Brian De Palma on Scarface, Mission: Impossible, and the Movie He Made in College

of violence. In any DiPalma film, the camera is ultimately the star. DePalma is the son of a surgeon, and he went to Columbia for physics, but he quickly discovered where his true passion lay. You know him as a virtuosic v director, but before that he was a fixture of the experimental Greenwich Village movie scene of the nineteen sixties. That's where he cast a then unknown actor named Bobby de Niro. Fitting since DiPalma later became known for working

with all the greatest actors. His very first Hollywood movie starred Orson Welles. Last summer, the Hampton's International Film Festival gave Brian de Palma the Lifetime Achievement Award. I was honored to speak with him in front of a live audience when he came to accept it. Please welcome, Brian de Palma. Um directing as an unbelievably difficult task. When did you know you could do that? This is a long,

funny story. I was head of the Columbia Players, and uh, the Varsity Show is a very big thing at Columbia. So there were two shows up to be voted for, and I was just an apprentice that was going to take over the Columbia Players the following year. So in these situations, everybody's uh, you know, got their own sort of corrupt intent because if you do my play, I get to play the lead and you get to direct. Dadada.

I knew nothing about this. There were two really good scripts, one by Steve Rawson, who was uh, one of my schoolmates at Columbia, and the other one by Terry McNally, a very funny comedy. And they fought for hours and they were deadlocked, you know, like six to six, and it was getting late and it was about midnight, and they said they looked over to me because I had read both scripts. And they said, well, well well, let's let the kid decide. So I said, all I think that

Terry mcdally's script is funny. Let's do that one great. Everybody leaves. That night, I was shooting my first short, which consisted of pan coming out of the tunnel at a hundred and sixt Street. I was not the director. I was just author and cinematographer. I get to the location and my director arrived, Jean Marner I'll never forget his name, and he comes with his very Sicilian girl frame named Charlie, and she comes over to me and says,

you fucking idiot. You didn't vote for the rows and play. Didn't you know that Gene was going to direct it? And I go huh? And then they walked off and they took the lead actor with them. So here I am at a hundred and sixteenth Street at three in the morning, staring into an empty tunnel, saying I'm going to direct this now and that's it, that's it. And you found some waitresses and all my dinner and said come with me, you're my lead do you didn't need any actors for the shot? No, I had to go

out and find my own actors. And start all over again. Okay, al cruise Travolta, on and on and on. You work with stars, I mean big stars at the apex of their career. Do you feel you were lucky that you got people who weren't only stars, they could play the role and meet the demands you had of them. Well, I think it was very lucky with that, like, for instance, in Blowout, which I wrote after Dressed to Kill, which Dressed to Kill was a big hit. So now I

was a genius and I could do anything. So I wrote this really small picture about the sound effects editor, and I was thinking it was really low budget and it's not huh. And then Travolta called me up and said, I want you to read the script. And I read it and I didn't wasn't interested. And then he said, well, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm doing this film. It's you know, it's about a sound effects editor,

and let me read it. So he read it and then he said, hey, I'd like to play that part. So now I have drawn Travolta, one of the hottest stars there is at that point. And uh, suddenly the budget went from like six million to sixteen million, and everything got bigger. Are their principles of filmmaking that that you hold fast too, regardless of the budget, regardless of the cast. Or did the way you make films change the more money that was at stake? I don't think so.

I mean, you know, making a you know, it's five million dollar movie or you know a hundred million dollar movie, it's sold more or less the same to me, obviously, more people around. And uh, and since I'd like to do these elaborate you know, set pieces, you need really those great technicians that we're in Hollywood. It's you know, the thing they always said about Orson Wells, he lost the ability to use all those great technicians and it

showed in his work, And I think that's quite true. Um, when did you start writing on What Felt after Dressed to Kill? I mean I had this idea because, uh, when I was mixing Dressed to Kill, you know there's you know, there's like a scene right at a blowout in it. I talked to the sound editor and I noticed, you know, this wind effect. And I said to him, this wind I've heard this a thousand times. Can't you

get anything new? And he looked at he says, Okay, so he goes out, you know, into the country and and and gets his mic up and tries to get me some new wind sound. So that so that started the idea of the sound effects editor who becomes the protagonist in the one of the new wind for Dress

to Kill. Correct, because remember when the review of Dressed to Kill they mentioned that, I said, there's a new wind sound achieves a new high and winds sound anyway and do and when you write them and someone else writes them, which is harder to direct. Well, I think it's very important to do both because you have your own ideas and your own idiosyncrasies and the set pieces I like to do. Uh, but I like working in other people's bullparks. And that's why I'm attracted to really

