Brian DePalma

Brian Russell De Palma was born on September 11, 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, into a Catholic family of Italian origin. His father, a surgeon, used to be unfaithful to his wife, until she got fed up with her and asked for her divorce. Young Brian (who spent most of his childhood in Philadelphia) took his first steps with the camera when, traumatized by the family situation, he was chasing his father, to see if he would catch him with one of his lovers.

He enrolled in Physics at Columbia University, but soon decided to pursue a career in film after discovering Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock ‘s Vertigo . He decides to study cinematography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where he becomes the first male student, since all his classmates were girls. Immediately he began shooting various shorts, such as Icarus , Woton’s Wake and The Responsible Eye .

underground era

One day he goes to a student performance where he notices the potential of one of the boys, a very young Robert De Niro who would play a key role at the beginning of the filmmaker’s career. Both would make their feature film debut with The Wedding Party , where the actor appeared in the credits as Robert Denero, and where De Palma was co-director and co-writer with Wilford Leach and Cynthia Monroe.

The film was not released until 1969. Before that, De Palma had finished Murder à la Mod , also written by him. This thriller about an aspiring filmmaker who seeks to divorce his wife opened in only one New York theater, and has long been missing.

In this first stage of his filmography, De Palma is greatly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague, as can be seen in the underground and extravagant Greetings , in which he once again turns to Robert De Niro, this time in the role of John Rubin, a voyeur. who films a Vietnamese woman whom he has taken prisoner. The film was quite critical of the Vietnam War, for example at a party a guy explains the harsh reality of the conflict, very different from the official version. At that time, De Palma wanted to be the American Jean-Luc Godard , so for example he films handheld through the streets.

It was an ensemble film, which finds its continuation in Hello, Mom , where De Niro returns to being Rubin, this time obsessed with recording a sexual relationship. Until many years later, he did not work with this interpreter again, but De Palma was looking for another fetish actor, William Finley , who appears in his film Dionysus , actually a recording of a theatrical performance of the Greek tragedy “The Bacchae”. of Euripides. In 1972 De Palma filmed the bizarre Beeman, the Magnificent , about a young magician’s apprentice, whose cast included his admired Orson Welles.

In the wake of Hitchcock

Sisters inaugurates a second stage in the filmography of the Italian-American, who calls himself the reincarnation of Alfred Hitchcock, and imitates to the millimeter not only his style, but also the arguments. A cheeky rehash of Rear Window and Psycho , it even features Bernard Herrmann, the usual composer for the wizard of suspense. Starring Margot Kidder , Jennifer Salt , Charles Durning and Finley again, it is an unoriginal film, but entertaining, where its stop-motion sequences were already present, with which it achieves enormous tension. After The Phantom of Paradise , rock opera key version of The Phantom of the Opera, which fails at the box office, and where Finley is the absolute protagonist, takes up the ‘Hitchconian’ vein in Fascination , a wild copy of From Among the Dead (Vertigo) , with a script by Paul Schrader , which is the penultimate work of the musician Hermann, just before composing the score for Taxi Driver . At that time Schrader showed De Palma his script for this legendary film that De Niro would star in, and the producers offered him to direct it, but he declined the offer and proposed that they offer it to Martin Scorsese.

In 1979, the filmmaker married actress Nancy Allen , to whom he gave a role in Carrie , an adaptation of Stephen King ‘s first novel , starring Sissy Spacek as a teenager with psychic powers repressed by her mother ( Piper Laurie ). It was De Palma’s first large-scale success. Also in the cast was Amy Irving , Steven Spielberg ‘s first wife , who was introduced to her by De Palma.

Once again, he mercilessly copies Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill , a mix of Psycho and Vertigo with Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine as protagonists, although Nancy Allen, Mrs. De Palma, had a relevant role.

Veteran Kirk Douglas took De Palma’s command in another psychic movie, The Fury , where he plays a civil servant searching for his missing telekinetic son. Douglas reprized with the director in the comedy A Crazy Family , also with Nancy Allen.

After divorcing Allen in 1983, De Palma has been together with the producer Gale Anne Hurd , with whom he had a daughter, and Darnell Gregorio-De Palma, an occasional actress with whom he had another, although he also ended up separating from her.

He has no qualms about stealing ideas from the greats without any qualms, as can be seen especially in Impacto , which mixes the plot of Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni , with that of The Conversation , by Francis Ford Coppola , through history of a sound technician ( John Travolta ) who while recording natural sounds becomes a witness to a murder. The film also has elements of Hitchcock, whom he shoots again in Double Body , a cocktail of Rear Window with Vertigo , although there was also an assassination attempt during a telephone conversation, which he drinks fromperfect crime . A guy ( Craig Wasson , about whom little is known later) becomes a witness to the murder of a woman he is obsessed with ( Melanie Griffith ) whom he spies through a telescope from her window.

He has even dared to emulate Howard Hawks, when he covered his gangster movie classic Scarface, the underworld terror , which led to The Price of Power , with an immense Al Pacino as rising Cuban gangster Tony Montana. The actor promoted the project, which in principle was going to be a literal remake in the Prohibition years, which was going to be directed by Sidney Lumet . He eventually walked away from the project, but had the idea to update the story and set it in the Cuban community of Miami during the cocaine boom in the early 1980s. Oliver Stone worked as a screenwriter, who carried out a solid investigation of the drug trafficking circuit. “Stone was very disappointed when it came out,” recalls De Palma. “I think he really would have liked to run it himself. He had been so deeply involved in the investigation, even risking his life. There was a time when the dealers he dealt with thought he was an undercover narcotics agent, for the amount of questions he asked. But it was worth it, because that investigation gives authenticity to the film.” Also revolving around organized crime is the bland comedy Wise Guys , a film by the far inferior director, with Danny De Vito.

Final stage

Brian De Palma begins a third installment in his filmography, more conventional and integrated into the Hollywood mainstream, with The Untouchables by Elliot Ness , again with Robert De Niro as Al Capone. Adaptation to the big screen of the classic television series, it provoked outrage in some critics for its recall of the key scene with the baby carriage descending the steps of Battleship Potemkin .

After taking up the Vietnam War in the interesting Hearts of Iron , De Palma failed with his adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities , Tom Wolfe ‘s important novel . He returned to gangsters with Trapped by his past , and returned to suspense with Snake Eyes , Femme Fatale and In the Name of Cain , where there was a flashback that turned out to be a lie, like the one that turned critics against Hitchcock for his film Panic on the scene . He gets huge suspense, especially in the Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling sequence, in Mission Impossible (1996) ., while his evocation of Stanley Kubrick ‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey in Mission to Mars is so laughable that the film fails at the box office.

De Palma has also shot The Black Dahlia , about a real murder that shocked Hollywood society in the 1940s, and Redacted , a shocking reconstruction of a dramatic episode in the Iraq war, which is followed by supposedly amateur recordings of the protagonists. . He is currently preparing Passion , a thriller with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace .

Despite the fact that he has a certain prestige, De Palma has never been considered a first-rate director on the same level as Coppola Scorsese, also Italian-Americans, who developed their careers at more or less the same time as him. “There have been some people who have said of me that I am a real nag, that I am unoriginal… All those showy and empty phrases that many people use to define me are well known. I have always been a controversial director: either they hate me or They adore me”, commented the director.