Hello and welcome to the unofficial Brian De Palma website.
Here is the latest news:

De Palma a la Mod

E-mail
Geoffsongs@aol.com

De Palma Discussion
Forum

-------------

Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

-------------

Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

------------

AV Club Review
of Dumas book

------------

« July 2025 »
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31

Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


Enthusiasms...

De Palma Community

The Virtuoso
of the 7th Art

The De Palma Touch

The Swan Archives

Carrie...A Fan's Site

Phantompalooza

No Harm In Charm

Paul Schrader

Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock Films

Snake Eyes
a la Mod

Mission To Mars
a la Mod

Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule

Movie Mags

Directorama

The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold

Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!

Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy

The Big Dive
(Blow Out)

Carrie: The Movie

Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site

The Phantom Project

Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
Fan Page

The House Next Door

Kubrick on the
Guillotine

FilmLand Empire

Astigmia Cinema

LOLA

Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

The Film Doctor

italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

Diary of a
Country Cinephile

So Why This Movie?

Obsessive Movie Nerd

Nothing Is Written

Ferdy on Films

Cashiers De Cinema

This Recording

Mike's Movie Guide

Every '70s Movie

Dangerous Minds

EatSleepLiveFilm

No Time For
Love, Dr. Jones!

The former
De Palma a la Mod
site

Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
All topics
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
Bart De Palma
Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
Betty Buckley
Bill Pankow
Black Dahlia
Blow Out
Blue Afternoon
Body Double
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Books
Boston Stranglers
Bruce Springsteen
Cannes
Capone Rising
Carlito's Way
Carrie
Casualties Of War
Catch And Kill
Cinema Studies
Clarksville 1861
Columbia University
Columbo - Shooting Script
Congo
Conversation, The
Cop-Out
Cruising
Daft Punk
Dancing In The Dark
David Koepp
De Niro
De Palma & Donaggio
De Palma (doc)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon
De Palma Discussion
Demolished Man
Dick Vorisek
Dionysus In '69
Domino
Dressed To Kill
Edward R. Pressman
Eric Schwab
Fatal Attraction
Femme Fatale
Film Series
Fire
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The  «
Genius of Love
George Litto
Get To Know Your Rabbit
Ghost & The Darkness
Greetings
Happy Valley
Havana Film Fest
Heat
Hi, Mom!
Hitchcock
Home Movies
Icarus
Inspired by De Palma
Iraq, etc.
Jack Fisk
Jared Martin
Jerry Greenberg
Keith Gordon
Key Man, The
Laurent Bouzereau
Lights Out
Lithgow
Magic Hour
Magnificent Seven
Mission To Mars
Mission: Impossible
Mod
Montreal World Film Fest
Morricone
Mr. Hughes
Murder a la Mod
Nancy Allen
Nazi Gold
Newton 1861
Noah Baumbach
NYFF
Obsession
Oliver Stone
Palmetto
Paranormal Activity 2
Parker
Parties & Premieres
Passion
Paul Hirsch
Paul Schrader
Pauline Kael
Peet Gelderblom
Phantom Of The Paradise
Pimento
Pino Donaggio
Predator
Prince Of The City
Print The Legend
Raggedy Ann
Raising Cain
Red Shoes, The
Redacted
Responsive Eye
Retribution
Rie Rasmussen
Robert De Niro
Rotwang muß weg!
Sakamoto
Scarface
Scorsese
Sean Penn
Sensuous Woman, The
Sisters
Snake Eyes
Sound Mixer
Spielberg
Star Wars
Stepford Wives
Stephen H Burum
Sweet Vengeance
Tabloid
Tarantino
Taxi Driver
Terry
The Tale
To Bridge This Gap
Toronto Film Fest
Toyer
Travolta
Treasure Sierra Madre
Tru Blu
Truth And Other Lies
TV Appearances
Untitled Ashton Kutcher
Untitled Hollywood Horror
Untitled Industry-Abuse M
Untouchables
Venice Beach
Vilmos Zsigmond
Wedding Party
William Finley
Wise Guys
Woton's Wake
Blog Tools
Edit your Blog
Build a Blog
RSS Feed
View Profile
You are not logged in. Log in
Sunday, February 16, 2025
AMY IRVING TALKS TO VULTURE ABOUT 'CROSSING DELANCEY'
UPON THE RELEASE OF A NEW CRITERION EDITION OF THE JOAN MICKLIN SILVER FILM
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/brianamyfuryset.jpg

