The Big Picture - The Brian De Palma Top 10 and ‘Blow Out’ at 40

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

It’s a very special episode of the show: a deep dive into the career of one of our favorite filmmakers, Brian De Palma. We’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of his masterworks, ‘Blow Out,’ this summer, and exploring the depths of his career. Joining Sean is Ringer contributor and author Adam Nayman. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Adam Nayman Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guests' guiltiest pleasures. Follow The Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Brian De Palma. Today is a special episode of the show, a deep dive into the career of one of my favorite filmmakers. We're celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of his masterworks,

Blowout, this summer, and exploring the depths of his career. Joining me to do so is ringer contributor author of this book really ties the films together and Paul Thomas Anderson masterworks among others. It's Adam Naiman. Adam, how are you? Hey, how are you doing? I'm very, very happy to be here for this one. Adam, you are an allegiant of the films of Brian De Palma as I am. So let's start with this. Explain to the listeners, who is Brian De Palma and what does he mean to movies? I mean, Brian De Palma is a still practicing hero of the 70s, the new Hollywood. And he sometimes seems to take it upon himself to remind people that he was part of that cohort. You've seen the documentary De Palma that Noah Baumbach and Jake Kasdan made. There's much reference from their subject to his days carousing around with your Lucases and your Spielbergs and your Scorseses,

where he was, by some standard, the kind of behavioral alpha of that group. Whenever you see them sitting around smiling and drinking and doing whatever, he's right there. And I think reputationally's he's right there and i think reputationally he was right there and then in in ways big and small uh over the the ensuing 40 years he kept pace with those filmmakers and dropped behind them and digressed to do totally different things and vanished and resurfaced i think think, in quite heroic ways. But, you know, I mean, who is Brian De Palma? He's not Martin Scorsese. He's not Steven Spielberg. He's not Francis Ford Coppola, but he is their artistic equivalent. And for me personally, this is where we start getting into subjective stuff. I prefer him to that list. I mean, maybe not gun to my

head. Maybe I wouldn't swear on my kids that I do, but I kind of do. And in a way, the fact that he hasn't won an Oscar, that he hasn't been officially canonized and that he'll never be beloved in the way that a Scorsese is, it's a compliment to him. It's not an insult to the other guys. It's a compliment to the kind of artist he is, which is, you know, kind of a truculent, difficult, shoot himself in the foot, shoot everybody else in the face, misanthropic kind of outlier. And that's who he is. I think that that is a beautiful summation of a cinephile's favorite. Those of us who are trying to conquer this vast century of cinema love Brian De Palma for a lot of reasons. I think his sort of underdog amongst the giant status is a factor there for sure.

I think it's obviously also a testament to the incredible formal skill that he shows in virtually every movie. And the fun that it is to deconstruct all of the work that he does and to think about the choices that he makes. And also the authentically transgressive movies that he makes relative to someone like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas or even Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. De Palma likes to play in slightly more illicit waters. And I think because of that, he is such a fun character to talk about. His movies are so fun to rewatch and to deconstruct. For you, when did your relationship with De Palma's movies start to build?

Well, there is some writing of mine that people can find on the internet where I had not been De Palma-pilled. And I don't mean like as an 18-year-old. I mean, even in my 20s, when I wrote about him, I very much believed that this was a tremendously talented and important filmmaker who just had these weaknesses to some extent of storytelling. And at that time for me, they really hampered my affection for him. And the Toronto Film Festival did a retro, like a full De Palma retro.

And this was not like babe in the woods, wide eyed kids stuff. I had seen a lot of these movies, but going to see them in a concentrated fashion on a big screen projected all that fetishistic joy of film going stuff. Um, it was cumulatively kind of overwhelming because you're watching the early political films and the sevents kind of jello

riff thrillers and the 80s you know excess you know glorious excess and the hits like Scarface and the Untouchables and then the sort of much maligned 90s period where it's maligned by regular ordinary people and just doubled down on by cinephiles and film lovers where like when you really start getting into De Palma lore is where you start getting into the you know like Armin White's quote that you know if you don't like Mission to Mars you don't like movies much less understand them and it seems random that you choose this like commercially middling sci-fi De Palma movie to make that statement about but that's the level that he exists on for the people who see movies through his eyes

or see movies sort of through sympathetic eyes. It's funny because I think that De Palma inspires hyperbole as much as any filmmaker that I know. He's also one of the only people who when people write hyperbolically about him, whether it's in an academic journal or a letterbox, I find myself like fist pumping sometimes. you know, like, like, like people, people will like be watching Carlito's way for the ninth time on letterbox. They'll be writing things like, you know,

when this movie started, I, you know, I just thought my life had no meaning. And 20 minutes into this movie, I've just, I'm a new person and I'm going to become a parent and donate my money to charity. And I'm like, yeah, Carlito's Way is very good. And Carlito's Way, for listeners of this podcast, is a movie that probably for you, or not for you, you're thinking, oh yeah, that came out in the 90s, around the time of stuff like Goodfellas came out and other Scorsese films. I mean, Cahiers de Cinema, the French film publication, they said Carlito's Way is the best film of the 90s.

Not the best De Palma film of the 90s. not the best movie about Carlito in the 90s. This is the best movie anybody made in a 10-year period. That kind of critical hyperbole that he inspires is fascinating, especially since for some people, there are some De Palma movies that just straight up suck, and they will just have no trouble telling you. They're like, oh, Snake Eye is horrible. Or more recently, you know, Domino is horrible. And then you start getting into that fun Twilight Zone of a tourism where it's like, is it horrible? Or is it so good that you, you stupid person, you think it's horrible?

He inspires that. And it can be obnoxious in the fandom realm. But I find it pretty glorious. I think that's one of the other things that distinguishes him from some of his peers that you mentioned. Totally. Which is like Steven Spielberg has made many great films and he's made a number of stinkers and the bad movies are bad. They have not been reclaimed or rescued. 1941 is bad. Always is incredibly mediocre. Hook is not good. These movies are not that good, and they're not actually worthy of the reexamination, but De Palma gets the reexamination

every time on almost every film, which is fascinating. Well, and he also, I think, challenges, I'm not going to say just that challenges binaries of good and bad, because I don't think his movies are so bad they're good. I just think that what he values and some of the emphases that he places are unusual and for some viewers uncomfortable. Like my problem with his storytelling has now been reversed into, well, the narrative cohesion of this movie

or the plausibility of this movie, this is secondary to the effects that it's actually generating. I don't usually defer to Pauline Kael either in terms of taste or her takes on movies, but we've talked about her on this podcast before. Even if I'm frustrated by her writing, I've memorized her. And she has this thing in her review of The Fury, which is this De Palma film, for those of you who haven't seen it. It's about telekinetic twins who are separated and Amy Irving is reckoning with her psychic power, and John Cassavetes is this government villain. And Cale reviewed it, and she compared it to Walt Whitman, and she said, someone wrote about Whitman, they said there are faults in this passage,

and they do not matter. And then she says in The Fury, there are faults in this passage, but they do not matter. It's like the problems with this movie are irrelevant, because the good scenes and the moments where it moments where it goes hard are sublime you know and even if the fury is not my first draft pick in the like diploma these faults do not matter draft i get what she's saying you know when he puts together a set piece or a scene in even in movies that have their problems again Again, it's like the fist pumping,

hooting and hollering kind of stuff because the craft and the way of seeing and thinking with the camera and thinking with his cutting, he absolutely lives up to his own ego in this case. When he says I belong with those guys, I'm on that Mount Rushmore, we all came up together and I'm still what they were. He's right. He is not mistaken. It is not delusions of grandeur. It is truth in advertising. I agree with you about that.

