Each instalment in the De Palma trilogy concerns itself with a man who goes about the place cutting up women: straight razor, chisel, power drill. The women are either prostitutes, sexual adventuresses or adult-movie queens. There is no conventional sex whatever in De Palma’s movies: it is always a function of money, violence or defilement, glimpsed at a voyeuristic remove or through a pornographic sheen (and this interest in flash and peep goes right back to Greetings). The heroes are childish or ineffectual figures, helpless in the face of the villain’s superior human energies. There are no plots: the narratives themselves submit to a psychopathic rationale, and are Jittered with coincidence, blind spots, black holes. Like its predecessors, Body Double could be exploded by a telephone call, by a pertinent question, by five minutes’ thought. Most candidly of all, De Palma dispenses with the humanistic ensemble of character, motive, development and resolution. He tries his best, but people bore him, and that’s that.
Brian has something, though. Without it, he would be indistinguishable from the gory hucksters of the exploitation circuit, the slashers and manglers, the Movie Morons who gave us The Evil Dead, Prom Night and I Spit On Your Grave. Brian has style — a rare and volatile commodity. Style will always convince cinematic purists that the surfaces they admire contain depth, and that clear shortcomings are really subtle virtues in disguise. De Palma isn’t logical, so he must be impressionistic. He isn’t realistic, so he must be surrealistic. He isn’t scrupulous, so he must be audacious. He isn’t earnest, so he must be ironical. He isn’t funny, so he must be serious.
And so I hung around in damp New York, waiting on the man. Every now and then De Palma’s ‘people’ at Columbia would apologetically pass on the odd message: ‘Brian’s probably going to decide tomorrow whether he’ll let you have this interview…’ I had urgent reasons for returning to London. A week passed. Now, there is no reason why celebrities should submit to journalistic inspection, and in fact they are increasingly reluctant to do so — except in the trash press, where publicity is always tilted towards celebration. But having agreed to an interview, they should play by the rules, which are rules of ordinary etiquette: do unto others — stuff like that. A week passed. And then Brian came down from the mountain.
‘Mr De Palma? He’s right over there,’ said the porter down in lower Fifth Avenue. Brian sat ponderously on a bench by the lift with a newspaper under his arm. Always keen to stay in touch with ‘street reality’, De Palma had just staggered out for a New York Times. ‘Hi,’ I said, and reintroduced myself. De Palma nodded at the floor. ‘It’s kind of you to give me your time.’ De Palma shrugged helplessly — yes, what a bountiful old softie he was. In eerie silence we rode the swaying lift.
‘Coffee?’ he sighed. With studied gracelessness he shuffled around his four-room office — televisions, hi-fis, a pinball machine, De Palma film posters, curved white tables, orderly work-surfaces. This was where Brian did all his writing and conceiving. Wordlessly he gave me my coffee mug and sloped off to take a few telephone calls. At last he levered himself in behind the desk, his nostrils flaring with a suppressed yawn, and waved a limp hand at me. The interview began. Great, I thought, after ten minutes. He really is bananas. This is going like a dream.
‘My films are so filmically astute that people think I’m not good with actors. Actors trust me and my judgment because I’m so up front about what I feel … I don’t make “aggressive” use of the camera. I make the right use. I go with my instinct — I use Hitchcock’s grammar but I have a romantic vision that’s more sweeping and Wagnerian__I have a tremendous amount of experience. I’m not afraid to try new things … Financially in Hollywood I’m a sound economic given. Three-quarters of my films have made money. Anybody who can make one film that makes money is a genius!’
‘Casting all modesty aside,’ I said, fondling my biro, ‘where would you place yourself among your contemporaries — Coppola, Scorsese?’