Here's an excerpt:

The specificity of the camera positioning and slow-motion orchestration in the title sequence is stylistically reminiscent of director Brian De Palma. Anderson said he wasn’t consciously thinking of De Palma when designing the title sequence, but he doesn’t deny the influence or direct connection.

“I think when you’re making something, you’re thinking of the things even that you’re not thinking of [them].  It’s in there,” said Anderson of De Palma’s influence on the scene. “You’re using all the paint on the palette, so for me it’s a natural thing. I’ve seen all [De Palma’s] movies, and I’ve seen them again and again, so I think it’s a part of my — it’s gone into my DNA.”

To hear Wes Anderson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

DE PALMA, MANA, CINEMA BY FRENCH ESSAYIST JEAN-FRANÇOIS BUIRÉ


Some notes from the publisher about the book De Palma, Mana, Cinema by Jean-François Buiré, which focuses on Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993). It was published in France by Pot d'Colle Editions in September 2024, and can be ordered here.

- In the field of cinema, Jean-François Buiré is an essayist (notably in the French journals Trafic, Cinéma, Cinémaction and Cahiers du cinéma, and for various video distributors), a teacher (in film departments at French universities and at a film school in Lyon), a creator of educational videos and a lecturer. He has directed ten short fiction films. Some of his work (in French) is available here: https://vimeo.com/jeanfrancoisbuire

-Carlito's Way was released in the United States in 1993 and in France the following year under the title L'Impasse. Though emotionally and dramatically intense, it received only a lukewarm reception and, thirty years later, remains relatively unknown — at least compared to other works by Brian De Palma, such as Scarface, released ten years earlier. Both are Latino gangster films starring Al Pacino in the lead role, but whereas Scarface is harsh, cold and ironic, Carlito's Way is melancholic, lyrical and vibrant. Through the journey of its protagonist — a former gangster, aging and trying to escape a past that keeps pulling him back —, the very powers of cinema are brought into play. In his analysis of the film, Jean-François Buiré compares these powers to those of magic: he sees the character of Carlito Brigante as a weary mage, wielding his faltering powers in the disenchanted New York of the 1970s and constantly at risk of losing his mana, the elusive principle of efficacy characteristic of belief-based magical societies.

There’s something cruel about Brian De Palma’s output being a strictly literary endeavor as of late. His films are such sumptuous visual experiences, as a critic I find it can sometimes be difficult to convey the intoxicating pleasures of their mellifluous camera movements and exquisitely-timed payoffs. There’s a musicality to De Palma movies and words don’t always do it justice. Alas, a new Brian De Palma film hasn’t opened in area theaters since his 2007 “Redacted,” with 2012’s lurid, underrated “Passion” and 2019’s budgetarily crippled, but not uninteresting “Domino” banished to straight-to-video bargain bins.

Die-hard fans have had to content ourselves with the likes of “Are Snakes Necessary?” The director’s 2020 debut novel (co-written with Susan Lehman) reads like a De Palma movie you’re watching in your head, dense with allusions to classic Hollywood, extravagant, unfilm-ably expensive set-pieces and characters saying that they felt like they were seeing things in slow motion. It was a fun way to pass the time and somewhat frustrating as a substitute for a movie. AMBROSE CHAPEL is even more so. This unproduced screenplay penned by De Palma in the 1990s and recently published by Sticking Place Books is a glimpse of what might have been – the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller.

Hailed as “The Masterpiece That Wasn’t” in an introduction by the estimable film archeologist and Edward Burns superfan James Kenney – a heroic scholar who discovered Peter Bogdanovich’s discarded director’s cut of his final film on eBay – “Ambrose Chapel” was written between 1993’s “Carlito’s Way” and 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” but finds the filmmaker in the playful, self-referential mode of his 1992’s “Raising Cain.” Kenney smartly cites the screenplay as the missing link between “Cain” and the filmmaker’s 2002 rapturously naughty “Femme Fatale.”

Over 30 years ago, I began the journey of producing my first film, Mission: Impossible. Since then, these eight films have taken me on the adventure of a lifetime. To the incredible directors, actors, artists, and crews across the globe that have helped bring these stories to life, I thank you. It has been a privilege to work alongside you all.

Most importantly, I want to thank the audience, for whom it is our great pleasure to create these films, and for whom we all serve. We’re thrilled to share The Final Reckoning with you.

What is Double Exposure? Double Exposure is an ongoing Quiet Axis series that reconsiders the public images of actors whose most complex work has been overlooked, misread, or flattened by history. Drawing on psychoanalytic and film theory, each entry reframes a career not through fame or downfall, but through the roles that disrupted coherence — formally, emotionally, culturally. These are not tributes. They are reclassifications.