Let's talk a little bit about where he comes from and how he became what he is. So he's born on the East Coast, born in Newark and raised in the city of Philadelphia. And he is clearly a brainy type, clearly a science whiz, a strong math student, but also a jock and also very interested in girls. And you can see this in the De Palma film that you mentioned that Noah Baumbach co-directed. His perception of himself is fascinating because he is simultaneously living up to all of the expectations of the 1950s middle-class boy and also rejecting them in real time. And he also comes from, as many great artists do, a kind of broken home, a home in which there's a lot of stress and struggle,

and his parents did not get along, and his siblings had to band together to kind of stand up for themselves. And it clearly infects the work that he makes, not in a discrete autobiographical way every time, but you can see that he is channeling his pain, for lack of a better word, his trauma. We hear artists talk about that all the time now. I thought about my trauma and I put it in the work,

but he does it in a more subtle and often more frankly perverted way that pays such dividends and I think makes his film so much different from some of his peers and we see a filmmaker who evolves basically as this kind of erotically and viscerally charged member of the you know the sort of movie brats generation well and his wares are on display a little earlier than some of the other guys because he catches a critical attention even Kale's attention he makes a student film called Wotan's Wake in the mid-60s.

And so, I mean, even as just, you know, I mean, it's hard. What does it mean for a filmmaker to be on the map in a pre-IMDB or pre-letterboxed era? Like, are people writing letters to each other about him? I mean, it's hard to talk what buzz means, right? But De Palma at a time when some of those other peers are sort of cutting their teeth on exploitation movies for Roger Corman or making student films of their own, I mean, he's actually very busy in the middle to late middle of the 60s, just kind of going out there and doing experimental work. He films an experimental theater troupe in New York for a film called

Dionysus in 69. I mean, he's out there trying stuff. And I think you're right that he's channeling pain, but he's also channeling a kind of a precocity, a precociousness. And he is aligning himself with an avant-garde that is not just political in the sense of making political work, but it's an avant-garde that's inclined with kind of anti-establishment politics. He's not just hanging out with interesting artists and writers and hipsters, but he's hanging out with draft dodgers. He's hanging out with war protesters. He has the same film brat childhood love of movies that people like Spielberg and Scorsese talk about, but it's not cozy. It's not cozy sitting by the TV. I go to matinees all the time and see Powell and Pressburger. He's like a militant, thorny kind of teen and a militant,

thorny kind of early 20-something. And so by the time he starts getting up the steam and the financing to making movies that aren't just sketches and aren't just kind of playing around, I think the headstart he has on some of those other guys is fascinating. I think in the head financing to making movies that aren't just sketches and aren't just kind of playing around. I think the head start he has on some of those other guys is fascinating. I think in the head start, he makes some of his best movies. That period in the late 60s, early 70s is close to my favorite, actually. So let's talk about that as a means to understanding what it is that he does that differentiates him just from a pure formal perspective. So he does, it starts to make essentially fully independently financed films in the late 60s. He's a postgraduate student at Sarah Lawrence. He encounters this acting troupe and he starts to build up this troupe.

And what does he do? What makes him different? What are the moves that he can make and the choices that he makes as a filmmaker that distinguish him? Well, there's a book that I'll probably refer to a couple times here. I hope it ends up selling some copies of this book by a guy named Chris Dumas, who wrote a book called Un-American Psycho. It's a great title, which argues that as much as people want to frame him as a kind of Hitchcock appropriator or Hitchcock imitator that in his post-student

days or in those heady salad days we're talking about, what he actually said he wanted to be and tried to be and came halfway close to achieving was to be the kind of American Godard, right? To make movies that deliberately explode narrative form and convention almost to the point of seeming amateurish, almost to the point of seeming kind of sketchy. So you look at a movie like Greetings and its sequel, Hi Mom, which both star an impossibly young Robert De Niro. And I can see it from her apartment. So as you'll see now, see, this is the preliminary stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Is she a pro? Well, I think she is, as a matter of fact, but she's really great. What happens now is... Before Scorsese and before everything else, he was part of De Palma's troupe. He's De Palma's gang. Even before he's in Mean Streets walking into the bar, he'd made two movies with De Palma. And in these movies, he functions as a kind of sly semi-analog for the filmmaker, like a peeping Tom pervert wannabe filmmaker who's also falling in with this kind of riffraffy crowd and drifting.

These are movies kind of about characters who are drifting. And what they're also trying to do is they're just trying to keep from getting drafted and they're trying to keep from getting sent to war. So, you know, they're draft Dodger comedies, but they're also like self-portraits of the artist as a young pervy kind of filmmaker. And if Hitchcock is in these movies or if classic Hollywood is in these movies, it's not foregrounded yet. What's foregrounded is actually closer to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In or like SNL before SNL. These kind of swift, kooky, explicit blackout sketch movies, and they're audacious.

I mean, in Greetings, there's a scene where you have a guy reading the Warren Commission report and photos of the Zapruder film while his lover is naked in bed, and he's tracing the bullet trajectory all over this topless girl, which is back into the left years before Oliver Stone did it in JFK, plus, you know, you get boobs and you have, you know, the,

the, the stirrings of blowout are there. And then in, in, in high mom, he stages like one of the greatest scenes in the history of American movies, which is the be black baby scene where you have this theater troupe of

black actors, welcoming white audiences into their theater for an immersive theater experience and basically verbally and then physically abusing them and placing them in blackface for this supposed, you know, this is an experience. This is what it's like to feel like an African-American. And the best thing you can say about that scene is that you cannot tell who the joke is on. At some point, the joke is is on us but you can't tell if what you're watching is real or staged if the fiction has sort of bled into documentary it's all done in these long takes it doesn't seem to be being done with real actors in fact when de niro pops in as a cop

late in the scene it actually kind of almost wrecks it because at least you're like oh that's robert de niro it takes you out of it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's fundamentally the final third of high mom. And it is unlike anything you'll see in any movie. And it's spotlights, you know, not just some of that, you know, lefty cynicism that you're talking about,

but that real sense of mischief that he has where he's trying to, and some of it is Godardian, I guess, where there's that kind of like rise sense of humor and that, that, that skepticism about the way that our society is constructed. But there's something, um, a bit, not just mischievous, but, kind of like wry sense of humor and that skepticism about the way that our society is constructed. But there's something a bit, not just mischievous, but ribald and almost dangerous about what he's trying to do. You can sense him tempting the fates of good taste all the time in these early

movies. And it's really, really exciting. And it does feel so distinctly different from all those other filmmakers that we're comparing him to as well. And constantly making you aware of the apparatus of filmmaking, or better, making you forget about it until suddenly you remember it and then feel like an idiot. I mean, one of the filmmakers who I think he is most like, even though he doesn't sort of pastiche him or pay him homage the way he does Hitchcock, is you know, one of the great things about Bunuel is Bunuel in his shorts and his features, he'll draw you into these things that are clearly dreams and they go on for so long

that you forget. And then someone's like, oh, and then I woke up from that. And you're like, what? How long have I been watching this? You know what I mean? And De Palma later on in the movie, like Raising Cain, he actually stages dreams within flashbacks within dreams. And you can say that it's silly, but if it's silly, I mean, the person who feels silly and to me elated is the audience member. When he wants to make a historical drama or when he wants to scare you, I mean, he can color inside the lines. But sometimes it's that willingness, even as he got older and more established and more sort of oriented within the industry to pull the kind of shit he's pulling in the movies we're talking about now like just that that i think distinguishes him and makes him very valuable it's interesting

that he went through the same sort of rite of passage that many filmmakers go through even to this day where they assemble a handful of independent projects in an opportunity to get recognized by the studio system and then go off and make a studio movie that doesn't work and that they hate because of all the compromises that they have to make. He is maybe not one of the earliest people to go through this, but it's a signature experience for him because I think it also radically changes the movies he'll make in the future. But so the one thing I had not seen Get to Know Your Rabbit, which is the movie he makes in 1972 for a long time I only saw it a few years ago for the first time actually it came up in a

conversation I just had with Alex Ross Perry as well it was a film that was not easy to find for many years and that if you watch that De Palma documentary he clearly had a very difficult time during the production of it but even in that movie you can see him doing some things with the camera and with that sense of humor and with the storytelling that permeates all of his other work. And it's unmistakably him. There are overhead shots and split screen shots and things that he does in his movies that become signatures. And it seems like he had a grasp of what kind of a filmmaker he was so early on. I mean, he's in his mid-20s when he's making most of these movies, and he knows exactly what he wants, which is what's so powerful.

