In Person: Brian De Palma
In Person
In Person: Brian De Palma
In Person
BY
Metrograph
Brian De Palma joins us to discuss the very beginning of his illustrious career.
One of the series that launched Metrograph remains, for many of us, the high watermark of our programming: In 2016, we hosted a near-complete Brian De Palma retrospective, primarily on 35mm archival prints.
The proceedings began with an unforgettable appearance by the Master of the Macabre himself, in person to discuss the beginnings of his illustrious career, specifically his rarely screened 1970 film, Hi, Mom!, which featured a pre-stardom Robert De Niro as a fledgling adult filmmaker in a radically changing New York City.
LET’S START BY TALKING ABOUT HI, MOM!. THIS WAS THE MOMENT WHERE YOUR REPUTATION WAS BEGINNING TO BECOME ESTABLISHED. THERE WAS A NOTION THAT YOU WERE SORT OF AN AMERICAN GODARD, WHICH I SEE AND DON'T SEE. AND I WONDER HOW YOU MIGHT HAVE FELT ABOUT THAT LABEL, AND HOW IMPORTANT GODARD MIGHT HAVE BEEN TO YOU?
I'm not much like Godard. But you know, I was making political films. We were all worried about, as you see in Greetings, being drafted. This picture was our first where we actually got some money to make a movie, because Greetings was a success. It was made for $20,000 and it grossed over a million dollars and got some good reviews. We suddenly had $100,000 to make a movie. Chuck [Hirsch] and I came up with this crazy story. I had noticed how good Bob [DeNiro] was in Greetings, so we decided to make this movie as an extension of his character from Greetings. Originally it was called Son of Greetings. I was actually getting paid to make a movie, which was kind of a shock, you know? We had a small independent distribution company financing our movie.
I was dealing with forms of cinema, and trying to tell stories through various cinematic forms. Of course, the big thing in this movie is "Be Black, Baby." I got that idea from making a documentary of an “environmental theater” piece called Dionysus in ‘69.
WE'VE SCREENED DIONYSUS, A REALLY BEAUTIFUL PRINT. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT'S EVIDENT: THAT'S THE BEGINNING OF YOUR USE OF SPLIT-SCREEN, BUT IT’S UNLIKE SOME OF THE SPLIT-SCREEN WORK IN LATER FILMS. WHEN DID IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT YOU COULD USE THAT FOR SUSPENSE?
In Dionysus, the idea basically was, because it was an environmental theater piece and the audience was getting involved in the piece, which was the piece, I had to figure out, "How am I gonna shoot this?" I decided that I would shoot the narrative of the play, which is the confrontation between Pentheus and Dionysus. Bob Fiore, who was a very good cinematographer, followed the involvement of the audience with the play, and we would try to avoid shooting each other. You see us occasionally shooting across, and you see me, and you see Bob. That was one use of split-screen. You know, that's sort of how it started.
Sisters was the next time I used split-screen. I had this idea of a guy, when he dies, writing "Help me" in blood on the window. Jennifer Salt sees it from her apartment building, and we have these two shots, from her point of view, over her shoulder zooming into the window, and then over Lyle's, showing her watching as he's writing. Then, on one side of the screen, Jennifer, who has seen the murder, has to come all the way down, run in to the police, argue with them, go up in the elevator, and go to the apartment. Meanwhile, Bill Finley and Margot Kidder have to clean up the blood and get rid of the body. That's going simultaneously.
Greetings
Dionysus in '69
Hi, Mom!
Hi, Mom!
SPEAKING OF BILL FINLEY AND ROBERT DE NIRO AND GERRIT GRAHAM, HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT TO, AT THESE BEGINNING STAGES OF YOUR CAREER, TO HAVE THIS COMPANY YOU WERE WORKING WITH REPEATEDLY?
