Suddenly — that is to say, after a fifteen-minute yelling relay — the shot is ready to go again. De Palma talks to no one but the camera operator. ‘Why don’t you pull back a bit? Why don’t you try to hold him from head to foot?’ All his instructions are in this dogged rhetorical style. Action. Gregg Henry and Craig Wasson perform creditably (‘Oh man,’ says Gregg, peeling off his false belly, ‘you ruined my whole surprise ending’), but De Palma is unhap ?y about the camera’s swooning back-track. He should have been unhappy about his surprise ending, which doesn’t work. ‘New belly,’ says Brian, and the delay resumes. A series of delays interrupted by repetitions: that’s motion pictures.
De Palma went trudge-about. ‘I think this would be a good time for you to be introduced to Brian,’ said Rob, the unit publicist — also likeable. ‘He’s in a receptive mood.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Very receptive.’
We walked over. I was introduced. De Palma wearily offered his hand. Rob explained who I was. ‘Uh,’ said De Palma, and turned away.
‘Is that as good as it gets?’ I asked as we walked off.
See him in New York, said Rob. He 11 be better, when he s wrapped.’
And so an hour or two later I left him in the lot, which was still doing its imitation of Hell. Gaunt ladies lurk near the catering caravan. Fat minders or shifters or teamsters called Buck and Flip and Heck move stoically about. The place is big and dark and hot, swathed in black drapes, vulcanic, loud with vile engines, horrid buzzers, expert noise-makers. Nearly all the time absolutely nothing is happening. Eight hours later, at midnight, De Palma wrapped.
As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. Unlike his peers and pals, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese (they all teamed up at Warner Brothers in the early Seventies), De Palma doesn’t shoot miles of footage and then redesign the movie in the editing room. His rough cuts are usually shorter than the finished film. Every scene is meticulously story-boarded, every pan and zoom, every camera angle. Here’s a sample on-set interview:
So, Brian, before you make a movie, do you see the whole thing in your head?
Yes.
Do you have problems re-creating the movie you see?
No.
How does the actual movie measure up to what you originally imagined?
It measures up.
He seldom advises or encourages his actors. Michael Caine has said that the highest praise you’ll hear from De Palma is ‘Print’. As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. The only question is: why does he want it?
Always an ungainly cultural phenomenon, De Palma’s reputation has never been more oddly poised. He likes to think of himself as over the top and beyond the pale, an iconoclast and controversialist, someone that people love to hate or hate to love — someone, above all, who cannot be ignored. In moments of excitement he will grandly refer to ‘whole schools of De Palma criticism’ which say this, that and the other about his work. Well, too many people have failed to ignore De Palma for us to start ignoring him now. But it may be that the only serious school of De Palma criticism is the one where all the classrooms are empty. Everyone is off playing hookey. They’re all busy ignoring him.
De Palma’s history forms a promising confection, full of quir-kiness and mild exoticism. His parents were both Italian Catholics yet little Brian was reared as a Presbyterian, The Catholic imagery was naturally the more tenacious for the young artist (‘that is one spooky religion’) and its themes and forms linger in his work: the diabolism, the ritualised but arbitrary moral schemes, the guilt. De Palma Senior was a surgeon – orthopaedics, the correction of deformity. Brian used to sit in on operations, often catching a skin graft or a bone transplant, and would later do vacation jobs in medical laboratories. ‘I have a high tolerance for blood,’ he says. The cast of The Fury (1978) nicknamed him Brian De Plasma. On the set his most frequent remarks are ‘Action’, ‘Print’ and ‘More blood!’ De Palma was tempted by medicine but rejected the discipline as ‘not precise enough’.