And then today, Piper De Palma posted the pic below on her Instagram. Let's follow the zoom around the room, so to speak: Brian De Palma, flanked by Susan Lehman and Piper, sits at twelve o'clock; then going clockwise, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, David Koepp, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Jake Paltrow, Jay Cocks, and, in the center, Wes Anderson. A legendary line-up, indeed.

(Thanks to Adam Zanzie, via a Nick Newman tweet.)

"From early masterworks such as Phantom of the Paradise to the overlooked and incendiary Domino, De Palma is gifted at crafting moments that don’t just linger, they burrow. Whether it’s a mind-bending split diopter, a startlingly vibrant color palette, or an assaultive act of violence, his films are unforgettable. This made selecting only ten shots a near-impossible task. One could select one-hundred shots from any given De Palma film and it still wouldn’t be a complete catalog of his skill. But the following ten shots are the ones that immediately come to mind when thinking about what makes De Palma the director he is."

I'll leave it to you to go to Film School Rejects to discover which shots she has chosen (with gifs included), and what she has to say about them... but, well, when you read the first one here, I think you'll see that you're in for a treat:

Hi, Mom! (1970)

The Shot: A woman tests out her new camera by locating Robert De Niro‘s Jon Robin in her field of vision and zooming in on him.

The Obsession: One of De Palma’s signature components is voyeurism. In Hi, Mom!, a film very much about both active and passive forms of looking and observation, this moment highlights an intrinsic curiosity that is found across De Palma’s filmography. While aspiring pornographer Jon looks at his own equipment, this woman turns her attention to him in order to test out the zoom feature. She decides to zoom in on a stranger across the room. She remarks that he becomes blurrier the closer she zooms in, while the focus eventually adjusts as Jon turns his own camera on her.

It’s a rather insignificant moment, one that has very little bearing on the film’s narrative, but it captures some of the most prominent themes in the film. Here, the camera is a novelty, and the prospect of using it to capture footage of a stranger is a bit of lighthearted fun to the female patron, while to Jon it is a tool for invasive voyeurism. There’s a duality to the tool, one that contradicts and complicates any attempt to classify an inherent quality of the camera.

There are also contractions in its very mechanism. As the woman remarks, the closer she gets to Jon, the more the image becomes blurry. While she remains on the other side of the room, she gets a sense of proximity but loses clarity. This shot is also a remarkable comment on the impulses of both De Palma and his characters — when anyone has a camera in hand, they can’t help but aim it at another person. Sure, De Palma is a voyeur. Who isn’t?

-De Palma says that during the pandemic confinement, he has written a screenplay, and that he and Susan Lehman are "working on another book."

-Regarding Predator, De Palma says: "I have a Weinstein character in a project I’m working on, but he’s sort of a minor character. It looks like it has a lot to do with him, but the real sexual predator is based on a very famous star who was trying to do all the women in the casting sessions in the mid-1970s. I had a real insight into it because when I was casting Carrie, I was seeing every young actor and actress in Hollywood. And so was Mr. X, so the girls had a lot to say about what happened in their casting sessions. It’s a jungle out there."

-De Palma "went out and got a drone" so he could test out a cinematic idea he had for a short film Emma Cline was working on.

-De Palma and Lehman watched Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968) recently, and then read the original short story by John Cheever right afterward.

-De Palma tells Cline that he's reading a biography of Francis Ford Coppola ("I’m right now in the Francis Ford book dealing with the making of The Godfather"), and that he was adding Oliver Stone's autobiography on his list to read.

-Cline and De Palma have both read Susanna Moore's memoir, Miss Aluminum. De Palma tells Cline that he knew Susanna because her husband, Richard Sylbert, "did a couple of my movies. He was a great, great designer, and a very funny, witty character. He was always hard to get for films, because he was always working."

-They've both also read Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye, about the making of Chinatown. "It was fascinating," De Palma says.