great writers. And when I read a great script, I go, oh, this is something I haven't never done before, like starting with you know, the gangster pictures or adaptation of a book, something like that. And then it enlarges you because now you have to tell their story with the techniques you developed yourself. Um, you hit a run there where Burham, Steve Burham becomes your TP and what was the battery between you and him that endured for so long. Your

first with him was what body Double? When I was doing Body Double, I was shooting a lot of tests, and I had some of the most beautiful women in the world auditioning, and uh. And then I was looking at these tests and I'm saying, God, these girls are gorgeous. Why do they not look so good on film? Then I said to myself, I think I'm going to start auditioning some cinematographers. I mean, they spend a lot of time putting on makeup. Why don't you like them correctly

so you appreciate all the work that's been done. Yeah. So Steve was the best of the auditioning cinematographers. And I went on and made many movies to him. And what I think is terrible now with all these streaming movies where they all shoot digitally and it's all with its bounced light and everybody looks like, excuse the expression shit, Uh,

it's it's very dispiriting. I did this TV series, Dirty Rock, and Tina Fey was was compelled by the NBC people to cut costs, and they would say to Tina every year, let's do camera tests with digital U and she rejected and she fought and she won and be shot on film for six and a half years, which I think they won't even allow you. You don't even have that discussion,

and everything is digital. What I don't like is because they can make the movie faster, the velocity of it now doesn't allow you to think as much as you used to. You know, now you've basically got an editor is cut of them me by the time you had just done shooting, and it used to be a year later in the old days. Do you miss having more time to luxury and thinking about what the movie would be. Well, when you work with the same editors movie after movie,

they more or less know what you want. So when you get to the end of your shoot, they have a pretty good assemblage of what you've done, and plus all the elaborate set pieces of all been story boarded, and they you know, and they work with me so long they know exactly where everything goes, so it's not much of a problem for me. Burham didn't do Scarface.

John Alonso did. How did that happen? Well, he spoke Spanish and I'd work with John on Get to Know Your Rabbit, my Lost Warner masterpiece, literally Alonso because he spoke Spanish. No, he's also he's also a legendary cinematographer. It's really a good cinematographer. He's great. But but but Burt was it like Burrow wasn't available? Or you want to try something different? You thought John was better for

this material. I don't know. I mean, there are many really good cinematographers and sometimes the one you want that you work with all the time is not available. And you know, I used vilmost a lot. I used John. Um, that's the great technicians are working all the time. Where did you find Liftgo? How did you come across? Well? When I was at Columbia, I was casting my first feature and I was looking for a replacement for the lead who I didn't think was going to be great.

And I went to Princeton and Liftgow was in a a moli Air play with another actor friend of mine, William Finley, and I saw this guy. He was, you know, just as I think a senior at Harvard at that point, and I said, Wow, this guy is fantastic, and I recommended him to another director, Paul William, who put him in his first film, UH, based on a book by Michael Crichton, and then when I did blow Out, that

was the first time we worked together. The thing about leth Cow, especially in this movie, that he reminds you of, is he has um such amazing vocal control that he will most often find in the theater. He is a great stage actor, and he's incredibly intelligent. He's very funny, he's great to work with. And uh, whenever I had a part for him, I immediately cast him. And in Raising Caine, I had him playing like five different personalities,

including a very deadly woman. You made a couple of films with al and uh did you just sit there sometimes behind the money and sit there and go, Jesus Christ, what am I going to do with this scene? You know what I mean? Like, he's so operatic and vivid. That never occurred to me. Just let albi al Well. I thought that I thought it was important to introduce him.

I mean, al has a great face, so I was gonna introduce these scarface So I was going to introduce him with this close up, you know, talking to these people interrogating him, because alcan holds the screen, you know, with this incredible face and that voice, and you just sit there, riveted. Uh, but they'll talk about how operrettic it was. Didn't see him opoaretic. To me, you have

obviously have a very high threshold for the operatic. As I told him, I said, my favorite story about Scarface because scar Face is obviously one of the most amazing movies ever made. It's just so insane what goes on there. You know, you know every line. I mean, how many times have you, you know, say hello to money, my little friend. You know you're going through the toll, you know what I mean, Or so someone's asking for your

I D. When you show your credit card. You're like, say hello to my little friend, say hello over and over again. I mean everybody. But my favorite, as I told you, was apparently years ago I read where they busted these drug dealers in East l A. And they and they swooped in the l A. P D on a big drug dealing nest the house in some tough area of l A of East l A. And they went in and the drug dealers here, who had like mountains of drugs there and everything, had weapons and money.