Well, I don't have it in front of me, but Murder a la Mode, which is one of his earliest films, which is 1966 or 67, it has these kind of direct-to-camera interview scenes between the director and sort of an auditioning woman that are so charged and voyeuristic and creepy. And he restaged them in the Black Dahlia on a giant Hollywood budget 40 years later. So yeah, he's cultivating signatures and moves and holding onto them kind of self-consciously. The value of Get to Know Your Rabbit is that it puts a big chip on his shoulder. Not that he was, I think, you know, sunshine and kittens before that. But, you know, Get to Know Your Rabbit, the failure of that movie, the perceived failure, his sense of failure, and also the feeling that it wasn't his fault.

You know, that this is what happens when you, you know, it's no surprise that after that he makes movies about, you know, a movie like Sisters where a murder is repressed and no one's going to really know the truth about what happened. He makes a movie about Phantom of the Paradise, which is all about selling out for success. And true artistry is this mauled, mutilated, ugly thing, you know, hiding in the shadows. He takes the primal scene of Get to Know Your Rabbit and keeps recapitulating it in all these different forms as his movies go on. But his movies access bigger things than his own failure and frustration within Hollywood. Because when you start really taking the movies apart, they're about some deeply sad things. And they're not just sad things about Brian De Palma. It's sad things about the American left. It's sad things about the American dream. And it's kind of just sad things about the human capacity for and relationship to failure. I think he's the greatest filmmaker of

failure that I've ever seen. I think the one thing that he does have in common with many of those peers is he's also a great filmmaker of alienation and a carry which is the movie that becomes essentially his massive breakout hit that truly puts him on the studio map i guess for lack of a better phrase is one of the great movies about feeling isolated and rejected and then seeking revenge and you can almost feel him seeking revenge And he was weak. No, Mama! He was weak. No! He was weak. And rejected, and then seeking revenge. And you can almost feel him seeking revenge on the movie industry throughout the rest of his career. What an interesting trick of identification Carrie plays, too.

Because on paper, you know, Brian De Palma making a film getting inside the head of a sad, disaffected, marginalized 16-year-old girl doesn't make a lot of sense. That's one of his movies where there's irony around the edges, but there's no irony in the performance by Sissy Spacek. And you got to realize that Spacek and her partner, Jack Fisk, were hugely instrumental, I think, in that phase of De Palma's life and career, the same way they were with Terrence Malick and with David Lynch. I think, in that phase of De Palma's life and career, the same way they were with Terrence Malick and with David Lynch. I mean, there's a whole other podcast, which is Jack Fisk as the kind of secret MVP in the background of American film. But that performance, he got out of SpaceX and that she gave to him, that she gifted him with, because it's both things. I mean,

that's why that movie works. or it's not why it works but then all the brilliant technique and the humor of it you know uh you know has a has a has a center around which it can kind of swirl and the movie's incredible it can't work if her performance isn't that good and that's straight in a way you know it is not tinged with irony there's no tongue in cheek when she with what she's doing even if every other character feels like they are perhaps operating in some sort of like exploitation not quite spoof but there's a level of self-awareness going on in a lot of that movie but not for carrie and that's what makes it so powerful but so we're talking about his movies in the 70s now and in the 70s he's making this transition from essentially a genre meister sisters is a it feels like an

AIP movie even if it isn't you know it's got a basically a big-time murder plot wrapped around Siamese twins Phantom of the Paradise is this kind of rock musical kind of horror movie that has grown massively in estimation over the years but was also a pretty big flop. And Carrie is the big breakout. And so what decisions does he make as he moves into the mid-70s? And how does his filmmaking change if it does at all? Well, I mean, the Fury, I think the Fury was kind of handed to him or the project came to me because it was another one with telekinesis, right? I mean, producers aren't stupid. You have a hit with one thing, sort of try something else. I mean, I think it's important to note that in the 70s is also where you start getting though it peaks more in the early 80s but you you start getting the party line on him that he's a hitchcock like necrophiliac you know

that he's just kind of humping hitchcock's movies or he's resurrecting hitchcock's movies because sisters is full of little little references and it's got this bernard herman score you know in carrie the kids go to bates high school he opens it with a shower scene where instead of a black and white janet lee getting stabbed to death it's like 15 naked chicks in a shower and the only blood is menstrual blood and you're like wow you know you you know he's he's he's very canny that way so i think that the period after Carrie, there's the real potential for him to be this big, gigantic, almost kind of like, you know, King of the mountain American genre filmmaker. That's the position the fury is made

from. It's not necessarily the position, the fury, uh, shores up for him. Cause it's not as big a hit as it should have been didn't strike the same chord as carrie i think that it even though amy irving is trying to give the same kind of performance as sissy spacek there's just too much of everything in it too much plot too much craziness you're sometimes with kirk douglas like an old tired looking kirk douglas is also a main character in that movie like it doesn't have that perfect suturing into the protagonist's point of view you have in Carrie. But then he chooses, I think, in the early 80s to do something kind of amazing, which is not just double down on the Hitchcock stuff, but triple,

quadruple, quintuple down on it, and to not ease up on the hyperbolic gore and the mixture of eroticism and gore, but he doubles down on that too. He makes a movie called Dressed to Kill, which could not have been more hated. And I've done most of the bad things you just read about. Do you like doing these things? Sometimes. Partially by design. And it's hated for a lot of reasons. It's hated because it's violent. It's hated because it's perverse and unpleasant. It's dealing with aspects of sexual anxiety in the early 80s that people don't want to see touched. And it's not nice.

And it treats its characters pretty badly. And it is so unapologetic about appropriating Hitchcock. So I mean, everyone kind of hates that movie. And I think that that's the movie where the sense of him as a major filmmaker becomes twinned with the sense of him as a kind of pain in the ass. Like that's where the idea that De Palma, okay, he's a big Hollywood filmmaker, but we don't like these movies. And that's, I think, what sets up the rest of the 80s for him.

So it's interesting that you frame it in that way as hated because it obviously was reviled by many critics and it had a very negative reputation. There's also, you know, violence against women is an ongoing conversation in all of his films. It's a signature in many of his films. And on the other hand, it was a hit. It was a pretty big hit actually relative to what he had done. Only maybe the second biggest film he had made besides Carrie to that point. And in a way it does give him while it gives him this provocateur reputation in full it gives him the opportunity to make a lot of different kinds of movies i don't want to talk about the next movie he makes yet i want to save that for the end of this conversation but blowout is the movie that we're talking about on this show i think for many people it's the signature

to palma movie we can talk about whether that's the case for you or not. But after Blowout, which we'll just say now was not a success, was a big swing, an expensive movie that did not hit. And then he finds himself a little bit of man without a country, unsure of what to do. And he strangely finds himself making a Scarface movie, which is not really where i would have imagined his career would go there are some interesting sliding doors there for his time in

the early 80s specifically the movies he could have made it occurred to me as i was going through his filmography you know rather than make blowout to palma had been made planning to adapt cruising which william friedkin would go on to make as a movie. And then shortly after that, he was getting ready to adapt the nonfiction book, Prince of the City, and build it into a kind of, you know, the terror of a cop turned informant on his colleague's movie. And Sidney Lumet kind of scooped that movie out of his hands. And so he was forced to pick up a movie that Lumet had been developing, which is Scarface. And Scarface is almost certainly, maybe with the exception of Mission Impossible, the most seen movie De Palma has ever made. And yet it doesn't totally feel like a De Palma movie to me.