Last November, pre-pandemic, Emma Cline was not at her writing desk—at least not all the time. Instead, the novelist was busy on set, undertaking her first foray as a director, for a 10-minute short she wrote called “Jagger.” Produced by Gagosian Gallery, the film was shot on location in New York City and in Amagansett on Long Island. For Cline, the experience seems to have been a baptism by fire, from running lines with the actors to negotiating the infinite complexities of the editing process. Luckily, she had a few mentor friends ready with advice, one of them being the iconic filmmaker Brian De Palma, who not only read the script and offered insights, but even screened a daily or two.

For fans of her gorgeous, Charles Manson–inflected debut novel, The Girls, or of her short stories that regularly appear in The New Yorker, Cline’s incursion into the world of cinema shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. The 31-year-old California native is one of contemporary fiction’s most stylish and visually rich world-builders. Cline paints rooms, neighborhoods, and whole scenes with careful attention to colors, clothes, attitudes, and body language—a whole sensorial universe takes shape in her elegant prose. This September, Cline releases her first collection of short stories, Daddy (one expects that the author must be bracing for an onslaught of Sylvia Plath comparisons, but what’s impressive about Cline as a writer is her willingness to stand face-to-face with darkness, and weirdness, rather than merely slink around it). Each of the ten stories is a feast of demented American dreams—hilarious, captivating, horrifying—and one only hopes that Cline doesn’t quit her day job for a Hollywood film career. Cline, in Los Angeles, and De Palma, on Long Island, were scheduled to talk on July 6, but cinema’s great maestro, Ennio Morricone, died that day, so they spoke two days later. —CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN

———

EMMA CLINE: I heard that you’ve got sad news.

BRIAN DE PALMA: Yes. One of the greatest composers, Mr. Morricone, died two days ago. He did a couple of scores for me.

CLINE: Casualties of War and The Untouchables, right?

DE PALMA: Yes, and he did a really fine score to Mission to Mars. But we’re not here to talk about me. What have you been doing since you’ve been confined?

CLINE: I’ve been in L.A. I have been reading and sort of writing, but to be honest, I haven’t been working very much. Have you been working?

DE PALMA: Yeah, I wrote another screenplay, and then Susan [Lehman] and I are working on another book. It’s been long, endless days here in the country where the big thing to worry about is where and what I’m going to eat next.

CLINE: That’s about how my days are organized, too. It was a run of lentils, but I’ve hit the end. I can’t eat them anymore. I actually do have a book draft that I’m finishing up, so I just have a whole lot of notes. I’m about to dive into that in a big way.

DE PALMA: Another novel?

CLINE: Yes, another novel. It’s actually set where you are right now, on Long Island. I feel like you might have been at some of the parties that are in this book.

DE PALMA: In fact, I met you at one of those parties. Let me ask you how the movie you were making turned out.

CLINE: It’s still not finished. I’m struggling with the ending.

DE PALMA: How did you like directing and screenwriting?

CLINE: I loved directing. Screenwriting felt more similar to things I’ve done before—at least under the same umbrella. It felt freeing in some ways, but very strange to think visually and cinematically. I mean, I do think visually as a rule. I think a lot about how things look in the stories I’m writing, but to actually write something that was going to be translated into visuals was interesting. Directing was incredible, like the best drug in the world, but what I found is that I often had to stop myself from totally flipping into observer mode, which is more my writing self.

DE PALMA: The quiet little girl in the corner.

CLINE: Yes, exactly. I had to resist doing that, because you can’t just be the quiet little girl in the corner. It was so fascinating. I’m in awe of directors who do it. It’s so intense. The idea that you made two movies in a year blows my mind.

DE PALMA: It’s what we do. We get the opportunity and we go to work.

CLINE: It’s like you have to light all these different fuses on all these different projects and wait until one makes it. It’s just a different way of approaching projects than I’ve ever done before. There’s all this timing that has to fall into place. All this money.

DE PALMA: Yeah, but the interesting thing about it, whether you’re working within the studio system or independently, is that a lot of getting a movie off the ground depends on who’s in it. You suggest some names, and they say, “Well, can we get so and so?” It’s always this process of negotiating who they think is hot enough for them to finance the project at that moment.

CLINE: It’s wild to me. But you haven’t seen my new ending yet.

DE PALMA: I’m looking forward to it. Did your idea for the script change at all because of the people you cast?