Already playing on the Criterion Channel as part of its "New York Love Stories" collection, Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey will be released as a physical Criterion edition this Tuesday, February 18th. Two days ago, Vulture's Rachel Handler posted an article with the headline, "Amy Irving Answers Every Question We Have About Crossing Delancey." Here's a Carrie-related excerpt:
Joan saw you at a movie screening scarfing down popcorn, and that’s when she decided that she wanted to cast you as Izzy. Do you have any memory of that? What do you think struck her about you?
I always loved that she said “scarfing,” as someone with deep food shame. Great. I love it. And she continued to say that all through our promotion. This image of me feeding my fat face. Anyway, yeah, she had been looking for a long time for her Izzy. She knew her pickle man, Sam, but she didn’t know who her Izzy was going to be. I was with girlfriends in the Upper West Side, where I lived. I didn’t have makeup on. I was probably high. [Laughs.] So I was just very relaxed. And yes, I was scarfing down popcorn, and she got in touch. When she met me in Spain, she told me that that’s what clinched it for her. I think she previously thought that I was maybe precious or because I was, at the time, a little bit of a princess of Hollywood — being married to the prince — she just didn’t know that I was just a regular down-to-earth gal.

You think your image was such that you were kind of untouchable?
I think there was a good thing about being married to Steven and a bad thing about being married to Steven. The good thing about being married to Steven was that I was married to Steven. We had a family. We had love. The bad thing was people got very awkward with me, whether we were divorced or married. It’s like, “Do I want Steven Spielberg’s camp in my backyard when I’m shooting this movie?” I think it became harder for me to get work, both married to him and not married to him. I was just grateful when Joan just pushed through all the bullshit and just wanted who she wanted.

She saw you outside of that paradigm.
Yeah. I mean, I think Los Angeles, the movie industry, feeds on a lot of fear. I remember once I wanted a job, it was a little PBS movie. Noel Black, who did Pretty Poison, a really interesting director, was going to do this Sherwood Anderson short story, “I’m a Fool.” It was going to be me and Ron Howard acting in this very sweet period piece. We’re in a rowboat with parasols, all that. I went to meet Noel Black having just finished shooting the last scene of Carrie, in which I’m in my mother’s arms screaming my head off. My real mother, by the way. And so I’m screaming, take after take after take. When I arrived that evening for this meeting, I have no voice. I can’t speak anymore. But I was so confident. I didn’t feel like a fraud. I felt like I was the real thing. I went into this office and I had so much confidence, and I literally just talked Noel Black into giving me a part. In a whisper, rather than having to read for the role.

I think that was very indicative of the way hiring and all works in Hollywood. If you come in and you’re scared, they’re going to think, Oh, you don’t know what you’re doing. You need to exude confidence to get past other people’s fears. But I had a hard time later, and Joan was a real savior for me. She kind of gave me hope that I could still work in the business.

It’s really interesting, though, because some of the sort of lore of the movie is Joan talking about how she was having trouble getting financing, and Steven was able to get financing from Warner Bros., right?
Joan remembers it a little differently. What happened was, obviously Steven read the script with me. And Steve Ross, who was the head of Warner Bros., was like Steven’s surrogate father — his other father. We vacationed with Steve. So, I mean, it was a no-brainer to give him the script because we knew he’d love it. And he loved it, so that’s how the financing came out.

But it was funny, because Warner Bros. had never made a low-budget film like this. This movie cost $5 million to make, and the press alone cost more than that to promote it. They were kind of awkward with it at first. I don’t know if they really gave it the full push they could have. They were all very nervous about putting a Jewish movie out there. Joan did feel very confident after Moonstruck came out. It was a very Italian movie.

I read somewhere that the studio was initially like, “Well, why don’t we make them Italian?” That they were very uncomfortable with the Jewishness of it. There were obviously rom-coms about Jewish people — Nora Ephron movies, movies infused with a Jewish sensibility — but this is one of the only super, super Jewish romantic comedies where it’s two people and it’s specifically about being Jewish.
And there’s a bris.

Yeah, exactly. What do you remember about the pushback on that — on the Jewishness?
That was not while I was involved. I think once I became involved, everyone kind of shut up a little bit. I think I had enough cachet at that moment to help get it going. Or I guess knowing Steve Ross helped a lot. But because I wasn’t brought up in the Jewish faith, it wasn’t something that meant so much to me one way or another.