What is your point of view on Scarface in general and relative to his work? Well, I'll add one other title to your what if list because supposedly Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver for De Palma. That's right, he did. They had a very unhappy collaboration on Obsession, an underseen De Palma that is also quite unapologetically Hitchcockian. I mean, as far as Scarface goes, the Dumas book I referred to does a pretty heroic job of rescuing Scarface from its own pop cultural ubiquity. He doesn't disrespect the ubiquity. He sort of talks about how this is a film that got its tendrils deep into hip hop culture, the Tony Montana character in the Pacino performance, Fushu Mang and all that stuff, which I believe is the title of a smash mouth album it certainly is not to confuse smash mouth with hip-hop culture or or culture um but you know it was you know big

hit big swing funnily enough for such a for such a a kind of uh uh a kind of excessive coke-headed movie that big shootout at the end is actually partially directed by steven spielberg or at least half mapped out by him because he was visiting the set you know because they're pals um great that big shootout at the end is actually partially directed by Steven Spielberg or at least half mapped out by him. Cause he was visiting the set, you know, cause they're pals. Um,

great movie to come out in the air of just say no, since it's been a character who only seems able to say yes. You know, I mean, you know, just, you know, mountains and mountains of cocaine.

He's taking the gangster movie tropes, the thirties, and he's updating them for the eighties. It's the same ideology rise and falles of the 30s and he's updating them for the 80s. It's the same ideology, rise and fall, top of the world and then plummet. He references that famous line, top of the world mob that James Cagney

had. Here he has a blimp that spells out the world is yours right before Tony has his great fall, which then was taken as the title of a song by Nas. Scarface was a big hit in theaters, but it's obviously a movie a lot of people saw on video. They rented it for that kind of transgressive reason

because it's a super R-rated movie. I think he is present in it because what Dumas does in the book is he argues for how political a film it is and how much the Pacino character is sort of seen as an outsider because of his ethnicity, because of his show of ethnicity in white spaces. But even that's kind of funny because you have Pacino playing a Cuban guy, which is problematic.

But he argues that Scarface in its way is very much an early 80s drug war allegory, and that it does have a kind of a political side it's very telling that the big depalment champions including kale did not like the movie they thought that what he had kind of done was gotten hijacked by oliver stone you know and that scarface was kind of an oliver stone movie that depalment technically directed and gave a lot of flair to, but that the ideas were very different. And that begins this period where, again, he's all over the map. He really toggles back and forth here. I think there's a lot of credence to the Oliver Stone theorizing because, in fact, Brian De Palma threw Oliver Stone off the set of the movie because

Oliver Stone was attempting to co-direct the film, which is obviously a no-no, especially in someone like De Palma's eyes. But the 80s are really, really interesting. You and I kind of hacked together what you could, I guess, call an essentials list of De Palma movies that are not necessarily his best films, but are the films that unlock the decisions that he's going to make in the future and influence a lot of other filmmakers as well. Most of these coming films we didn't list which i find interesting and that includes body double and wise guys and the untouchables one of which is one of the most fascinating transgressive movies ever made especially by a major studio one of which is a completely forgotten comedy and the other is considered one of the most iconic quote unquote rewatchable

movies of its time. And I, they exist in, in this very curious fugue period. I feel like for De Palma where he's trying to balance all of his interests and also maintain the, maintain the, the balance of his career.

Basically like, how do I continue to be a successful director while still getting to do the things that i want to do and there have not been very many filmmakers who have done that by making movies like body double and following them up closely with the joe piscopo comedy so what do you think is happening with him in the sort of mid to late 80s i mean when i actually when i realized just now in real time that body double is not on our list i did an inward shriek. I was like, how did we forget it?

For what it's worth, I have talked about it many times on this show. It is one of my favorite movies. Yeah. No, it's very, very good. I mean, I probably should have put it on my half of the list. I just forgot. That's a movie where you can almost feel somebody trying to live up to their worst critics or live down to their worst critics like oh really you think this is what i am this is what i do and this is what i'm about well i'm

going to give you the i'm going to give you the highlight real version of your of your your your your bad impression of me which is kind of what you get in femme fatale almost 20 years later but you know body double which has been written about you know really well by a lot of people written about well i think on this site by by manuel alazich like it's a it's a film that is so close to not almost not being a real movie you know to almost not being a real movie to almost having no connective tissue or no or no through line but the set pieces are kind of stunning and the the the the you know the daring of it to come out in the mid-decade high concept 80s where you need to have a movie that could be summed up in half a sentence where you needed a movie that was also kind of a pepsi

ad and to make something where a guy watches helplessly while this woman gets drilled to death by a by by a power drill it's like like, that didn't happen in Rear Window. It's everything that Rear Window is about, by the way. It's just with the license and the gore of the 80s. It's very telling to me that Brett Easton Ellis seizes upon body double as the favorite character of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho because Patrick Bateman is a character who doesn't understand popular culture or he understands it in the most perverse way. So of course, someone who likes Phil Collins, and of course course someone who likes you know huey lewis also likes body double because of the power drill he doesn't see it as a joke he just thinks that it's

a turn on right yes and that's what and that's why it's so weird that when he makes the untouchables almost all of the irony and almost all of the rage kind of drains away. And he really colors inside the lines, I think. You can feel him almost toggling in real time between this is what they want me to do, so I'll do it.

And this is what they want me to do, so I will do the exact opposite. Almost in succession, you can see him making those specific choices. And in some ways, I think he's very clear and very clever about this in the in the documentary about him but this this concept that at the time in his head

these ideas did not seem necessarily as absurd or offensive as they would be received because this is how his mind works the drill idea idea from Body Double, for example, he clearly thinks that's hilarious. He thinks it's hilarious, the idea of being shot from below and watching the drill go down across the man's crotch into the woman, the obvious visual sexual sight gag of that moment. And people were absolutely disgusted by this. The people who paid for the movie were disgusted. Critics were disgusted. The very few people who went to go see that movie were disgusted. And he maintains that it's funny, and it is funny. But you also have to be willing to kind of go on the ride with him. It doesn't really feel like that's necessarily what he's after in The Untouchables. It does feel like he's making something that is, frankly, just more conventional. And it's interesting to get

back into the kind of quote-unquote gangster waters and what that means. And to make a movie, frankly, with someone like Kevin Costner, who does not does not necessarily scan as dark and devious and traumatized and funny as many of his leading men across his career. No, but I mean, the difference between body double and the untouchables can be summed up in Craig Wasson and Kevin Costner you know Craig Wasson this hapless wabagon to me great performance truly great performance in body double and Costner this assured charismatic to me kind of flat performance in in the untouchables you know De Palma is really good with characters who are either tempted or characters who experience you know crushing failure or see their idealism kind of deflated. And that's not Costner's wheelhouse. You know, Costner plays a guy whose moral certitude is intact the entire time. His best scenes are when he's sad about Sean Connery and we're all sad about Sean Connery because when he leaves the movie, the movie to me kind of suffers. The air goes out of it, yeah. The air goes out of it. And then it rallies at the end, but it rallies in a very film geek way where for some reason, we have a shootout at a train station that's just a remake of Battleship Potemkin,

which is just him doing it for fun. And Tarantino and De Palma get talked about together a lot, or Tarantino, to his credit, talks De Palma up. Blowout, which we're going to talk about later, Tarantino says one of the best films ever made. The critical community, the critical establishment, the way movies were talked

about in the 80s, was not quite there the way it was for Tarantino in the 90s with this idea of prestition, satire, and restaging sequences. I mean, could you imagine if a movie like The Untouchables came out now that just did Battleship Potemkin for 15 or 20 minutes? I mean, could you imagine if a movie like The Untouchables came out now that just did Battleship Potemkin for 15 or 20 minutes? I mean, people got it in the late 80s,

but I think that by the 90s, Tarantino had much more normalized that idea that movies are just strings of references, or The Simpsons had normalized the idea that movies or TV could be just strings of references. The Untouchables is, and I know you say this literally and figuratively, a rewatchables type movie. Cannot be overstated how weird it is that for 15 minutes, it becomes a remake of a formalist Russian silent film. I had what I'm sure many people experience that are within our age range, which is I was shown the Eisenstein film in film school. and when i was 19 and i watched the sequence in battleship atempkin and i had a flashing moment of holy shit that is what that

is that is not only homage it is almost shot for shot at certain parts of that sequence um i like the untouchables it's not that i dislike it i find it difficult to evaluate amongst these other movies which i have a much more personal and excited relationship to now. It feels like when you get into De Palma, you kind of grow out of The Untouchables. You might even grow out of Scarface a little bit. I feel like I've grown out of Scarface a little bit. I don't return to that movie nearly as much as I would return to something like Carrier or Body Double or Blowout. The late late 80s and the 90s is, of course, a fascinating period for him. He makes some of his best work and some of his worst work at the same time.