CLINE: I think the place where it changed the most was in the editing room. That was a new experience for me. You’re in this weird dorm room, with a bunch of bad snacks, with your editor. And you just go in on this granular, second-by-second focus on the project. I loved it, but it changed the shape of the movie I thought I was making. Now that I’ve had that experience, I understand there are moments in filming when you need a different flavor and you need to cover your ass a bit in that way. But the editing was really loose and fun and freeing. And the movie will adapt to the edit, if you have what you need in there.

DE PALMA: Do you have any more directing plans for the future?

CLINE: I’m working on two movie ideas—just outlines now, which I find really fun.

DE PALMA: Well, you’re in Hollywood, Emma.

CLINE: Wait, two movies isn’t enough to have on the backburner? You think I need more?

DE PALMA: I was talking to Greta Gerwig the other day, and I said, “Greta, you have a huge hit. You should be out there making deals for all those projects that you couldn’t previously get off the ground.” Anyway, you did a really terrific job with your recent story [“White Noise,” based on a Harvey Weinstein–like narrator] in The New Yorker.

CLINE: Oh, thank you. You’re working on a Weinstein project, right? Or Weinstein-inspired.

DE PALMA: I have a Weinstein character in a project I’m working on, but he’s sort of a minor character. It looks like it has a lot to do with him, but the real sexual predator is based on a very famous star who was trying to do all the women in the casting sessions in the mid-1970s.

CLINE: Ooh, that sounds good.

DE PALMA: I had a real insight into it because when I was casting Carrie, I was seeing every young actor and actress in Hollywood. And so was Mr. X, so the girls had a lot to say about what happened in their casting sessions. It’s a jungle out there.

CLINE: I’m curious, as someone who’s been in the movie business, if you found the Weinstein portrayal in my story accurate-ish. Or were there big factual errors, or distracting anachronisms?

DE PALMA: I had very little contact with Harvey, because I don’t like bullies. My older brother was a bully. But I remember I set up a luncheon for a director friend of mine when he brought his Irish movie to New York. Harvey was distributing the movie. I saw him at that luncheon and that was enough for me. Bullies take up all the oxygen in the room.

CLINE: Well, he did recover from coronavirus.

DE PALMA: Exactly. How did you put together Daddy?

CLINE: They’re stories that I’ve written over the last decade, most of them in the last couple of years. The title came out of thinking about a unifying theme, concerns or preoccupations that repeated themselves from story to story. Most of these stories are about older men, or younger women who see themselves in relationship to men. There’s something about the word that I thought was very funny and would make a good title.

DE PALMA: Do you have daddy issues?

CLINE: I guess I should anticipate that question. I suppose I do, in a sense, right? Like, am I super close to my father? No. Did I experience him as an angry, malevolent god figure as a child? Yes. I guess in that way you could say I had some psychosexual daddy problems, but I don’t know. Do you have daddy issues?

DE PALMA: No, I had mommy issues. My father was an orthopedic surgeon and was really not around. Consequently, he didn’t figure much in my upbringing.

CLINE: But you do have a vivid story about your father that I’ve heard you tell … going through his office, trailing him.

DE PALMA: Listening to your father set up an extramarital date on the telephone is an enlightening experience. I put a tap on the telephone. All that science fair background comes in handy. I was a science fair winner. I knew how to tap a phone at a very early age. Do you like overhearing conversations?

CLINE: Yeah. I think it’s a quality that unites a lot of the artists and writers I know. Moviemakers and writers have a sense of wanting to create or observe life as it happens, to look at other people and what they’re like.

DE PALMA: As we were leaving the house this morning and I was sitting in the car, I could hear our neighbors discussing something through the bushes. I couldn’t exactly hear what they were talking about, but I’d never heard these neighbors before. Did I perk up and try to listen? You bet. Who knows what great material you will get from observing conversations.

CLINE: I remember when I had my script for the film and you and I were talking. And you had this suggestion that was so cinematic about the little boy seeing his mother in bed with someone who she hadn’t come to the party with. The way we ended up filming it, he comes in—it’s late at night and he’s afraid, and he’s looking for his mom. So he comes into the room. But your thought was that maybe he should have a drone where he can see what the drone sees as he’s controlling it.