Margot Kidder is remembered as Lois Lane — sharp, quick-witted, and iconic. Yet that image, cemented by the 1978 Superman and its sequels, overshadows a different trajectory: one marked by fractured performances, destabilising roles, and a refusal to conform to coherent femininity. The dominant narrative — fame, decline, disappearance — is not just reductive. It reflects a deeper structural failure in cinema’s cultural memory. Kidder’s most radical work — formally and psychologically — has been omitted from her legacy not because it lacked substance, but because it threatened the frameworks through which we remember women on screen. This essay argues that Margot Kidder’s career exposes the limitations of critical and cultural systems that favour legibility, coherence, and control. Her performances, rich with instability and layered contradiction, demand a re-evaluation of how we process female complexity in film.

Kidder’s role in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972) is central to this re-evaluation. Playing conjoined twins Danielle and Dominique, Kidder inhabits a narrative of bodily fragmentation, voyeurism, and erasure. The film’s surface may be pulp, but her performance is anything but shallow. She doesn’t simply switch between two characters; she fractures, spills, collapses. Her voice slips between registers; her gestures oscillate between seduction and disorientation. In a genre that often reduces women to victims or threats, Kidder plays both — and neither. She resists categorisation.

Theoretical frameworks deepen our understanding of what Kidder is doing here. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) famously argues that classical cinema renders women as passive objects of the male gaze. Yet in Sisters, the gaze is anything but stable. De Palma disorients the spectator’s position. Kidder’s body provokes surveillance but also disrupts it. She cannot be fully possessed by the camera. Barbara Creed’s concept of the “monstrous-feminine” applies here: Kidder’s character(s) embody the cultural fear of female multiplicity, of women who do not resolve into one.

There's this hesitancy in contemporary adaptations to experiment with the legacy of the source material in fear of upsetting their fanbases. Phelps' turn was considered a betrayal of everything the character stood for, to which I say, that's what makes it so great. If you want what you enjoy about the television show, De Palma doesn't negate it. Voight's Phelps doesn't exactly conjure images of Graves' performance anyway. The twist plays into the larger picture of using familiar iconography and team tactics to lull the viewer into a state of security before kicking their chair out from under them.

Phelps' sleight-of-hand was always there, such as the moment where he utilizes the IMF mission tape's self-destruction to mask his own puff of cigarette smoke. The audience, like Ethan, could never fathom the original series' ringleader as the domino to bring it all down for nefarious reasons. A common criticism I would hear lobbied against "Mission: Impossible" was the plot being too confusing, which is hilarious in hindsight. There's a lot going on, but De Palma is such a delicate craftsman who knows how to keep track of everything, even when he's not directly telling you. It's incredibly effective when De Palma, Hirsch, and Cruise display a metatextual recollection of events that show one thing while Ethan says another. By the time we get to the train chase, we have seen the truth in Ethan's perspective and are now fully onboard his crusade to fight for what's right.

Q: When the first “Mission: Impossible” came around, where were you in your career?

A: I was doing the David Mamet play “Oleanna,” touring around Wales. I got a call from my agent, saying they wanted me to audition for a Tom Cruise movie. I said great, I took a three-hour train ride to Pinewood Studios near London and I met with Brian De Palma for three and a half, four minutes. I thought, well, that was a waste. I thanked the casting director for calling me in, but told her I didn’t think it went very well. And she said, “No, no. No! Oh, no. He loved you! You were in there the longest of anybody.”

Q: So you got the part. How long was the gig?

A: They offered me the gig, but I had another film job to finagle a little, to make them both work. It meant working three or four weeks, seven days a week, which was fine. Great, actually. Three weeks on “Mission,” then another week or so finishing up while I did this other film. I was younger then.

Q: At that point in your career were you thinking, well, good gig, small part, big movie? Or did you have anything like a hope of it turning into something more?

A: No! I mean, I got to do a Tom Cruise movie directed by Brian De Palma, and to be honest, if it hadn’t been for those two, I probably wouldn’t have gone in for the audition, because it meant six hours on the train back and forth from Wales and I had a show that night. Donloe was a tiny part, walk-on stuff. That’s how it started, although it did develop a little bit more as shooting went on.

Q: How so?

A: I was very at ease on set, having a good time, and I was sort of messing around one day, you know, cutting up, making people laugh. I don’t even remember how. But then I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant, who said: “Mr. De Palma wants to speak to you.”

Q: And he fired you.

A: (laughs) You’re joking, but believe me, that’s what I thought was happening. The look on the first assistant’s face — we’re still in touch today, a great guy — seemed to indicate exactly that. All he said to me, as we walked over to De Palma, was: “Watch me. Watch me when you’re talking to him.” So he stands behind De Palma and De Palma says to me, “I saw you messing around up there.” And I say, “Yes, sir.” And he says, not smiling at all, “Yeah. Everybody seemed to be enjoying that.”