And it starts with Casualties of War, one of the more controversial American movies ever made, frankly. Somebody stumbles. They don't mean to shoot you. They're sorry for the fucking casualty. I mean, a body bag is a body bag right who's counting uh which is a depiction of heinous war crimes um during vietnam and a movie that he'd been wanting to make for a very long time that was not at all commercially successful that is very difficult to watch and he himself has said that he has a hard time watching it but that i i think is

one of his signature films um and i think one of the most fascinating and brutal depictions of war ever in American moviemaking. It feels like another movie that was not necessarily in circulation that did not have that kind of like hot cult appeal that many of De Palma's movies have. What do you make of it right now? I love casualties of war and I'm grateful to a late friend of mine, my friend, Kevin Currier, who passed away a couple of years ago, who was a casualties of war fan and who kind of talked, not to not talk me into watching or not talk me into liking, but talked about the movie so much that, you know, just, you know, you have those people who, who proselytize on behalf of the movie, but it doesn't bother you. It's just very passionate, very nice to hear. You know, it was a movie that I think he meant a lot to him.

He was a writer in Toronto. And that's a movie that comes out after Platoon wins the Oscar and after Full Metal Jacket kind of, in its weird Kubrickian way, kind of completely colonizes the audience's mind about what a Vietnam War movie looks like. So it's kind of a casualty of timing in that sense. But it's a movie that means a lot to him. It's once again, a movie about failure, the failure of a man to save a woman, the failure of a man to rescue a woman, a woman falling, plummeting, reaching out to her death in one of the most horrific sequences and set pieces, which he kind of makes into an action set piece, but it's not shameless and it's not exploitative. It feels kind of operatic,

you know, I think the casualties of war in a way is more operatic than the untouchables, which actually features long stretches of, of opera or, or deliberately operatic stuff. But into the nineties, you can sort of see all these attempts, I think,

to recapture some past formula raising cane as an attempt to return to the diploma of of dress to kill it actually has the tagline i think it's like deranged demented diploma yeah right so that's clearly not reaching out for the untouchables crowd or the casualties of war crowd carlito way. He actually was hesitant to make because he thought it was too close in some ways to Scarface and then mission impossible. You have the weird thing of the director kind of disappearing. I mean, he doesn't disappear because it's a primo to Palma movie in a lot of ways,

but that's not why people went to see it. Yes. Right. I mean, people want to see mission impossible because it's Tom Cruise and because it's Mission Impossible. He's like at best the third tier attraction

from a box office point of view. Yeah, I have a... Well, one, I think Carlito's Way followed by Mission Impossible is one of the great one-two punches

of the 90s and shows, I think, all of the colors of De Palma. The fact that he was very gifted at taking on studio fare

and creating a mass consumption, enjoyable film like The Untouchables or like Carrie, but also was able to do something as emotional and complex and also as formally gobsmacking in Carlito's way, especially some of those famous,

you know, follow shots and the oners that he's doing following Al Pacino around through the climax of the film are just amazing. And, you know, follow shots and the one-ers that he's doing following Al Pacino around through the climax of the film are just amazing. And, you know, he's talked at length around the production design of Carlitos. Mission impossible is really important because it's not just a hit,

but it becomes an instant cultural artifact. It becomes a part of the wallpaper of American pop culture. And it's a series that is still going on. And I would argue that without the famous cia infiltration sequence and without that you know famous helicopter into the tunnel a quite phallic call back to the uh final shot of north by northwest um i don't think that the mission impossible movies are still happening his collision of pop action movie making with character building and

genuine mystery intrigue makes for candidly what I wish most franchise filmmaking was. I think he basically built the format that guys like Christopher McQuarrie are still building on top of. I was determined to make

a huge hit. I said, with Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible, I'm ready. So this was a situation where whatever Tom wanted to do, they would make. They didn't care. They just wanted to make Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Isn't it interesting how Mission Impossible manages to showcase Cruise without basically being a commercial for him, which is what the new Mission Impossible movies are. And do not get me wrong, I enjoy aspects of these later Mission Impossible films

and Christopher McQuarrie being Tom Cruise's pet director and whatever else. But in Mission Impossible, Cruz gives a great movie star performance. He's given the space to do that. But then the movie around him is all about compromised ideals, and it kisses off the sixties in a pretty vicious way. His original plan was even meaner, but he was going to bring back the whole original cast of the first show and

kill them. Yes. You know, and so instead he, instead he just kills off a bunch of other likable actors instead of, you know, old, old,

old folks. And, you know, it, it, it, it, it doesn't,

it doesn't feel like a movie that you know is tom cruise basically as a as a stuntman tourist you know it's got a good tight fun propulsive plot and it does that thing of world building long before that entered into everybody's vocabulary both as filmmaker and film viewer i mean it sets up the architecture that the rest of those movies operated without really kind of breaking a sweat. And even the opening scene is all about a fake movie being made. It's a sting operation that's ultimately a kind of weird

behind the scenes movie that the whole crew is making. So all the stuff with the costumes and the masks and the mixed identities, he's getting his stuff in there. One of the things we'll talk about in our blowout portion of the conversation is just how much he loves to reflect on the nature of making movies within his movies.

So in the 90s, you have Bonfire of the Vanities, this historic bomb that is well chronicled in The Devil's Candy. I think there's a podcast actually coming out this summer that is about the making of The Devil's Candy hosted or the making of Bonfire of the Vanities hosted by The Devil's Candy author, Julie Salomon, who followed De de palma i'd encourage people to check that that book out it's a it's a very rare instance in which a journalist is present for almost every step of the disaster of a movie i don't think the bonfire of the vanities is very effective not even necessarily for the reasons that de palma believes which is he thinks that the movie itself is fine, but the readers of the book were confused and often outraged by the result.

But it obviously did not work. It sets his career once again in a different course. He makes Raising Cain another kind of overt homage to these Hitchcockian impulses, very nifty little thriller. Then he makes Carlito's Way. Then he makes Mission Impossible. And then he makes Carlito's Way then he makes Mission Impossible and then he makes what I think is now only barely trailing femme fatale as the are we sure this isn't one of his three great masterpieces which is Snake Eyes which is one of my favorite movies um and Snake Eyes is a pure conventional Bruckheimerian David Koepp scripted thriller starring Nicolas Cage on its surface and then if you drill down to it the same way you just drilled down into some of the,

some of the cynical notions that are undergirding mission impossible is just an incredible movie that I think holds up to this day. That is ostensibly a kind of like day in the life movie of a, a, a Vegas police officer slash alcoholic slash gambler slash ne'er-do-well, but that also unlocks

all of the same ideas about conspiracy and anxiety of events and influence around this one figure and what the government does that is not above board versus what the common man

can do to battle those power structures. Really, really n power structures. Really, really nifty movie. Sure. And all hiding in plain sight in the context of a big boxing match, right. Which is, you know,

allows him to, to, to, to shoot a movie in a place where there's cameras everywhere and where, you know, media and media surveillance are everywhere, which is also one of his great themes, which again,

we'll kind of loop back to blow out. But I do think that when you are getting into, and it may just also be that this is around the time I started reading a lot of film criticism and sort of realizing that for, for a lot of people, maybe people who don't get out or, you know, get picked for pickup basketball or something that, that arguing about diploma was a big thing. There's a class of like diploma worshiping critics.