Your father was Jewish, right? But you were brought up —
Christian Science. I went to Christian Science Sunday school. I learned all about Mary Baker Eddy and Science and Health. And because of the power of positive thinking, I’m like the opposite of a hypochondriac. That’s what I got from it.

So when you were put into this Jewish Lower East Side film, did it feel foreign to you?
It was a world I learned a lot about while doing that movie — the whole world in the Lower East Side. Well, the Lower East Side was a hangout of mine for a while, but it was more about the Fillmore East. I don’t think I got on the other side of Delancey Street. It’s interesting — Izzy was not religious, and she was trying to get out of that culture, but she was also drawn to the culture because she had her great love for her bubby. Susan Sandler talks about how the love of her bubby was her main love. I think about going down there and meeting Reizl Bozyk, who kind of became my bubby too. The most delicious, delicious grandma you could have.

The whole matchmaker thing — I didn’t really know that that existed. It was kind of bizarre, but it was bizarre to Izzy, too. So it was like, I could use all that. And her resistance to Sam was not just being a pickle man, and it wasn’t about being Jewish. It was more that she felt herself in this literary world, because she ran this bookstore, and she was involved in bringing artists in and exposing people. I think she just felt like that’s where she belonged. When she became attracted to the asshole writer Anton, it was more like she thought that was her lane. So she resists the whole matchmaking and the pickle man and everything. But then she gets off her high horse and feels something in her heart and learns a different value — being able to actually look at the person and say, “Oh, this is a good person and this is someone I could lose my heart to.”


And here is an excerpt related to The Fury:

How did playing this role or making this film change you at all? Did it change the way you related to men, to relationships, to Judaism, to New York?
Making movies is a lot of sitting around and waiting and working yourself up to do this one scene again. That kind of screeching up from zero is sometimes very hard. So I loved working in a lower-budget film like this, where you had to keep moving. I loved being the lead because I was in every scene, just about, so I didn’t have to sit around. I’m a theater actor, so I’m used to getting on the stage and doing the whole thing to the end of the thing. It’s a way I feel comfortable working. And that was the closest to that feeling that I’d ever had. I was not offered a lot of big pictures, but still, it was the independent, smaller-budgeted films I felt more comfortable in.

How did you feel like it changed your life or changed the trajectory of your career?
Well, you’d think it would’ve changed it in a pretty nice way. It was a really awkward time for people dealing with me. Because right after the film came out, Steven and I were divorced. And if you think they were awkward with me when we were married, they would literally walk across the street to avoid talking to me.

Why?
“What if Steven thinks I’m in Amy’s camp?” They didn’t realize Steven and I had parted as friends. But they just assume or whatever. I actually had to leave Los Angeles. That’s when I moved to New York.

You left because it was so awkward in L.A.?
I left because it was awkward and I thought, Well, if I can’t work in film, I’ll get back to my true love, which is theater. Which is what I did. I went back to New York to do theater. I assumed that film wasn’t going to be my medium.

Do you feel like that was the right choice, leaving L.A.?
Well, I really was never in love with living in Los Angeles. It’s a one-note town, and I was a San Francisco girl first. I moved to New York when I was 11, and then New York was home. I did my time in L.A. That’s how I feel about it. But I love living in New York. I just think it’s real life. I don’t have plastic surgery all over; when you’re out there in L.A., they all do that. They all just suddenly get worried about wrinkles, and I’m kind of embracing mine. I’m old enough to be able to not have to look young anymore, which is freeing. They’re not going to start a film on my ass in a bikini. Like in The Fury, when Brian De Palma told me that was our first shot. I was like, Oh, my God. That’s horrifying. I went on one of those fad diets. I think in those days it was — they used to shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh to break down the fat.

What?!
Swear to God, there were so many ridiculous fad diets.

They would shoot pregnant women’s urine into your thigh? What is the science there?
I think it broke down the fat, and then they put you on this specific diet that would rinse the fat through.

Did it work?
Well, did you see my ass in The Fury?