DE PALMA: I actually went out and got a drone and tried to do it.

CLINE: Did you see anyone having sex?

DE PALMA: I saw no one having sex in a hammock, no.

CLINE: Maybe you could use it to see what’s going on with these neighbors.

DE PALMA: It did feel very Rear Window.

That's just one of the fine moments in this two-hour-and-forty-minute podcast discussion between Gattanella and Hughes of seven Brian De Palma films. The podcast episode runs about the length of De Palma's Scarface, yet that film is not one of the ones included. The films the pair watched and then discussed on this episode are Sisters, Phantom Of The Paradise (Hughes remarks that she admires and appreciates how De Palma made Phantom a tight and lean 90-minute film), Dressed To Kill, Body Double, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes, and Femme Fatale.

During the discussion on Raising Cain, Hughes has a bit of an epiphany:

Korey: I was saying when we first started this, that a lot of De Palma's movies, like Tarantino's movies, are obviously made by someone whose life revolves around movies. Like, I feel like De Palma's life on a personal level, is dominated by the pop culture he's consumed. And one thing I was thinking is that he has all these movies about multiple personalities, and they're all highly entertaining, and not even remotely psychologically plausible. And I think the reason for that is De Palma is filtering multiple personalities through pop culture. So he's not engaging with actual research on this condition in actual people. His movies address how pop culture addresses multiple personality disorder. So I feel like he's riffing on how we as a culture process this concept. Not the actual concept itself.

Jack: Well, in the case of Raising Cain, I watched an interview with him, and he said that he had a friend who was a child psychologist, and was trying to do tests about how children respond to this or that, and trauma and stuff like that. And I think in his head, he then bounced off that into what this movie became. So he starts from a very basic place, and then...

Korey: Yeah, I think that's what makes them so melodramatic and heightened, is that he's not telling a story about multiple personalities. He's telling a story about the stories we tell about multiple personalities. And I'm thinking that's what I think really unites his treatment of this concept in Sisters, in Dressed To Kill, in Raising Cain, is he's telling a story about the stories we tell.

A couple of years ago, I shared a video made by Carl Rodrigue and his friend from when they visited Mission: Impossible filming locations in Prague and London. Now the pair have put together a video (above) that collects their trips over recent years to filming locations from 11 of Brian De Palma's films.

In an email, Rodrigue writes:

These road trips about filming locations would not have been possible if I hadn’t met this friend, who is a not only a cinema buff, but also loves De Palma as much as you and I. Fun fact: we met on the Internet in 1996 looking for Murder a la Mod. We never found it of course and, as many De Palma fans, we had to wait until the Blow Out Criterion release to watch it.

Having said that, it’s a major treat to found yourself on any filming location, if you ask me.

Especially, the ones from De Palma’s movies!

Phantom of the Paradise

All pictures were taken in Dallas. We tried to visit the Greystone Mansion in California, but didn’t get the permission.

Same goes for the Majestic Theater in Dallas. Next time, we’ll buy tickets to see a show so we can enter.

Since we were not sure where the exterior scenes were shot, we still took pictures of the Majestic and I put one in the video.

Obsession

The street of the Courtlands' house is part of a walking tour you can take while in New Orleans. The house is apparently famous for being is some other movies as well as Obsession, we heard a guide saying. We had to wait for the tourists to leave to take our pictures.

Carrie

There are only three trees left near the place where Carrie walks.

As soon as we put a foot on the college where the volley ball scene was filmed, we went to talk to a guardian who was there and we were taken to the principal’s office. We explained our project, but didn’t have the permission to take pictures while students were there, and our tight schedule meant we were not able to wait.

We were a little discouraged as we encountered the same reception at the next college where Carrie walks out from the fire, but since the movie was made, it was changed to a museum, so we got lucky there.

Another luck : we found the road where Chris and Billy try to kill Carrie just a few weeks before we left for our second road trip.

The Fury

Again, our tight schedule prevented us from visiting other locations from The Fury. But we can agree on the fact that it’s one of the best scenes of the movie if not the best.