And that's where you start getting your snake eyes is your mission to Mars is your femme fatales, your black dahlias where it's like the battles of the past are now being refought on the premises of these films that at a glance don't work. And when you start reading most sort of mainstream publications, reviews of them, like, you know,

your local papers review of the black dahlias probably of them, like, you know, your local papers review of the Black Dahlia is probably like, this doesn't really work, you know. But the hardcore De Palma tourists are sort of arguing, you know, no, he's better than ever. And he's reworking the, you know, the things he did before. I mean, a movie like Femme Fatale is a great litmus test movie for taste, I think. Not like you have bad taste if you don't like it good taste if you do but you have a particular kind of taste if this movie speaks to you this is a movie that opens with like hot lesbian sex in the bathroom at the can film festival everyone is watching some boring movie and he keeps cutting between the audience sitting through this horrific you know euro pudding co-production and Rebecca remains Stamos, you know,

making out with this rich, this rich blonde in a bathroom stall while stealing her jewelry. And I love this idea that the better movie at con is playing in the bathroom, you know, and that's just really funny. I mean, everything about femme fatale is really funny. Even the incredible way it presses reset on its plot, which I won't spoil here, but strike

some people as the dumbest oldest twist in the book but the way he torques that twist towards i think actually being about ethics and choice and and and free will it's a litmus test movie i think that body double femme fatale these are movies that if you like them you are good for the whole filmography. Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that. Very few of his other films will live up necessarily to the kinky and kinetic pleasures of those movies, both of which do something that many of his movies do, which is constantly shift perspective and reevaluate the events, reevaluate an event from a number of different set of eyes, and then figure out what that means to shift the perspective and how that can change necessarily how you perceive your life and the lives of others um and there's something that's in casualties of war it's

something that's in carrie it's something that is in so many of his movies this idea that life is subjective but the camera is not and there's a way to kind of redefine that every single time. Well, and he really, really, really went hard in that direction when he makes Redacted, which is my favorite of his 2000s movies and a movie that I, I mean, it's just crying out for someone to actually do some kind of proper reevaluation or symposium on it. It's hard because people don't really want to return to the movies of the Iraq war. And there was so much badness around the making of redacted where he was fighting with

mark cuban who produced it and he wanted to buy it back and the ending kept getting cut like he couldn't have the ending he wanted but this is a movie diploma made for those listening who haven't seen it that's done essentially as a series of youtube clips with no real narrative, no real, no real narrative center. I mean, it's almost like kind of a series of sketches filmed from different perspectives, different uploads, different YouTube uploads that re reenact casualties of war, except he doesn't have to say, well, what if the same thing that happened in Vietnam happened in Iraq where American soldiers raped and killed? They did. So it's not just a remake of Casualties of War in an opportunistic way. He found the same story with American soldiers during this conflict. And man, the way he uses that to draw parallels

between two periods, but also the consistent cruelty and excess of American military abroad. But then he also makes it all about voyeurism because in Casualties of War, the camera is, it's a narrative film. We see things because there's a camera there. In Redacted, everything is seen from someone's point of view. And I don't know how well you remember the film,

but some of the effect he gets out of the idea of who is filming, who is being filmed, why would someone film this? Are people doing confessionals? They're filming stuff for their YouTube channel. They're being caught by surveillance cameras.

It's just dazzling stuff. I haven't seen it since it was released. And so I don't know if I... I'm trying to remember if it doesn't have most of those formal choices that appear in most of his films. It doesn't have the split screens.

It doesn't have the split diopter shots, the steady cam. It's made much differently than most of his movies, right? Well, yeah. The movies that it feels like, I mean, narratively, it feels like Casualties of War. But formally, it's more like greetings and hi mom it's almost like this weird this weird kind of blackout sketch movie where the common denominator is again that these these are videos that have been taken or uploaded and someone has arranged them i mean i mean it's kind of a found footage horror movie because again this is a guy who's very aware of and

always riding aesthetic trends i will say just in passing that in addition to Redacted being the one movie I interviewed him for at TIFF, and, you know, I'm just trying to be truthful here. I'm not, I don't want him to listen to this and sort of be like that didn't happen. But I also happened to sit next to him at two separate movies at TIFF with in no way knowing who the other person was. But, you know, I saw him at the Michael, uh not like the the the sarah palin documentary that nick broomfield made and i saw him once at guillermo ariaga's burning plane and leaving aside how he reacted to these movies i mention it because he would just come to tiff and see movies right not i'm showing up for my movie or not i am making a show of being on a jury. I mean, he came and watched everything. And so when you have redacted playing with found footage horror,

that's not just trend spotting. That's a guy who's aware of the visual language of the moment. He is an endless film-going kind of director, and he's seen everything. One of the reasons why hardcore film fans love him is it's evident how much he loves films. It feels like you are a part of this kinship of viewership that goes on.

So Redacted is 2007. And there's not much since then. And that's the thing. He's in his mid-60s at that time when he makes that movie. And it's been almost 14 years since that movie was released. And we've gotten two films. We've gotten Passion, which is again feels like a maybe a slightly stripped down return to some of the territory of Dressed to Kill very difficult production and a film that may or may not have been utterly hacked to bits that you have a lot of passion for so what is it about domino that makes it a meaningful movie to his career what i have passion for in domino is i

have passion for the the the way that he has not disappeared and that there's three or four scenes in this movie that no one else could have directed. And it's not just him on autopilot. It's deeply engaged at whatever age he's at late seventies, early eighties. I don't have it in front of me, but he's not, he's not coasting. He's not phoning it in.

And here again, I don't, I don't want it to come out the wrong way. I'm not being factual. It's my own opinion here, but like there was something about his diminishment that i find moving there is something about him having to make a movie like domino which is a big international you know cheap euro co-production shot in all these locations which seemingly seems for tax credit purposes he's not working with your

travolta's and cruises anymore he's working with actors from game of thrones who are who are good both of them and and guy was excellent and then guy pierce as well it's not meant as an insult it's that there's a diminishment there it's an industrial diminishment that i see as being yoked to a certain kind of principle he's not going out and writing op-eds for the new york times about the kinds of movies he doesn't want to see being made i mean that's scorsese is doing that in all power to him. We don't need to relitigate that. You know, De Palma's not out there because he's not a beloved voice of the people in that way. He's not a beloved voice of cinephilia. He's just a guy who's still around. But when he manages to get the juice together to make a movie, he doesn't suck up. He doesn't capitulate. He doesn't change. He follows his obsessions and his technique and his incredibly bleak way of seeing things.

And he follows through on it. It's not a failure to learn or mature. It's like he knows who he is. He knows who he is. And I think he knows in some way that he's working in a diminished capacity and he owns it. Domino is such a b movie you know and there's a certain joy i take in what a trashy kind of b movie it is and there's a lot of people watch domino i mean i'm not trying to sound crazy there's lots of parts of it that feel

weak but when it's good i feel it's as good as the fury or it's as good as body double or it's as good as the Fury or it's as good as body double or it's as good in some places as blowout and uh you know I I I moved by that so we just traversed through 50 plus years of De Palma movies in under an hour first of all kudos to us second of all here's what I'm gonna do just for the listener at home I'm gonna identify the movies that we think are the portal movies for De Palma. Here are those movies. High Mom from 1970, Sisters from 1972, Phantom of the Paradise from 74,

Carrie from 76, Dressed to Kill from 80. I think you could do a Dressed to Kill body double feature if you were interested. Blowout, which we will discuss very shortly. Scarface from 83. A double feature of Casualties of War and redacted as a kind of mirror image.

Femme Fatale, which many people still have not had a chance to see. And Domino, which many, many people have still not a chance to see. So if you want to get started and have yourself a Brian De Palma weekend, you could do so. But he's made 30 movies in 50 years.

He's been very productive, even only having made two movies in the last 14. So there's a whole world to dive into. Adam, let's take a quick break and then we'll talk about Blowout. What cat did you strangle to get that? The cat that you hired. That's her voice. You mean you didn't cat that you hired. That's her voice.

You mean you didn't dub that? No. That's hers? Yeah. Oh, really? Yes. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about Blowout.

