The movie Brian De Palma knew was doomed to fail from the beginning: “He’s a rather cynical man”
While it’s normal to assume that most filmmakers are highly motivated when working on their projects just to get all the different parts of a production working perfectly, some can already tell how it’s going to fare out there in the world in the middle of the process. Maybe it’s all the industry experience they have gathered that makes it easy to have such premonitions, but these ominous visions never stopped Brian De Palma.
When you look at the trajectory of the representation of violence in American cinema, De Palma will always stand out as one of the chief architects who had a major influence on its evolution. That’s exactly why Quentin Tarantino can never stop gushing about the director of Carrie and Scarface any chance he gets, having been completely mesmerised by De Palma’s approach to crafting cinematic violence as an aesthetic form in and of itself as a child.
Even though different entries in De Palma’s oeuvre were met with varied receptions when they first came out, his work is now taught in film schools as a whole because they are part of a coherent artistic vision that the American auteur has always championed. That might go some way in softening the harsh blows that some of his movies initially received, especially the 1993 Al Pacino vehicle Carlito’s Way.
In a conversation with Collider, screenwriter David Koepp revealed that De Palma already knew Carlito’s Way was going to be panned by critics just because he had an extremely cynical idea of how the industry and its market components functioned. Set in New York, the film featured a fantastic team-up between Pacino and Sean Penn in what is now seen as one of the most underrated additions to the genre from the 1990s.
Recounting De Palma’s words, Koepp noted: “He said, ‘Well, I can tell you how it’s gonna go on this one. You wanna know?’ I said, ‘Sure’ and he said, ‘OK, Al [Pacino] sucks because he just won an Oscar and he’s played a gangster before. I suck because I did a gangster movie before, and this isn’t like it, but it’s enough like it. Sean [Penn] is fantastic because they haven’t seen him for a while and will like to have him back. That’s how it’s gonna go.’ And that was exactly how it went. So it was a little disappointing that it wasn’t more warmly received because I think it’s a really beautiful movie, but it went nicely over time.”
As De Palma predicted, Carlito’s Way polarised critical opinion, but the ones who saw the credit in the story the acclaimed filmmaker was trying to tell can now take pride in the fact that they have emerged on the right side of this discourse. Hilariously, the Carrie director also blamed Koepp for the negative reviews it was eventually going to get just because he was associated with Jurassic Park as a screenwriter.
Koepp added: “When he was predicting he also said, ‘Oh and the other thing is you suck because you’re dinosaur boy.’ Brian was great, we did three movies together, and it was great every time. I had a lot of laughs, and we’re close friends to this day. He’s a rather cynical man, but that’s what I love about him.”
Whatever disappointments Carilto’s Way had for De Palma were soon outweighed by the massive successes, both critically and commercially, that his next project brought on: 1996’s Mission Impossible starring none other than Tom Cruise.