Posted by Geoff at 9:58 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, February 16, 2025 10:01 PM CST
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Sunday, May 12, 2024
PHONE BOOTHS & PAYPHONES IN DE PALMA (PART 8) - 'THE FURY'
CARRIE SNODGRESS AS HESTER, MAKING A CLANDESTINE CONNECTION
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/fury45th4.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 8:53 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Friday, May 10, 2024
PHONE BOOTHS IN DE PALMA (PART 7) - 'THE FURY'
KIRK DOUGLAS AS PETER SANDZA - "I NEED YOUR BODY, BABY!"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/fury45th6.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 5:53 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
PHONE BOOTHS IN DE PALMA (PART 6) - 'THE FURY'
"LOOK, I'M AT THE BEACH, AND I MADE A CONTACT" - WILLIAM FINLEY AS RAYMOND DUNWOODIE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/phoneboothfury1.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 10:33 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Sunday, September 10, 2023
'AS GRAND A PIECE OF GUIGNOL AS I HAVE SEEN'
SUNDAY TWEET - ADS FOR 'THE FURY' IN LONDON FROM 1978
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/furyrialtoad45.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 10:49 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Sunday, August 20, 2023
'YOU'D STILL NOT BELIEVE THIS MOVIE EXISTS'
WEEKEND TWEETS - WATCHING DE PALMA'S 'THE FURY' ON MAX
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetfurychaotic.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 10:31 PM CDT
Updated: Sunday, August 20, 2023 11:05 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (3) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, August 10, 2023
'THE BEST CHASE EVER FILMED'
"IF YOU DON'T HAVE A BETTER IDEA, IT REALLY ISN'T WORTH BOTHERING"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/frenchconnect345.jpg

An excerpt from the chapter on The Fury, in the 2001 book Brian De Palma - Conversations with Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud, with the help of Google Translate:
The scene of the kidnapping of the two cops very quickly turns into a car chase and you don't feel very comfortable filming it.

Because I hate that. We've seen hundreds of them and it's very boring to watch. The best chase ever filmed is in William Friedkin's French Connection. If you don't have a better idea, it really isn't worth bothering to film a new one. I'm not like James Cameron, I don't enjoy filming endless chases with trucks, on bridges, it's not my style. It was my first time filming a car chase in The Fury. I took it as a challenge but quickly hated it. So I placed it in the fog to stylize it as much as possible. Because filming in a car, there is nothing more boring. What are you going to show? A guy moving the steering wheel, reflections on the windshield. There aren't many solutions to make it interesting.



Posted by Geoff at 11:16 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, August 10, 2023 11:20 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, March 16, 2023
VIDEO - PIANO ARRANGEMENT OF 'THE FURY' THEME
BRETT MITCHELL PERFORMS HIS SOLO PIANO ARRANGEMENT

Posted by Geoff at 11:37 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
45 YEARS AGO TODAY, THE FURY OPENS IN U.S. THEATERS
PAULINE KAEL: "IT COULD BE THAT HE'S DEVELOPING ONE OF THE GREAT FILM STYLES"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/fury45th1.jpg

Brian De Palma's The Fury was released in U.S. theaters 45 years ago today. Filmed largely in the Chicago area (including a memorable sequence filmed at "Old Chicago" in Bolingbrook), it features an extraordinary score by the great John Williams. It's a magnificent film. In a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone, Jean-Luc Godard mentioned The Fury's standout use of slow motion, "where it was used for an entire sequence and wasn't just a gadget." The movie critic known as Pauline Kael, enraptured, wrote of The Fury in The New Yorker:
No other director shows such clear-cut development in technique from film to film. In camera terms, De Palma was learning fluid, romantic steps in Obsession; he started to move his own way in Carrie—swirling and figure skating, sensuously. You could still see the calculation. Now he has stopped worrying about the steps. He’s caught up with his instructors — with Welles in Touch of Evil, with Scorsese in Mean Streets. What distinguishes De Palma's visual style is smoothness combined with a jazzy willingness to appear crazy or campy; it could be that he's developing one of the great film styles—a style in which he stretches out suspense while grinning his notorious alligator grin. He has such a grip on technique in The Fury that you get the sense of a director who cares about little else; there's a frightening total purity in his fixation on the humor of horror. It makes the film seem very peaceful, even as one's knees are shaking.

At The Spool this week, Chicago-based critic Peter Sobczynski writes about The Fury at 45:
If this project, with its obvious echoes of Carrie, seems like an odd choice for De Palma to have chosen to follow, it appears that he looked upon it largely as a means to a particular end. At the time, he was keenly interested in doing an adaptation of Alfred Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man, a sci-fi-thriller involving a murder in a futuristic telepathic society, and had even co-written a screenplay for it with author John Farris. As a way of working out the elaborate visual storytelling and special effects required to bring that project to life, De Palma elected to first make a film of Farris’s 1976 novel The Fury with the author doing the screenplay, changing a considerable amount of the narrative in the process.