I've been waiting to talk about Blowout on this podcast since we started it three years ago. Adam, I'm really glad you're here to do it. It's the 40th anniversary of this film. I think it's one of the greatest movies ever made. What is Blowout, and why does it resonate with us? Blowout is a film that Brianalman brian depalman makes in 1981 right at the dawn of reagan's presidency within proximity intentionally or not to reagan

having a shot taken at him by john hinkley inspired by the movie taxi driver which even though that may be one of the few american political myths not referenced in blowout seems significant to me because of the slippage between movies and reality, where it's like a guy watches Taxi Driver, but someone so alienated becomes a political assassin. He's like, I should become a political assassin. And then, you know, watches a movie with someone who becomes obsessed with Jodie Foster. And so, you know, decides to invoke Foster as his reason for shooting at Reagan. He basically makes the first, not the first response to the

Kennedy assassination, because he had responded to Kennedy himself already. That is what is going on in Greetings, and that is what is going on in Hi Mom, and almost any De Palma movie where there's a murder and a visual record of it is riffing on the Zapruder film. But he sort of decides for whatever reason in the early 80s, maybe it's the election of a movie star in the White House, maybe it's the malaise and the hangover of Watergate, but he sort of decides audaciously to take Zapruder and Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick and Antonioni's blow up and his own ambivalent relationship to technology and truth

and a bit of the plot of vertigo and an awful lot of other Hitchcockisms. And I'm not going to say mash them together. I'm going to try and say differently. To string them together in this perfect bejeweled contraption of a movie that could not be better engineered. It's just not possible to engineer something more beautifully than he does blow it. Even the excesses in it, the strangers of it, Roger Ebert's problem with the film, the subplot with John Lithgow as a serial killer, it's all thought through. And it's just one of those films where you're in awe of the screenplay, even if the script is not really what people ended up talking about,

because they ended up talking about the visuals and they ended up talking about the staging. But I love it as a piece of writing. And I love what a B-ish movie it is. It's not respectable. Yeah, it's fascinating because it is not respectable, but it is so personal. So this is a movie, of course, about essentially a sound artist, a Foley artist, somebody who helps create and sound design for B pictures for exploitation movies. The movie opens with this John Travolta character essentially sitting in a screening of an upcoming horror film in which he kind of masterfully apes like a Black Christmas style slasher movie. The film is called Coed Frenzy.

Yes. And in typical De Palma fashion, you are not told that you are watching a movieasher movie. The film is called Co-Ed Frenzy. Yes. And in typical De Palma fashion, you are not told that you are watching a movie within a movie. So not only is he doing Halloween and Black Christmas, he's doing Carrie. Yes. Because the camera's going through the locker room, you know? That's right.

The shower on the shower door. Yeah. On the shower door. And then it pulls back and you realize at the end of this scene with the giant stabbing, there's this pitiful little scream coming from the slashy, which suggests, of course, that this movie sucks. And also that Travolta's heart is not in his job. That's right.

And you can imagine extrapolating to Palma having had that experience of working on films he did not have his heart in necessarily. But it's not personal just because it's a movie about a person who makes movies and who is interested in the you know the sort of more technical aspects of making movies it's also a film set in philadelphia where he grew up and it's a film that is a reunion of sorts with some of his key collaborators and we haven't talked about them that much um through the course of this conversation the first of which is uh vilma sigismond the uh the famed DP. Pino D'Onozio, the composer who he worked with, I guess the highest number of times after those early films with Bernard Herrmann. Yeah, for sure the most number of times. Paul Hirsch, the famed editor of films like Star Wars, among many others.

And then it's a reunion of John Travolta and his then wife, Nancy Allen, who starred together in Carrie. And the movie effectively gets made and made at the scale that it does. One, because Travolta wants to do it. Two, because Travolta wants to do it with his old friend, Nancy Allen, who is married to De Palma. And then, of course, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz. So it is it's a it's a troop movie. And it goes back to those early movies of the 60s where he's working with the same six or seven actors over and over again, the same collaborators over and over again. So you can feel a sense of evenness, of equilibrium in the making of the movie. It

feels like a total control movie. Now, every De Palma movie feels like a total control movie, but this one even more so. There is not a wasted moment. There is not a shot out of place. There is not a tinge of sound out of place. Everything is just so, and just perfect. And it's also a compelling narrative. It's a, it's an exciting movie that doesn't necessarily resolve in a way that will satisfy your standard moviegoer, but is also so incredibly well-designed. Well, I mean, it's interesting. The opening co-ed frenzy scene, Travolta is like a, a passive viewer at a movie he doesn't want to work on. But then when he records by the riverbank, what sounds like a blowout, you know, is a tire being blown out or shot out.

He is seeing a car go into the river, a presidential candidate, high-ranking politician dying. Again, a reference back to what happened to Ted Kennedy. I mean, the plot of the film is that he becomes involved with the survivor of that crash, a call girl played by Nancy Allen, who is sweetness and light and dignity and a complete sacrificial lamb in waiting in this film's cynical calculus. But then when he tries to reconstruct the crime, he's a sound man, but he becomes an auteur. He tries to take photographs and sync them to the sound that he's recorded. And you get this flip book version of what we've already seen happen live and in color. And it's like a mini Zapruder film within De Palma's own construction. And you realize that

he's not a passive viewer anymore. His heart is in this now. He's trying to reconstruct an audio documentary of something that happened. He's trying to prove an audio documentary of something that happened he's trying to prove that something did happen and i'm going to say that that is one of the things that makes de palma's film so nightmarish his characters know that something has happened and they cannot convince anybody or even when they come close to convincing people they don't have the proof and then when they have the proof the proof gets gets erased. And there's a scene in Blowout where his tapes get demagnetized and he does it as a twirling shot.

It's the same 360 degree shot you have in Carrie where the date is going out of control. I mean, just to pause, that scene in Carrie almost brings tears to my eyes when I think about it, where they're slow dancing together and it's romantic. And then the camera starts moving in a way where it's not romantic anymore.

It's just like, this is fucked up. Something bad is going to happen. And in blowout, it happens where he comes back to his studio and his tapes have been erased. And it's like for the artists, that feeling I recorded this, this is my stuff.

I worked on this. I had control of it. It's gone. That is a nightmare feeling. The position of the camera is as important as what you're photographing. A dirty word to me is coverage. You know, two-shot, over the shoulder. You know, it's stuff you see all the time.

It just drives me crazy because this, to me, is not directing. You have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material and this whole kind of swirling idea of all those tape machines turning, turning, turning and then the whole idea of you know everything's been erased you know and and it becomes more and more that that sound of white noise comes louder and louder it's it's so well rendered and uh that's how i feel at the end of every one of these podcasts i'm like don't ever delete this because this is a really important testament to film history um the other thing about it that i like and one of the reasons why i think it still resonates and that's to your point about the the nature of getting to the bottom of a conspiracy is while he does somewhat get to the bottom of the conspiracy at the heart of the movie, he doesn't really solve anything.

And in fact, he doesn't fix anything or make he doesn't make the world aware of what he thinks he is discovering. And that same sort of fruitless pursuit of imagined conspiracy is so present right now in our culture. Well, yeah, and not only that, but the collateral damage is tragic. Because Blowout is a film that for all of its B-moviness and, you know, John Lithgow playing kind of, you know, Howard E. Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy, but is a serial killer. I mean, this is a movie where a character is like, in order to make one thing that we fucked up look like a crime, we're going to go kill a bunch of other people to make it seem like there's a serial killer. That's how that will then be covered up. I mean, the predatory mendaciousness of that is off the charts.

But even in a movie with such luridness, it's truly tragic. And it's the kind of tragedy that sticks in your throat at the end, where I'm not spoiling the end of the movie, but again- Imagine getting to the end of this podcast, having not seen Blowout and still listening. But at the end, the idea that something can happen in plain sight and no one can see it, and you're the only one who can see it. And you're the only one who can see it. And you're the only one who can hear it. And you're the only one who knows what it really means. And the suffering is not, you're not going to suffer the violence. You're just going to suffer the witness or you are going to suffer the knowledge. And Ringer has been so gracious to me

over the years, letting me write about De Palma's stuff. And I know I wrote a piece for you guys about different screams in movies and you know Blowout is the greatest movie about a scream ever because when that scream gets filled in and what it means to De Palma and to the character and to us your blood is just ice. De Palma tells such a beautiful story about the inspiration for the final minute of the movie which is of course one of the great dark-hearted heartbreaking endings to any film and he he describes coming upon you know the audio fills that you would find uh in in movies that are used over the years and if you needed footsteps walking through a corridor you would have a particular sound that you would use to fill in that foley.