Well, I went to school with Bill Finley. We went to Columbia together, and he was my first successful short called Woton’s Wake, he played Woton. I sort of lost track of Bill, and he got involved with the NYU group that was working on Dionysus in '69. When I came to see the production, I said, "I've got to find a way to record this. This is an incredible experience. There's got to be a way to put that on film." I cast Bobby in The Wedding Party because he came in an open audition. We had put an ad in show business newspapers. He was around 18 at the time. He came and did some plays at Sarah Lawrence, and that’s the workshop where we developed The Wedding Party. When I did Greetings, I brought him in. Gerrit, another Columbia student that I cast, played the assassination boss.
ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES IN WATCHING THE FILMS TOGETHER IS THAT YOU CAN LOOK AT GREETINGS, AND SEE GERRIT GRAHAM SPEAKING TO THE CAMERA ABOUT THE ZAPRUDER FILM. AND THEN, YOU CAN WATCH ALL THE FILMS AND KNOW THAT THIS IS GOING TO LEAD UP TO BLOW OUT. WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR CAREER IS THAT THERE'S THIS BEGINNING PERIOD, WHERE THE POLITICS AND THE COMEDY ARE MORE OVERT, AND THEN YOU MAKE A SWITCH IN THE SUSPENSE PERIOD, BUT NEVER LOSING THE HUMOR, AND ALSO NEVER LOSING THIS GENERAL DISTRUST, THE IDEA THAT YOU CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE. WAS THAT SOMETHING THAT YOU THINK THAT STARTED FOR YOUR GENERATION WITH THE ZAPRUDER FILM? OR WERE THERE OTHER THINGS?
With the Zapruder film and the investigation around the assassination of JFK, the more books you read, the murkier the whole investigation became. Because of the Vietnam War, you stopped believing your congressman and your president. The stuff they were feeding you, you didn't really see working out in real life. So that began the suspicion and the paranoia which is sort of very much in Blow Out.
I THINK WHERE YOU'RE GOING, IN DRESSED TO KILL OR SO MANY OF THE FILMS, IS THAT THE PROTAGONISTS CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE THEMSELVES. THEN THEY START TO QUESTION THEIR OWN SANITY AND WHAT THEY'RE SEEING.
Well, you know, you can lie on film 24 times a second. People think because it's a picture, it's real. You're from a more sophisticated generation; you know it's all a bunch of crap. But when I grew up in the '50s, and then '60 we believed what we saw and what was presented.
I WAS ACTUALLY GETTING PAID TO MAKE A MOVIE, WHICH WAS KIND OF A SHOCK, YOU KNOW?
Following his extended conversation with Jake Perlin, Brian De Palma stayed with us, taking a series of questions from his sold-out Metrograph audience and introducing another packed house to his 1980 masterpiece, Dressed to Kill.
ON THE INITIAL RELEASE OF HI, MOM!
I remember my mother went to the box office at a big theater in the 42nd Street area. The distributors thought it going to be a big hit like Greetings. And the lady selling tickets looked at my mother and says, "You don't want to see this." You would walk into this vast theater and there were five or six people, you know, watching the movie. And it just died after a couple of weeks. It was sad.
ON A MEMORABLE SCENE FROM DRESSED TO KILL
I ran into an old girlfriend in the Village, and we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years. We went up to her apartment, and we were just talking about old times, blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. And suddenly there was a knock at the door. She answered it, and there was this kind of very officious-looking guy handing her a form. And she looked kind of sheepish about it, and I asked, "What's this?" And she had contracted a venereal disease. And when you get a venereal disease, you had to fill out a form to tell the people that you've slept with that you have a venereal disease. And that's the form that she had to fill out. So that's where I got that idea. After this great and sexy thing, you know, you have the horror of finding out, "Oh my god, this person has a social disease." Which just brings the drama and the guilt up even higher.
