How Brian De Palma came to accept his descent into mediocrity: “What are we going to do about it?”
Brian De Palma is one of cinema’s great chameleons. You never know what to expect from one of his films; he can do horror like Carrie, spy thrillers like that smash hit Mission: Impossible, he has a handle on gangster dramas as shown in Scarface and head-bending neo-noir as with Blow Out — you name it, and De Palma has likely made a movie about it.
A standout of the new Hollywood movement, De Palma could have been up there with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. Yet, if you ask a younger film fan to name a famous director, chances are they’ll be there a while before they get to his name. His recent films have failed to live up to his hefty standards, including his most recent picture, 2019’s Domino. It was a schlocky cop thriller that went straight to streaming in the US and was slammed by most critics. Even De Palma himself criticised the finished product.
How does one cope with being the darling of the cinematic world and then slinging muck on VOD? The director himself addressed this when chatting to The Skinny about his 2012 film, Passion. “I made this film, as I’ve made all my films, to be seen on the big screen,” he said. “But I’m in my 70s now, and I see my daughter watching most of her films on her laptop. Technology will continue to change everything, so what are we going to do about it?” He observed that modern Hollywood only seemed to be interested in what he labelled “pre-sold franchises”, which didn’t appeal to him. “That has absolutely no interest to me whatsoever,” he said, despite the fact that Mission: Impossible has become a multi-billion dollar series.
Passion is an erotic thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. Its distributors, Metronome, decided to send it straight to DVD in the United Kingdom, providing the following statement to The Skinny: “Brian De Palma has an in-built fan base, but a genre like this can be difficult to release theatrically. It’s a turbulent theatrical market and we felt this was the best way to launch the film to UK audiences.”
This was just the latest disappointment for De Palma, who hadn’t seen a movie make it to theatres in some time. He suggested that his 2007 film Redacted, a loose recreation of an incident where US soldiers murdered a young girl and her family in Iraq, might have had something to do with his decline in fortune.
“Redacted did something that no film has ever done,” he stated. “It criticised the American troops. That’s unheard of in America. You just can’t question the boys. But the film came from stories soldiers were sharing of their experiences and posting online. I still find it gob-smacking – disgusting –that we tried to claim victory in that country.”
Redacted did get a theatrical release in the US, but only a limited one, and it made next to nothing at the box office. It polarised critics, with some calling it a disturbing masterpiece and others lambasting it as a gross exaggeration of what American soldiers are really like. It didn’t help that, when De Palma claimed at the New York Film Festival that Magnolia Pictures had altered the movie’s ending, the company president stood up and said he was lying. The dispute between De Palma and Magnolia rumbled on throughout the festival.
“I’m confounded by the lack of political films out there by young directors,” the director railed. “Where’s the outrage? The public relations people are in control of the media now.”
