The director Mel Brooks and Brian De Palma agree is the greatest of all time: “That’s my vote”
Brian De Palma and Mel Brooks are two filmmakers who have absolutely nothing in common on a personal, professional, or stylistic level, apart from the fact that they both agree on which director deserves to be called the greatest of all time.
In one corner, fighting out of ‘New Hollywood’, is the enfant terrible who zagged when Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola zagged, shying away from awards-baiting prestige dramas and marketable movies in favour of experimental, daring, and often controversial fare like Obsession, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Scarface.
In the other corner, fighting out of the ‘Golden Age’, is the quip-happy comedian who cut his teeth on television before graduating to the big screen and winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ in his debut feature as a director, before going on to shape mainstream comedy for decades to come through a string of classics and cult favourites, including Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
Even today, their careers continue to deviate wildly. Once De Palma went off the boil, he couldn’t reheat himself, with the disastrous Mission to Mars exiling him from mainstream cinema, with several notable box office bombs, critical pariahs, and altogether misguided ventures reducing him to a shadow of the auteur he used to be, all while the other ‘Movie Brats’ continue to thrive in their veteran years.
Meanwhile, Brooks is 99 years old, still working, and still making an impact on popular culture, as the response to the announcement of the Spaceball sequel showed. They came from different eras, made different movies, and took different paths, but the common bond between them is that, as far as they’re concerned, the best to ever step behind the camera was Alfred Hitchcock.
The EGOT-winning legend called the ‘Master of Suspense’ the “best director who ever lived” when asked who he thought was the cream of the directorial crop, adding “that’s my vote” for emphasis. They became friends, and Hitchcock even performed uncredited rewrites on Brooks’ High Anxiety, the spoof that was created as a love letter to his impressive filmography.
Meanwhile, De Palma has listed several Hitchcockian classics among his all-time favourite films, has homaged them on multiple occasions, and labelled him as “one of the few directors who advanced the form of cinema,” explaining that “anybody who knows anything about film grammar cannot help but be snowed under by Hitchcock.” To put an even finer point on it, he said, “It’s like studying Bach.”
Of course, they’re far from the only two high-profile filmmakers who wore Hitchcock’s influence on their sleeve, but it’s one of the few, possibly the only, places where Brooks and De Palma intersect. Other than lumping them in together as two of the most important voices in 1970s Hollywood, which they were, they don’t get mentioned in the same breath all too often.
However, when it comes to the ‘Master of Suspense, the polar opposites are in firm agreement that nobody has ever done it better.
