‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m up there, I guess. Time …’ he said, and paused. De Palma is generally tentative about time — aware, perhaps, of what time has already done to much of his oeuvre. ‘Let’s face up to it! I’m never going to get a lifetime-achievement award. I never bought those values anyway. In ten years hence they … I don’t know. Time will find a place for me.’
On this note of caution, Brian unwound. His mood of frenzied self-advertisement receded, alas, and I have to report that he then talked pretty soberly and fluently for well over an hour — bearish, grinning, gesturing, his laughter frayed by hidden wildness. Of course, the time to catch De Palma in full manic babble is when he is writhing under the tethers of a collaborative project, as on Scarf ace, or tangling with the censors, as he did on Dressed to Kill, which barely escaped an X. But he was relatively calm during our meeting, with Body Double in the can and another project nicely brewing: Carpool, in which he intends to indulge his fascination with rearview mirrors. ‘Steven will produce,’ says Brian snugly. In January he had told Esquire: ‘As soon as I get this dignity from Scarface I am going to go out and make an X-rated suspense porn picture.’ Later he added, ‘If Body Double doesn’t get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. I’m going to give them everything they hate, and more of it than they’ve ever seen.’ What major company, you wonder, would finance and distribute an X? I asked Brian about this. He grew sheepish. ‘No major company would finance or distribute it,’ he said. So it’s an R. ‘Most frustrating,’ De Palma muses. ‘I mean, look at cable TV. Kids can watch anything these days.’
Despite such checks and balances De Palma is quick to claim full responsibility for his projects. ‘It is an auteur situation out there. You guys, you writers, you got to stop thinking of directors as still living in the Fifties. It’s not an entrenched power system. There’s a lot of free will. No one wants to confront you. No one wants to take responsibility. That’s why directors are emergent figures. If the executives lean on you, you just have to say, “Okay, guys, you do it.” Either they let you alone, or its “Goodbye, Bri! Well, De Palma fucked up!’“
After a little coaxing, however, Brian confessed to moments of self-doubt. ‘It’s an intolerable kind of regime. You wake up at four in the morning, thinking — Who wants it! Who needs it! It’s all so complex. It’s like Waiting for Godot [this last word stressed oddly too, like Gdansk]. Then the rushes, the final mix — that’s pleasure. I like to write. My own pace. I basically like to work by myself.’
At this point I recalled the morose and taciturn figure at Burbank Studios, in LA. Among all the clamour and clatter, the compulsive wisecracking and bovine bonhomie, there was De Palma, doing as good an impersonation of a man alone as the circumstances could well permit. Occasionally, too, I thought I glimpsed the obsessive and abstracted kid in him, the bristle of a more rarefied talent. Human relations are always difficult’for this kind of artist — messy, confusing, ‘not precise enough’. De Palma has been married once, and briefly, to Nancy Allen, whom he had cast as a monosyllabic hooker in three movies running. Informed Hollywood gossip maintains that Nancy wanted a family, and Brian didn’t. Well, he’s batching it now. Asked why he always equates sex with terror, De Palma says equably, ‘Casual sex is terrifying. It’s one of the few areas of terror still left to us.’ And this is why pornography interests him. It is casual, but safe. And it is solitary: nobody else need come in on the act.
The time had come for the crucial question, made more ticklish by the fact that De Palma’s manner had softened — was bordering, indeed, on outright civility. One could now see traces of his man-management skills, his knack with actors, how he calms and charms them into a confident partisanship. Despite De Palma’s indifference to characterisation, there are remarkably few bad performances in his films. ‘I always felt that Brian adored me,” John Travolta has said. ‘He seemed to get pure joy out of watching me work.’ But perhaps Travolta feels that way about everybody. De Palma is best with the stock types of lowbrow fiction, as in Carrie. Elsewhere, he is about as penetrating as the studio make-up girl. Even with an award-winning writer (Oliver Stone), an award-winning star (Al Pacino), and an unlimited canvas ($zz million and three hours plus of screen time), De Palma showed no inkling of human complexity: Scarf ace might as well have been called Shitface for all the subtlety he applied to the monotonous turpitude of Tony Montana.