rated riff on Norman Bates. Employing and slyly parodying Psycho’s psychiatric diagnosis, Dressed to Kill is an uncloseted, unbound film that exists at the intersection of various characters’—and viewers’—erotic fixations. Perspective is of paramount importance in De Palma’s films, not just because of the complex networks of who’s looking and who’s being looked at but also for the ways in which we are invited to experience desire right along with the people onscreen.

I’ve long found Femme Fatale to be De Palma’s queerest film, both for explicit narrative reasons and for something more connected to aesthetic perspective. The exhilaration of his 2002 thriller comes from its constant, absolute awareness of sex and identity as performances and the manner in which it unabashedly, knowingly lures the viewer into its world of luxurious game playing. In De Palma’s films, desire becomes spectacle, an unavoidable and somewhat serious extension of the director’s oft-reiterated belief that people go to the movies to watch women. “People have been looking at beautiful women since the beginning of time,” he shrugged to an interviewer at the time of Passion’s release in 2012. “All you have to do is look on your television screen or go Googling or pick up a magazine, and what do you see? Women, dressed or undressed. That’s what people are interested in.” He’s intractable on the point of visual pleasure and for decades has played enough variations on this theme to make it both persuasive and surprisingly rich. Femme Fatale doesn’t shift perspective away from De Palma’s fixations, but it so perversely and continually looks back at itself, refracting, shattering, and reconstituting its own gaze—and its characters’, and ours—that it effectively queers itself in the process.

Mark Kermode: "Although contemporary reviews were mixed, Obsession is now considered to be one of De Palma's finest."

HIFF 2019 will honor legendary director Brian De Palma with a Lifetime Achievement Award, along with a special screening of one of his many award-winning films. De Palma will also participate in a A Conversation With… at the festival with Festival co-chair Alec Baldwin.

Brian De Palma is an American film director and screenwriter. Some of his notable directing credits include BLOW OUT, SCARFACE, THE UNTOUCHABLES, CASUALTIES OF WAR, CARLITO’S WAY, CARRIE and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.

"Brian De Palma’s filmography suggests one word: excitement. Few directors in movie history have generated the kinds of feelings found in Brian’s films,” said HIFF Co-Chairman Alec Baldwin. “Although he often worked with big stars and great writers, Brian is responsible for most of the excitement in his films."

Thierry Frémaux, who has been with the Lumière Institute for decades, and is also Artistic Director and General Delegate for the Cannes Film Festival, opened with a tribute to Agnès Varda, who died earlier today. Frémaux was then joined by Tavernier to welcome De Palma to the stage. (Recall that last June, De Palma expressed his anger to Les Inrockuptibles' Jacky Goldberg about an unfinished version of Domino having been screened for consideration for Cannes 2018. "I'm furious," De Palma exclaimed at the time, "and you can print that! The film was screened without post-synchronization, non-mixed, non-graded, and without my consent, to Thierry Frémaux, who must have asked himself 'What the heck is this?' The producers eventually found the money and we finished it last week. I presume it'll soon be shown in some festival. But seriously, what a pain!")

One final note before the rest of the pictures below: at some point of the day in between these two events, De Palma and Lehman were interviewed by TV channel France 3 Rhône-Alpes. A large picture from the latter is at the end of this post. But first, pics of Brian De Palma on stage with Bertrand Tavernier and Thierry Frémaux...

Of course, let us not forget that De Palma has an entire feature film that revolves around Valentine's Day...