And I started to say something, and right then Chris, the first assistant, who’s standing behind De Palma, just does this (holds his finger up to his lips in a “shush!” gesture). So I didn’t speak. De Palma says, “Uh, well, could you do that again, whatever it was you were doing?” And I said sure, and he said, “Because I have an idea for something. After lunch we’ll film for an hour or two.” So that afternoon, and then the next morning, we improvised all the throwing-up bits, and Donloe running to and from the bathroom. And that came from just messing around on set. Most of it ended up on the (cutting-room) floor, but it was fun.

Q: You barely talk in that entire scene, which for a lot of people was the best thing in the first movie. It makes Donloe seem like an accidentally crucial figure.

A: That’s De Palma. I’m forever in his debt for that scene. A masterful filmmaker.

Q: And you had no reason to hope, any time over the last 25 years, that Donloe might find some excuse to return to the “M:I” universe?

A: Only in my own mind (laughs). I did draft a letter years ago: “Dear Tom: What about if we did this?” Some ridiculous excuse to bring back Donloe, you know. Then I thought, who am I kidding? I crumpled it up and threw it away. And then years later this happens.

Being only in the first movie and the last movie you have an interesting perspective. What’s the difference between a Brian De Palma-directed “Mission: Impossible” and a Christopher McQuarrie-directed “Mission: Impossible,” other than a lot less Dutch angles?

Brian, from what I remember, was under a considerable amount of pressure. For a variety of reasons. He was dealing with technical aspects of the film rather than with the actors.

What do you mean by that?

He’s not a great people person. He’s a genius filmmaker. To say that I worked with him and to watch him work, that’s amazing. That’s a wonderful thing. And, of course, with my character there wasn’t a lot there. That was sort of left up to me. And that was great, I was happy with that. And Chris is a different kind of director.

In my experience, he’s very cerebral and in the weeds with filmmaking.

He’s also in the weeds when it comes to working with actors. It was a very unique experience working with someone like him. He improvises a lot. A lot of improvisation. It took me a minute to realize it’s not he didn’t like what I was doing, he just wanted to see what else could come up. And once I got a hold of that, it was great.

Speaking of the first movie, that has to be an odd scene to do with Tom Cruise just hanging above you the entire time.

Well, he’d been up there for quite a while, a couple of days. So I had seen him up there a lot.

You had to know that was going to be a showstopper of a scene, right?

No.

Really?

What happened with that sequence, I was messing around on set one day, just joking around, it was a long day. I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant director, Chris Soldo. And he says, “Mr. De Palma wants to see you.” “What?” He says, “I’m going to stand behind him, just follow my lead.” I’m going, oh shoot, this is not going to be good.

I came up to him and he said, “I saw you messing around over there.” I said, “I’m sorry, sir, if I was being distracting.” He says, “No, no, no. It was funny. People were laughing. People really seem to enjoy what you’re doing, can you do it again?” And Chris is behind him mouthing, “Say yes.” So we spent the whole day after lunch and the whole next day doing the vomiting thing. It wasn’t in there before. The thing with the knife I think was there, but the whole vomiting thing was brought in.

I’m glad Donloe kept the knife. A nice souvenir for him.

I love that. I did ask because it isn’t the real one. They said they had to remake it. They are like $100,000 now.

What?

They are really expensive, so they couldn’t get them. One of them is in a museum. So they just remade them.

Yeah, maybe you should have kept that knife like Donloe did.

No kidding! “What knife? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Premiering in 1996, the first Mission: Impossible had director Brian De Palma at the helm, which in and of itself was a statement of intent. De Palma’s work has frequently drawn comparisons to that of Alfred Hitchcock—albeit with a liberal sprinkling of sex and violence—and that sentiment carries over to Mission: Impossible. The film opens with Hunt and his team on a mission in Kyiv that ends with everyone other than our hero dead; in what becomes a recurring theme in the series, Hunt goes on the run, as his own agency mistakenly believes he’s betrayed them. While Mission: Impossible culminates with an explosive train and helicopter sequence, the film is more in its wheelhouse as an exercise in suspense—nothing if not on-brand for a Hitchcock heir.

That willingness to make Mission: Impossible an auteur-driven tentpole extends to the three sequels that follow it. Mission: Impossible 2 is an unmistakable John Woo joint—all the way down to the white doves—in which Hunt becomes less of a traditional spy than a gun-wielding, motorcycle-driving martial artist. (Mission: Impossible 2 wasn’t for everyone, but I see the vision.) Mission: Impossible III hails from J.J. Abrams, who, taking some world-building cues from his work on Alias and Lost, adds some new dimensions to Hunt, including a fiancée in peril (played by Michelle Monaghan). Were it not for an all-time villain performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, I suspect Mission: Impossible III would be viewed as the franchise’s low point, which is more indicative of Abrams’s limitations as a filmmaker than anything to do with the plot. Then came Ghost Protocol, wherein Brad Bird makes a seamless transition from the world of animation to live-action filmmaking. Indeed, some of the best set pieces in Ghost Protocol have a playful, cartoonish quality to them—in a good way.