Dressed to Kill

The museum shots you see are not exactly the same as the movie, since that portion was in renovation when we visited. Still, the architecture is the about the same on all floors, so it wasn’t too hard to take pictures that look like the ones in the movie.

We were also amazed to find the painting you see at 2:08, so I to put it in the video.

Blow Out

It took us a while to get access to the bridge – it’s harder / more complicated than we first thought. And even then, as you’ll see in the first picture, we were on the opposite side. By the way, I don’t know how many accidents there are there, but as you can see, the barrier is still damaged! :-o

Do I have to tell you that the murder shot was taken in the men’s bathroom, and not the women's? ;)

Also, we went two times to Philadelphia. The first time, the place where Sally is killed was closed. Fortunately we got lucky the second time!

Body Double

Maybe the biggest disappointment of all was not getting permission to take pictures at the Beverly Hills mall.

It’s very hard to get a good shot of the Chemosphere House since vegetation and other houses are in the way.

While we were figuring how to take pictures of the beach house, a gentleman saw us and let us enter. Sometimes, it seems that our Quebec accent helps. People understand how far we've come and will give us freebies like this. That’s how we were able to get the picture you see at 3:09.

The tunnel is now closed – since many years ago, it seems – but you could still see the façade from the beach.

The Untouchables

I remember I told you about the time I went to Chicago in 2015 when the staircase was in renovation. Talk about a MAJOR disappointment! Still I took some other pictures in 2015 and of course we put Chicago on our map for the road trips of 2016 and even 2019.

We took a diner at the Houndstooth Saloon.

Maniacs that we are, we went all the way to Montana for the frontier scene.

I’m especially proud of the Capone shot on the stairs (3:39). I took it in 2015 and didn’t have the pictures of the movie with me that time, but I still got the right angle.

As for the church, what can I tell you? This one of my favorite shots of all time: the hands near the camera, the heads further and the depth of field which leads us all the way to the back of the church. This is badass composition. No wonder I used it as the thumbnail. ;)

Casualties of War

Not much to be said here since, as you know, these shots were the only ones possible to take.

Oh and yes, for the first one we had to stand there for a little while waiting for the tramway to come and be able to take matching pictures.

Raising Cain

The manager of the Raising Cain motel was kind enough to let us take our pictures. Very appreciated. Another time where our Quebec accent might have helped.

We took more pictures at the park, but the scenery sure changed a lot since 1992.

Another treat was to be able to take as many pictures as we wanted inside the police station of Raising Cain (in fact a town mall). We have documented pretty much the whole sequence-shot.

Mission: Impossible

Finally for Mission: Impossible, pretty much all the pictures are from the video I made in 2018. The only new one is the 5:12 one which I found a way to insert here.

I don’t know if I told you back then, but remember when Tom Cruise says to Emmanuelle Béart: “There was nobody on the bridge.” ? Well, I have been in Prague for a week, and went to Charles bridge maybe five or six times at different hours trying to get these kind of shots.

Tom Cruise is a liar : There’s ALWAYS someone on the bridge.

So that’s about it. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have many more pictures, so I’ll let you know when I’ll make some new videos about single films.

In the future, a third and final road trip in the States would include the east coast; especially in Miami for Scarface and New York for Carlito’s Way, Sisters, and some other shots from Dressed to Kill.

The Untouchables, Casualties of War, The Bonfire Of The Vanities, Raising Cain, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible... Brian De Palma didn't just make all those movies, he made all those movies... in a row. Nobody balances suspense, action, and character better than he does. Each film is a master class in building tension, with tracking shots, disconcerting angles, and split screens. And then he releases that tension with the blunt shock of violence. In any De Palma film, the camera is ultimately the star. De Palma is the son of a surgeon, and he went to Columbia for physics. But he quickly discovered where his true passion lay. You know him as a virtuosic movie director, but before that, he was a fixture of the experimental Greenwich Village movie scene of the 1960s. That's where he cast a then-unknown actor named Bobby De Niro. Fitting, since De Palma later became known for working with all the greatest actors. His very first Hollywood movie starred Orson Welles. Last summer, the Hamptons International Film Festival gave Brian De Palma the Lifetime Achievement Award. I was honored to speak with him in front of a live audience when he came to accept it.