And he came upon some fill that was being used for Lawrence of Arabia. And so Lawrence of Arabia, this, you know, Titanic David Lean epic has had little bits and pieces of it pulled apart and used as fill on other movies

over the years. And the idea of taking something that is so profound and in some cases painful, as with the end of this movie, and using it for schlock entertainment tells you everything you need to know about the very complicated relationship he has to his art form, which is that he is in love with it and thinks it is the deepest and most powerful thing you can find. And it's also kind of a crude joke. And he seems to be making that observation all the time in his movies. And he understands, of course, that a joke can be funny and a joke can also be more of a cosmic joke. And Blowout is that sort of cosmic joke movie. It's really a shaggy dog story that in the end really is about a sound man looking for a

better scream. It sets up the quest in the first five minutes about a sound man looking for a better scream it sets up the quest in the first five minutes one could argue that the whole fate of the union state of the union plot which is rendered in red white and blue throughout by zigmund and by the other by the production design i mean philadelphia is just a riot of by of of of a bicentennial imagery in this movie in that sense it's a very close cousin to Altman's Nashville. You know, those two movies go back to back. And to Cale's credit,

she both thought they were equally great. She didn't write about them together, but she wrote about Nashville and Blowout with a similar passion. There was something that really, I think, touched the American in her, you know? But at the end of that, at the end of this movie, it really is just set up in punchline, go do a better job. I need my crappy slasher movie to

have a sense of true terror to it. And then by accident and by providence and by nightmare, he succeeds. And in a way, that's what I mean by he's the great filmmaker of failure because the success of the Travolta character in this movie is steeped in the deepest sense of failure. And as always, to quote Body Dub with De Palma, it's always this failure to act. So as much as there is a sexism and a misogyny to the films and no one should deny it, nor should they try and recast it as stealth feminism or anything like that, I cannot think of a filmmaker who is more attuned to male impotence and male passivity and this male non-committalness where you just will not do something. And his female characters tend to have a lot more agency. They are braver and

more intrepid and they actually make choices, which is what Femme Fatale is all about. It's what Dressed to Kill is about, really. I mean, Nancy Allen in that film makes the choice when she sees this other woman being murdered. She makes the choice to track down who did it. She picks up the baton, not just as the protagonist of the movie, but she picks up a kind of moral authority. De Palma's men have no moral authority, or when they try and have it, they don't live up to it. And it's one of the reasons I think why in a strange way, I'm using a phrase I don't like, but I think is worth bringing up in the context of all these kinds of filmmakers. He's not really a film bro guy. The camera movement is in that conversation and some of the

raconteurish 70s stories about coking and and all that stuff is similar but his men are just so pathetic yeah you know they're they're they're beta science nerds most of the time or they're people thrashing against their own their own virility that's the michael caine character in in dress to kill is someone who is ashamed of what he is and trying to reckon with that by hurting other people. And there's so many other, so many of his characters, even Ethan Hunt in a strange way is somebody who is self-loathing and can't accept his own fate. And so is fighting as much as he can against it. It's a very interesting series of heroes or not quite heroes. I mean, Scarface, one of the great anti-heroes of the 1980s,

you know, he does this over and over again. Well, and in Scarface, though, the thing about that character is he both is and isn't potent, right? And, you know, by the end, he's kind of this slumped, wilted caricature because, you know, you can't go anymore because of the coke. I mean, I feel like that's De Palma's view of film executives. I've always thought that Pacino in the end,

even if he's not literally playing Don Simpson, he's playing a version of that. And that's why things like The Untouchables stick out, because Kevin Costner is nothing if not a virile hero who can throw a bad guy off a roof, spoiler. And my problem, I guess, with The Untouchables is it actually ends there you know i'm interested in the diploma and blowout is one of them but you think about carrie too

the famous ending which no one listening to this hasn't seen so it's not a spoiler but that idea that nothing's over you know he has characters wake up from nightmares but nightmares aren't aren't over you know and that irresolvability that irresolution that's in certain of his movies is i think what what what what kind of keeps you coming back to them and dressed to kill is the same way you know that's such a good point and this is something i thought about when i revisited carrie this week when the amy irving character at the end of that movie awakens from the nightmare you don't get the impression that there's any sense of relief it's it's sheer terror and it will live with her forever. That's the feeling that you get.

And you get that through all of his movies that these things stick. They are not something that you get over. And that's also such a profound idea about what happens to people and how their lives can be torn apart. Right. And so then when we were circling back to the beginning of this epic conversation, we go, all right, so why isn't Brian De Palma more loved? Well, he doesn't believe in American institutions. He doesn't believe in happy endings. His men are cucks. He's not nice films. and there's very rarely resolution or when there is resolution it's either placed in scare quotes or it's just jammed down your throat as the worst kind of tragic irony like the end of blowout that's why he's not more liked simultaneously it is why he should be loved venerated and placed on the kind of pedestal that i think he himself kind of just refuses to step on. He's never going to make a big movie again. And when I watch the crummy B-moviness of Domino,

I just feel this, I can't explain it, just this stirring of absolute respect. Adam, you steadfastly reject these hyperbolic gamified conversations about film history, but is Blowout De Palma's best film in your eyes? The only movie that for me of his means as much to me, and it's probably because of when I saw it and because of how much my mom loves it and I've watched it with her. I mean, I really love Carrie. And I think that as dark and sad as Carrie is, you can kind of love Carrie, you can love her. You can love Carrie White the way Sissy Spacek plays her. And there's a tenderness to those feelings. And also anyone

who's been to high school should basically just watch that movie and be like, yes, it's a documentary. I don't care if I'm not a small girl with freckles. We've all been there. But I have a hard time thinking it's a better movie than Blowout. Those would be my top two. Me as well. Those are simply two of the greatest movies ever made. Adam, this has been a lot of fun. I think if anybody is still listening and they haven't deeply explored the films of Brian De Palma,

I hope this will be an incentive to do so. Any parting thoughts on the works of the great filmmaker? No. I mean, I think we mentioned and kind of talked around the doc on him, which all I would say is, I mean, it's a very essential movie to watch for anyone who's this pot committed to De Palma. But I also, and when I wrote about it

for Reverse Shot at the time, the one thing I was frustrated by, I don't know how you felt, and I know you watched it recently because I saw your letter box. I sure logged it. You logged it. His own estimation of his movies is kind of

frustrating because he's so proud of the ones that made money and i can't tell if that's kind of a put on as well but the happiest he is in that doc is where he's talking about like winning on set arguments with robert town and tom cruise for mission impossible and constantly reminding us that the movie did well and i can't tell if that's a put on or if at the end of this kind of long career, being a kind of a great filmmaker in spite of your box office doesn't feel so good. And actually you really do want to remember the times when you kind of, you know,

we're number one in variety. Because I think Mission Impossible is the last time he had one. That's a long time ago. It does seem like a somewhat under Palmean note, but I do think that being truly beloved

does ultimately trump cult fetishism. And the idea of having made the Untouchables and the idea of having made Mission Impossible must be satisfying to him. That he could do what his peers could do, but he could also do what he wanted to do.

And having that balance in his career and in his storytelling life is, I bet, I bet means a lot to him. Even if it is a 75-year-old man reflecting on his life. I think the legacy should be that someone should do some horrible Mount Rushmore of 70s directors. And you put the four guys you expect there. And then someone needs to Photoshop him in with his flack vest. And that shit-eating expression on the face should just be superimposed in.

And you're like, that's the legacy. We would superimpose him on the face of Cary Grant, scaling one of those faces in North by Northwest. That is how we would do it. Well, there you go. But no, nothing else to add, except thanks as always for having me and for the chat. It's so much fun. Thanks, Adam.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, right on. Thanks to Adam Naiman and of course, to our producer Bobby Wagner for their work on this episode. Later this week on The Big Picture, we're reviving the movie auction to round out the rest of the year's most anticipated movies. And we'll also have an important guest to talk about the future of The Big Picture this summer. We'll see you then.