Brian De Palma in Two Takes

Wrapping with the director of Body Double

BURBANK Studios, Soundstage 16. In silent hommage to Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps, Brian De Palma's belly swells formidably over his waistband.. .So, at any rate, I had thought of beginning this profile of the light-fingered, flash/trash-movie brute, director of Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarf ace, and Body Double. But that was before I was exposed to De Palma's obscure though unmistakable charm. ' 'I know Brian promised to see you," his P.A. told me at the entrance to the lot. ''Well, he's rescinded," she said and laughed with musical significance. This told me three things: one, that she was scandalized by his behavior; two, that he did it all the time; and three, that I wasn't to take him seriously, because no one else did.

Let's start again. Brian De Palma sits slumped on his director's chair in boiling Burbank. It is wrap day on Body Double, his latest "soft-core porno murder thriller"; only two climactic scenes remain to be shot. "Put the chest back on," De Palma tells the villain, played by Gregg Henry. "O.K. New chest! New belly!" This means another forty-minute delay. De Palma gets to his feet and wanders heavily around the set. He is indeed rather tubby, the back resting burdensomely on the buttocks, and he walks with an effortful, cross-footed gait. "Hitchcock was sixty when he made Psycho, ' ' De Palma would later tell me. "I don't know ifl'llbeable to walk when I'm sixty. '' A curious remark, but then Brian is not a good walker, even now, at forty-four. He walks as if he were concentrating very hard on what he has in his pockets.

I approached the sinister

Gregg Henry and asked him about the scene they were shooting. It sounded like standard De Palma: "I throttle Craig Wasson to the ground or whatever. I jump out of the grave. I rip off my false belly." The belly is part of Gregg's disguise, along with a rug, redskin facial pancake, and obvious dentures. As in Dressed to Kill, a goodie turns out to be a baddie, in disguise. It takes a makeup veteran three and a half hours to get Gregg looking this sinister. Presumably it takes the baddie in the film even longer, but this is a De Palma picture, where gross insults to plausibility are routine.

On schedule and under budget, Body Double has gone pretty smoothly. The only hitch was a hair problem with Melanie Griffith . She spent two weeks over the sink and under the dryer. "We tried brown, red, platinum, until we got what Brian wanted. "

The shot is ready to go again. De Palma talks to no one but the camera operator. "Why don't you pull back a bit? Why don't you try to hold him from head to foot?" Action. Gregg Henry and Craig Wasson perform creditably, but De Palma is unhappy about the camera's swooning back track, and the delay resumes.

"I think this would be a good time for you to be introduced to Brian," said Rob, the unit publicist. "He's in a receptive mood."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Very receptive."

We walked over. De Palma wearily offered his hand. Rob explained who I was. " Uh, " said De Palma, and turned away.

"Is that as good as it gets?" I asked as we walked off.

"See him in New York," said Rob. "He'll be better,

when he ' s wrapped. ' '

An hour or two later I left him on the lot. Eight hours later, at midnight, De Palma wrapped.

De Palma doesn't shoot miles of footage and then redesign the movie in the editing room. His rough cuts are usually shorter than the finished film. Every scene is meticulously storyboarded; every pan and zoom and camera angle is thought through precisely. De Palma knows exactly what he wants. The question is, Why does he want it?

Although he was the son of two Italian Catholics, little Brian was reared as a Presbyterian. The Catholic imagery was naturally the more tenacious for the young artist, and its themes and forms linger in his work: the diabolism, the ritualized but arbitrary moral schemes, the guilt. Bom in Newark, raised in Philadelphia, a student of physics at Columbia University and of drama at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, De Palma is solidly East Coast. He admired Godard, Polanski, and of course Hitchcock, but he entered the in-

dustry from left field: via the TV-dominated world of lowbudget satire, documentary, and chaotic improvisation. None of De Palma's work before Phantom of the Paradise in 1974 is much shown now.

In 1976, along came Carrie, far and away De Palma's most successful film, in all senses. By that point De Palma wanted independence, the sort that comes from power and success within the Establishment. "There I was," he has said, "worrying about Carrie not doing forty million. That's how deranged your perspectives get. "

What use has he made of his freedom? "Mature" De Palma consists of Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double. These are the medium-budget films that De Palma conceived, wrote, directed, and cut. (The Fury and Scarface we can set aside as fancy-priced hackwork.) These three films reveal his cinematic vision, unfettered by any constraints other than those imposed by the censors.

The De Palma trilogy of thrillers concerns itself with a man who goes about cutting up women. The women are prostitutes, sexual adventuresses, or adult-movie queens. The heroes are childish or ineffectual, helpless in the face of the villain's superior energy. There is no conventional sex 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. Nevertheless, he has something that distinguishes him from the hucksters of the sexploitation circuit. He has style. minutes. He really is bananas. This is going like a dream.

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I (Continued from page 14)

Now, there is no reason celebrities should submit to journalistic inspection, and in fact they are increasingly reluctant to do so. But having agreed to an interview, they should play by the rules of ordinary etiquette. A week passed. And then Brian came down from the mountain.

"Mr. De Palma? He's right over there," said the porter in the lower-Fifth Avenue building. The director sat ponderously on a bench by the elevator with a newspaper under his arm. Always keen to stay in touch with street life, he 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." He shrugged helplessly—yes, what a bountiful old softy he was. In eerie silence we rode the swaying elevator.

"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

"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.. . .1 use Hitchcock's grammar but I have a romantic vision that's more sweeping and Wagnerian.. . .1 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 ballpoint, "where would you place yourself among your contemporaries—Coppola, Scorsese?"

"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! Time will find a place for me."

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 Scarface, or tangling with the censors, as he did on Dressed to Kill, which barely escaped an X rating. 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 and expects definitely to get an X. I asked Brian what major company would finance and distribute an X? He grew sheepish. "No major company would finance or distribute it," he said. "Most frustrating. I mean, look at cable TV. Kids can watch anything these days. ' '

At this point I recalled the morose and taciturn figure at Burbank Studios. Among all the clamor and clatter and wisecracking, there was De Palma, doing as good an impersonation of man alone as the circumstances could well permit. Human relations are always difficult for this kind of artist— messy, confusing. De Palma has been married once, and briefly, to Nancy Allen, whom he had cast as a monosyllabic bimbo in three movies running. Informed Hollywood gossip maintains that Nancy wanted a family and Brian didn't. Well, he's baching it now. Asked why he always equates sex with terror, De Palma has his ready answer: "Casual sex is terrifying." 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. Girding myself, I asked De Palma why his films made no sense. He bounced back with some eagerness, explaining that Hitchcock was illogical too and that, besides, life didn't make any sense either. "Hitchcock did it all the time! Didn't anyone look at the corpse in Vertigo? In Blow Out the illogic was immense— but it was in Watergate too! I'm not interested in being Agatha Christie! Life is not like a crossword puzzle! I trust my instinct and emotion! I go with that!' '

De Palma is regarded as an intellectual, a reputation that isn't hard to come by in the film world. He isn't an intellectual, though his films, like his conversation, have a patina of smartness. A combination of master and moron, perhaps, he has created an art form that appeals to a strange assortment of cineasts: purists, producers, and fans by the millions.

Martin Amis