Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma (born September 11 1940 in Newark, New Jersey) is an Italian-American film director.

De Palma is often cited as a leading member of the Movie Brat generation of film directors, a distinct pedigree who either emerged from film schools or are overtly cine-literate. His contemporaries include Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, De Palma worked repeatedly with actors Jennifer Salt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen (his wife from 1979 to 1983), William Finley, Charles Durning, Gerrit Graham, cinematographers Stephen H. Burum and Vilmos Zsigmond (see List of noted film director and cinematographer collaborations), set designer Jack Fisk, and composers Bernard Herrmann and Pino Donaggio. De Palma is credited with fostering the careers of or outright discovering Robert De Niro, Jill Clayburgh, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, and Margot Kidder. De Palma has encouraged and fostered the filmmaking careers of directors such as Mark Romanek and Keith Gordon. Terrence Malick credits seeing De Palma's early films on college campus tours as a validation of independent film, and subsequently switched his attention from philosophy to filmmaking.

De Palma, whose background is Italian Catholic, was raised in Philadelphia and New Jersey in various Protestant and Quaker schools. The frisson between the Catholic and Protestant ethic is exemplified in De Palma's cinema, where the grand guignol exists alongside the status quo, where the normal is made epic and the extraordinary deflated into the mainstream.

Enrolled at Columbia as a physics student, De Palma became enraptured with the filmmaking process after viewing Citizen Kane and Vertigo. He switched majors and enrolled at the newly coed Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, becoming one of the first male students among a female population. Once there, influences as various as drama teacher Wilford Leach, the Maysles brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol and Alfred Hitchcock impressed upon De Palma the many styles and themes that would shape his own cinema in the coming decades. An early association with discovery Robert De Niro resulted in The Wedding Party, codirected with Leach and producer Cynthia Munroe. The film was shot in 1963 but remained unreleased until 1969, when De Palma's star had risen sufficiently within the Greenwich Village filmmaking scene, though De Niro's remained low enough for the credits to display his name as "Robert Denero". Various small films for the NAACP and The Treasury Department followed.

Early efforts Greetings and Hi, Mom! (starring De Niro) espouse a Leftist revolutionary viewpoint common of their era, and experiments in narrative and intertextuality reflect De Palma's stated intention to become the "American Godard." Hi, Mom!, in its Be Black, Baby sequence, parodies cinéma vérité, championed by the documentary movement of the late 1960s, while simultaneously providing the audience with as visceral and disturbingly emotional an experience as fiction film can provide, and remains a significant touchstone in interpreting De Palma's filmography.

Career beginnings and highlights

Following a disastrous Hollywood foray, in which his next film Get to Know Your Rabbit was reedited by Warner Bros. at the behest of star Tom Smothers, De Palma returned to independent film. Both Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise were tongue-in-cheek experiments in pure cinema and allowed De Palma to jettison the more dated hippie trappings of his earlier films. Obsession, an emotional alternative take on Vertigo scripted by Paul Schrader, seems less now a bold attempt to usurp Alfred Hitchcock than an extension of the experiment begun on Blood Sisters, using the Hitchcock film as a template to analyze male and female roles and how an audience expects them to be reinforced. It is this tension, at once removed from the superficial elements of the plot or characters, yet intended to elicit emotional responses, that drives De Palma's work; the somewhat notorious reputation he has earned and the critical dismissal De Palma has experienced is a direct result of the distantiation techniques he employs in films that use the methodology of thrillers to engage the audience. De Palma's chief entrance into the mainstream has been his public image (fostered by De Palma in the early 1980s and later rejected as counterproductive) as a combative and controversial director of sex and violence.

De Palma, a veteran of the New York underground scene, had yet to produce a certifiable commercial hit by 1975, while his friends Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese benefitted from a comparatively larger financial and critical windfall. Therefore his next film, the psychic thriller Carrie is seen by some as De Palma's bid for a blockbuster. In fact, the project was small, underfunded by United Artists, and well under the cultural radar during the early months of production, as Stephen King's source novel had yet to climb the bestseller list. De Palma gravitated toward the project and changed crucial plot elements based upon his own predilections, not the salability of the novel. The cast was young and relatively new, though stars Sissy Spacek and John Travolta had gained considerable attention for previous work in, respectively, film and episodic sitcoms. Carrie became a hit, the first genuine box-office success for De Palma. Preproduction for the film had coincided with the casting process for George Lucas's A New Hope, and many of the actors cast in De Palma's film had been earmarked as contenders for Lucas's, and vice-versa. The "shock ending" finale is effective even while it upholds horror-film convention, its suspense sequences are buttressed by teen comedy tropes, and its use of split-screen, split-diopter and slow motion shots tell the story visually rather than through dialogue.