ON THE “ODESSA STEPS” SEQUENCE IN THE UNTOUCHABLES
Most of the big set pieces are carefully worked out, like the prom scene in Carrie. But the Odessa steps sequence happened because we ran out of money. David Mamet had written this train chase. The accountant's on one train, Ness is on another train, and they're racing. But the studio said, "Are you kidding? A train chase? Forget it!" So I said, "Well, suppose he doesn't get on the train. Suppose the accountant doesn't get out of the station. Suppose we have something happen in the station, and then I always had this idea of using this baby carriage on the stairs from the Odessa steps, amidst the shootout, and that's how it all fell into place. But I just made up that sequence! I had, like, I think six or seven nights, and I just made it up as I went along.
But I had done a lot of sequences like that before, so I knew exactly what I wanted. But that was an unusual thing. That's when, you know, you're stuck and you've got to come up with something else. Which also happened in Carlito’s Way. I mean, we had a big shoot-out on the escalators in the World Trade Center, and they blew it up. So I said, "What are we going to do now?" "Oh, they're not gonna go to the airport. They're gonna go to the train station." And then I staged that whole thing in Grand Central.
ON OLD-SCHOOL PUBLICITY CAMPAIGNS
In the good old days, before the studios had in-house publicity and advertising departments, you used to go out to vendors, and they would bid for the job. So you had a lot of competition and you had a lot of inventiveness. I remember, when I saw the Scarface poster, and you know, they put Al in the black suit. You know, I said, "Black suit? This isn't The Godfather. This is Miami. Put him in a white suit." They reversed everything. I mean, we had a lot of control in those days, in the advertising and copy of the campaigns. But as they became more institutionalized, you lost a lot of control in that area. You would arrive and they'd say, "Here's your poster. Don't ya love it?" You'd go, "Well, wait a minute... I mean – Huh?" And next thing you know, it's gone, it's done, the picture's opening, and it's over.
ON THE INFLUENCE OF WILFORD LEACH
Wilford Leach was a great teacher and a co-director of The Wedding Party. When I was at Columbia and at Sarah Lawrence, I first started as an actor. I went to Sarah Lawrence to be in a play because they were looking for male actors. And I was very fortunate, because Will saw something in me and encouraged me to keep coming. So I kept attending his classes, even as an undergraduate at Columbia. Because I was in Will's plays, I could watch him direct, and I learned a lot from the way he dealt with actors. He had this whole Brechtian thing, the alienation thing, where you're telling something to the audience, but you're also making them aware that this is a theatrical production. So in my movies, I'm constantly making you aware of the form of film that you're watching. Certainly in the “Be Black, Baby” sequence of Hi, Mom! I'm creating a whole reality television show, basically, which is completely ridiculous, but it still has a tremendous amount of dramatic force. So that's the kind of stuff that I learned when I was at Sarah Lawrence and working with Will.
ON CASTING DRESSED TO KILL
There's a cruising section in Dressed to Kill with Angie Dickinson, and it's basically a pick-up scene. I got that idea from going to the Museum of Modern Art with my roommate when I was at Columbia, looking at the paintings and looking at the girls. I watched the way that guys would pick up girls at the art museum, and this gave me the idea for this scene. I wrote Dressed to Kill in New York. I wrote the part of the girl in the picture for my then-wife Nancy Allen. I had met Angie Dickinson at the Montreal Film Festival. Something that I've always tried to tell film students, "You can go to film festivals, and you can see movies. But you know what else is there? Actors." And if you're trying to get somebody interested in your movie, you might, by chance, be sitting next to the actor that you want at a luncheon, and that's how I met Angie. So I wrote the picture with Angie in mind, using the idea from Psycho of bumping off the star, and – gee, I can't say any more, can I? Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us into the museum here in New York, so we had to go to Philadelphia. That's the Philadelphia Museum of Art that you see in the movie.
One more thing: one of the characters is very much based on me as a young science fair computer-builder. The computer that you see in this movie is an exact replica of my science fair project that I won the Benjamin Franklin Science Fair with.