Hollywood is littered with the bloated corpses of movies that were made with the intention of kicking off long-lasting franchises (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, John Carter, The Dark Tower, etc.). But it was obvious right out of the gate that Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible would lead to a series of legs (even those legs wouldn’t be attached to De Palma). We were lured into the theater by the name-brand cache of the vintage TV series and, of course, Cruise’s star power. But we were immediately put on notice that the M:I movies wouldn’t really have all that much to do with the small-screen storytelling of the show—that these movies would be massive Rube Golberg-ian exercises in pyrotechnics and triple-cross pretzel logic. So this is really where it all begins. And now, it seems like a quaint throwback to a time when blockbusters could be…smart. Clearly, it’s hard to discuss this film without talking about the trickle-of-sweat hanging-spider break-in at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Twenty-five years later, movie magic has come so far. But this set-piece really hasn’t been topped in terms of pure ingenuity and suspense. Over time, the M:I series’ trademark set pieces would get bigger and louder and more lavish and expensive, but nothing has yet come close to topping this economical masterclass in dangling, white-knuckle delirium.

Film scholar and returning guest James Kenney has a knack for uncovering lost and forgotten cinematic treasures. You can listen to episodes 18 and 32 of the Movies In Focus podcast to learn about his headline-making work on Peter Bogdanovich’s Squirrels To The Nuts and the rediscovery of the original version of the Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas film, God’s Daughter.

James now returns to discuss his latest find: Brian De Palma’s ‘lost’ film script, Ambrose Chapel. The now-published screenplay features an introductory essay from James, which examines De Palma’s fascinating and stylish career as a master of suspense.

Written by De Palma in the 1990s between Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible, audiences can finally catch sight of De Palma’s ‘screwball noir’. Virtual reality, mind control, and De Palma’s famed voyeurism are the order of the day for this Hitchcock-inspired, Mexico City-set thriller. James digs into the origins of Ambrose Chapel, exploring how it fits within many of De Palma’s signature themes.

The conversation takes a broader look at De Palma’s legendary career, tracing his evolution as a filmmaker and examining how Ambrose Chapel fits into the director’s cinematic legacy – ultimately offering a look at one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood auteurs.

The book, originally written and published in French and now translated into English by Paul Cronin, is available from Sticking Place Books in hardback or paperback. (Keep in mind that while both have photos included, only the hardback edition includes full-color photos, while the paperback includes them in black-and-white.)

In the introductory chapter, Réra discusses his approach and lists the people he interviewed for the book:

I quickly realized that my project would make sense only if my research was as broad as possible. Without aiming for completeness - which is ultimately illusory - I decided I would embark on a quest to pull together the recollections of Casualties of War's crew, and, in doing so, assemble a new archive." In total, including the filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, I interviewed thirty-three people. I spoke with the production manager (Fred Caruso), the production coordinator (Sallie Beechinor), the director of photography (Stephen H. Burum), the Steadicam operator (Larry McConkey), the on-set photographer (Roland Neveu), the second unit director (Eric Schwab), two assistant directors (Brian W. Cook, Carl Goldstein), the production designer (Wolf Kroeger), the chief makeup artist (Paul Engelen), De Palma's personal assistant (Monica Goldstein), the props master (Mickey Pugh), a special effects technician (Yves De Bono), a historical advisor (Deborah Ricketts), two military advisors (Mike Stokey and Art Smith), a costume designer and Thai stand-in (Pasiree Panya), a Thai assistant (Charlie Sungkawess), seven actors (Sean Penn, Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Thuy Thu Le, Erik King, Holt McCallany, Dale Dye), the San Francisco extras casting director (Nancy Hayes), the editor (Bill Pankow), the head of the sound department (Maurice Schell) and one of the sound designers (Marko A. Costanzo).

I opted for semi-structured interviews, most of which took place by phone, though videoconferencing applications were also employed. Whenever possible I met with my interviewees in person. In a few cases, only written correspondence was exchanged. Our discussions, which ranged from half an hour to over two and a half hours, often led to additional exchanges via email or phone so I could clarify details or ask new questions. I transcribed each conversation in its entirety and sent the result to the interviewee for review. I extracted the essence of these conversations, which are spread throughout the second half of this book. Contacting several of these individuals meant trading the methods of an art historian for those of a detective, and sometimes-as was the case with Sean Penn-great patience was needed.