The financial and critical success of Carrie allowed De Palma to pursue more personal material. The Demolished Man was a novel that had fascinated De Palma since the late 1950s and appealed to his background in mathematics and avant-garde storytelling. Its unconventional unfolding of plot (exemplified in its mathematical layout of dialogue) and its stress on perception have analogs in De Palma's filmmaking. He sought to adapt it on numerous occasions, though the project would carry a substantial price tag, and has yet to appear onscreen (Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report bears striking similarities to De Palma's visual style and some of the themes of The Demolished Man). The result of his experience with adapting The Demolished Man was The Fury, a sci-fi psychic thriller that starred Kirk Douglas, Carrie Snodgress, John Cassavetes and Amy Irving. The film was admired by Jean-Luc Godard, who featured a clip in his mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma and Pauline Kael, who championed both The Fury and De Palma. The film boasted a larger budget than Carrie, though the consensus view at the time was that De Palma was repeating himself, with diminishing returns. As a film it retains De Palma's considerable visual flair, but points more toward his work in mainstream entertainments such as The Untouchables and Impossible (movie), the thematic complex thrillers for which he is better known.

For many film-goers, De Palma's gangster films, most notably Scarface and Carlito's Way, pushed the envelope of violence and depravity, and yet greatly vary from each other in both style and content and also illustrate De Palma's evolution as a film-maker. In essence, Scarface's excesses contrast with the more emotional tragedy of Carlito's Way. Both films feature Al Pacino in what has become a fruitful working relationship.

Themes and critical opinion

His works explore themes of suspense and obsession, along with gender identity and the destructive nature of the male gaze. He is famous for his extensive use of split screen, split-diopter and process shots, and long tracking shots. His films also frequently feature characters changing their hair colour from blonde to brunette and vice versa.

Critics of De Palma accuse him of being misogynistic and of emphasizing technical aspects of storytelling at the expense of human stories. These views, along with the charge of 'ripping off' various filmmakers, is slowly fading from mainstream critical analysis of De Palma's work, as the complexities of his montage and mise en scène come into focus. Emerging views of De Palma compare him less and less with modernist filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and more with transgressionists such as Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard and to traditions ranging from Surrealism, Postmodernism to the theater of the Absurd.

Trivia

His father, Anthony DePalma, was an orthopedic surgeon and teacher who made a lifelong contribution to the practice of medicine. His oldest brother Bruce De Palma, who died in 1997, was a well known figure in the alternative energy community (perpetual motion and antigravity crackpots in his case), while Bart De Palma is an artist who contributed photographic mosaics (and a cameo appearance) to Femme Fatale.

DePalma was interested in physics in his youth and won the top prize in his high school's regional science fair. He placed second in the nation in 1957 and 1958. The 1957 project was entitled "The Application of Cybernetics to the Solution of Differential Equations."

An incident involving a stolen motorcycle left De Palma in a New York City jail overnight after a bullet was removed from his leg, courtesy of the NYPD.

He directed Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark" music video and is widely believed to have written the crawl that begins Star Wars.

DePalma has refused to answer Scarface fans whether Pacino really snorted the cocaine, and if the cocaine was real.

He is the step-father of American model and actress Willa Holland.

Brian De Palma has been offered, considered for, or associated with the production of films as disparate as Demon Seed (which featured De Palma regular Gerrit Graham), Grease, Flashdance, Cruising, Prince of the City, Act of Vengeance, The Truman Show, and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In the latter two cases, De Palma was rejected by producer Scott Rudin.

Director trademarks

Split screen

Split Diopters

Many Alfred Hitchcock homages, using similar locations and camera techniques.

The "Long Take" which is usually complimented by a series of elaborate tracking shots or dolly movements

Has commissioned Hitchcockian compositions for his films, and worked with Bernard Herrmann (a composer who worked with Alfred Hitchcock until a fallout during the production of Torn Curtain.)

Dopplegangers (or evil twin), and femme fatales appear frequently in De Palma's films.

Often shoots 'tense' moments without any widening lens or zoom. When coupled with his trademark extended shot, it creates a feeling the viewer is in the scene.

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Career beginnings and highlights

Themes and critical opinion

Trivia

Director trademarks

Filmography

Bibliography

External links