De Palma responds: "This is a long funny story. I was head of the Columbia players. And the Varsity Show is a very big thing at Columbia. So there were two shows up to be voted for. And I was just an apprentice that was going to take over the Columbia Players the following year. So, in these situations, everybody's, you know, got their own sort of corrupt intent, because, if you do my play, I get to play the lead, and you get to direct, da da da. I knew nothing about this. There were two really good scripts. One by Steve Rossen, who was one of my school mates at Columbia, and the other one by Terry McNally, a very funny comedy." [A Columbia College obit of McNally, who passed away earlier this year, notes that "McNally wrote the 66th Annual Varsity Show, The Streets of New York, in 1958."] "And they fought for hours, and they were deadlocked, you know, like six-to-six, and it was getting late, and it was about midnight, and they said, they looked over to me, because I had read both scripts, and they said, well, let the kid decide. So I said, well, I think that Terry McNally's script is funny, let's do that one. 'Great!' Everybody leaves.

"That night, I was shooting my first short, which consisted of Pan coming out of the tunnel at 116th Street. I was not the director, I was just author and cinematographer. I get to the location and my director arrives, Gene Marner, I'll never forget his name. And he comes with his very Sicilian girlfriend named Charley. And she comes over to me, and she says, 'You fucking idiot! You didn't vote for the Rossen play? Didn't you know that Gene was going to direct it?' And I go, 'Huh?' [Baldwin laughs] And then they walked off. And they took the lead actor with them. So here I am, at 116th Street, at three in the morning, staring into an empty tunnel, saying, 'I'm gonna direct this now.'

Baldwin: "And that's it."

De Palma: "That's it."

Baldwin: "And you found some waitress at an all-night diner and said, 'Come with me, you're my lead!' You didn't need any actress for the shot?"

De Palma: "No, I had to go out and find my own actors and start all over again."

The article, with the headline, "So far, so close, the secrets of proximity in the cinema," includes image frames from Brian De Palma's Carrie and Blow Out. Lévesque discusses De Palma as "the undisputed master of the bifocal" --

The key is there, in the juxtaposition. De Palma’s work is replete with examples where the bifocal has not only narrative but psychological value. In Carrie, you can see the reaction of popular student Tommy (William Katt) at the front of the classroom and that of the ostracized Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in the back after reading a poem. Here, the bifocal makes it possible to “unite”, literally and figuratively, two students who seemingly separate everything.

In Pulsions (Dressed to Kill), Peter (Keith Gordon) sits in the police station waiting room while, beyond the bay window behind him, Detective Marino (Dennis Franz) and Doctor Elliott (Michael Caine) discuss the murder of his mother. The teenager, using a listening device, hears everything that is said in the office, and De Palma visually expresses this sound concept by using the bifocal: in the foreground, Peter listens, and in the background, the two men distill useful information without the sequence appearing explanatory.

A similar scene and intent can be found in Blow Out when Jack (John Travolta) in the hospital listens to two hard-pressed political advisers. In the left part of the plan, the profile of Jack in close-up, and in the right part, the advisers who are plundering further: in the ambient hubbub, Jack concentrates on a conversation concerning him; we hear what he hears, we enter his head. Note: a great montage of fifteen bifocals that the film contains was produced by Vashi Nedomansky (vashivisuals.com).

In Mission: Impossible, there are several segments filmed in bifocal, but one of the most memorable is that where the operator of the computer kept in a Langley vault returns earlier than expected: we see him from below, in the foreground, while Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) hangs just above him. Will Hunt be caught in the bag? Suspense by amplified proximity...

In short, the bifocal gives more information in a single plane, in addition to highlighting the nature of the relationship between different characters, whether friendly or antagonistic. Or in love? Certainly. We think of the magnificent Paris, Texas, of Wim Wenders, and this sublime passage where Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), having found the elusive Jane (Nastassja Kinski), talks with her on the phone without her, on the other side of the peep show booth where she works, knowing who he is.