At the time of release, Roger Ebert wrote in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times:
De Palma's almost nonstop action carries the film along well (and distracts us from the holes in its plot), and Kirk Douglas was a good casting choice as the avenging father. In his best roles, he seems to be barely in control of a manic energy, and this time, being chased down the L tracks, he seems just right. Cassavetes always makes a suitably hateful villain (he plays the bad guys as if they're distracted by inner thoughts of even worse things they could be doing), and Carrie Snodgress, returning to movies after several years of voluntary retirement, is complex and interesting as the government employee who falls in love with Kirk Douglas.

Big-eyed and beautiful Amy Irving, vulnerable and tough at the same time, is just fine. She was Sissy Spacek's "friend" and final victim in De Palma's "Carrie," and I guess it's only fair that this time she gets to unleash the Fury in the final scene. Is it as scary as the final moment in "Carrie"? Not quite, but it'll leave your head spinning.



Posted by Geoff at 11:05 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, February 23, 2023
SAM IRVIN WRITING MEMOIR OF HIS DE PALMA YEARS
THE BOOK, PLANNED FOR 2024, WILL COVER HIS TIME ON SET OF THE FURY, HOME MOVIE, DRESSED TO KILL
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/furysetoldchicago55.jpg

Sam Irvin's latest book, I Was a Teenage Monster Hunter!, "uniquely combines his exciting cinematic adventures, self-discovery, and documenting horror history through his self-published horror fanzine Bizarre," writes Daily Dead's Justina Bonilla. "Though Bizarre only lasted four issues, they are an amazing time capsule filled with interviews with horror royalty, from Vincent Price to Christopher Lee, with the book’s forward from Elvira, Mistress of the Dark aka Cassandra Peterson."

In the interview portion of the article, Irvin tells Bonilla that the book, the first in a series of memoirs, covers his life/career up until the time he met Brian De Palma. "And then, for 2024," Irvin says, "I will do the next volume of my ongoing series of memoir books, this one covering my De Palma years."

In the interview, Irvin talks about why the journal he had writen for the magazine Cinefantastique was never published:

Why did you stop publishing Bizarre?

The reason I stopped doing it, is that I ended up meeting Brian De Palma and had to start getting serious about figuring out a career in film. Between my junior and senior years of college, I ended up going to work for De Palma on The Fury. After I graduated, I became a full-time employee of De Palma as his assistant.

Then, I associated produced and was a production manager for his film Home Movies with Kirk Douglas and Nancy Allen. That's what launched my career.

When did you decide to step away from magazine writing to focus on your film career?

I became friends with Fred Clark, who was the editor of Cinefantastique. When I was working on The Fury, I got an assignment from Fred to write a journal on the making of The Fury. I still wanted to be writing for about horror movies and stay in that world.

Fred promised that The Fury would be on the cover. So, I interviewed everybody on the film from Kirk Douglas down, including composer John Williams and the editor Paul Hirsch, who edited Star Wars. Then, Fred saw Star Wars. He decided to bump our issue, so he could do a double issue on Star Wars. Okay, fine. Star Wars deserved it.

In the meantime, I insisted to Fred that, “You've got to run my interview with Amy Irving. You can't wait, because she talks about for the very first time ever, her relationship with Steven Spielberg. They were living together and it had not been revealed anywhere. I have this huge scoop.

What was the result?

So, Fred assured me that he’d run the Amy interview in the Star Wars issue, as kind of a teaser for the big coming issue on The Fury. Then, The Fury opens. Fred sees it, hates it, and decides that he is not going to put it on the cover. He cuts my journal on the making of it in half and on the cover, he instead puts the composer Hans Salter, who composed some of the scores of the 1940s Universal horror movies. I love Salter and his scores, but could there be anything less commercial? It felt like such a slap.

De Palma was not happy, and I was embarrassed. It made me look bad. I felt really bad about the whole thing.

It put such a bad taste in my mouth, that when I got asked to do articles on other films that I was working on, like Dressed to Kill, I just ended up turning it down. It kind of extinguished my wanting to continue to be a journalist in that realm. Instead, I focused on being a director.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post

Newer | Latest | Older