They also had Scarface on on a loop and it played all day and they just watched Scarface all day I think that's amazing, you know, I mean because like only only at a home with children do you loop the same thing, like you show home alone all day where you show powerpuff Girls all day and drug dealers show Scarface all day. Like kids, when you do say hello to my little friend, where you behind the monitor

going oh yeah, baby, this is it. It's a great scene. Well, the reason there's so many people being shot and falling down steps and eighty thousand killers running up the steps is when we first went on to the set to start that sequence, first had burned down. The whole set burned down. Somebody said it on fire. That was that was number one. Number two. When Al was using that gun uh to shoot people, he grabbed the gun by the barrel and he burned himself severely because it's you know,

white hot. So Al went to the hospital, I think for two weeks. So they said burn Al burn yea so here I had had a set, no Al, but I had a lot of Colombians to kill. You spent a couple of weeks killing Columbian dealers, a couple of weeks killing Colombians, and you're on the phone, You're like, how are you doing now? You still want a lot of pain huh, even a lot of pain killers. Okay, beat all right, line them out. We're gonna kill the

rest of these guys. Get him in there. One star Brian de Palma has directed his Vigo Mortenson, who turned in an exquisite performance has the wheelchair bound informant Laleen in Carlito's Way. But Mortenson didn't always get such juicy rolls. As a child, he was an introvert who couldn't imagine going on stage. Um well, actually I did have one experience. I had a junior high A friend of mine was

really into the idea of becoming an actor. And you loved musical and you knew everything about the theater in New York, and he said, you gotta try it for this play. It's great. It's called hellll Dolly. You gotta triumphant. And I said, what, No, I can't you imagine me trying out for Hella Valley. I went very unwillingly on this stage, and I read the first paragraph from David Copperfield, or tried to, and I finally just closed the book

and ran off. And that was my only for a other than I think when I was like six, they put me in a play George and the Dragon, and that was the ass end of the dragon. It was just a gray suit. It sounds like my career. My full conversation with Vigo Mortenson is in our archives at Here's the Thing, dot Org. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're

listening to Here's the Thing. Throughout his career, Brian de Palma's films have been widely celebrated, but the violence in them has also brought him fierce criticism, including from members of the m p A. A ratings board and X rating could kill a film at the box office. Well, it all started with a dressed to kill the master aition scene in the shower and Heffner I used to battle. You know, you send the film over and you take out one of the shots of the breast, and you know,

is that enough? No, no, no, you gotta take out that other. They don't say it exactly, but they say, maybe you should work on it a little more. Okay. Well this this went on from movie to movie until we got to Scarface. I finished Scarface and I sent it to the ratings board. They give me an X and I said, okay, well, maybe we'll cut a little here. Because I sent it back again version number two. They gave me another X, and then I said, okay, I'll

try it again, and then I sent it. We cut a little more out of some of the violent scenes, and they gave me an EX and I said what and they said, well, the clown, when the clown gets shot, that's too much. I say, I am not cutting anything else. And then you have to go to the whole board and plead your case. So they said, well, what version do you want to use. I said, I'm going to use the original version in the head of the studio.

So no, no, no, you have to use that third I said, no, they're all X. I'm taking the first version that I didn't cut anything out of. And then we went before the board and I vanquished Hefner. We won by they voted and they let us he was ahead of the ratings board. Was yeah. I thought. I thought, you're going into like a room and the guys in his pajamas. You gotta pipe And he's like, I'm sorry, Brian,

I'm sorry, Brian, shooting the clown is too much. You could have all the boobs you want, but shooting the clown is too much. Um. I kept when you do a scene that you know is violent or not, uh, just powerful, you know. I mean, I mean when you see the music plays and cruise goes no, no no, and he lands like that, and mean a mission. Nobody there's guys that are up there with you. There's only the famous photograph of you and your alums, You and

Lucas and Marty and Stephen. You're graduating class, and I think about that. I think the difference, and needless to say, Marty and Stephen are very skilled, uh at these kinds of sequences. I think the difference is that Stephen has always used the same composer, John Williams, great composer, but it's always the same composer, and Marty uses rock and roll basically. Uh. I've used some of the best film composers that we're writing music in my era, and it

makes a difference. I mean, the the Marconi score for Casualties will tear your heart out, uh, and then the score for Carlito's Way. You know, when Alice dying, it's just you know, it's opera time, you know, it's Puccini time. You just tears your heart out, and that I think is the difference is I used a variety of the great composers that we're working and that may be why my sequences stick out so much. Well, let's go to Mission for a minute. What made you decide you wanted

to make that as a film. I had made Carlito's Way, which I when I saw this picture in Berlin at the festival, I was literally behind the screen watching it and I said to myself, I can't make a better picture than this, and it wasn't a big success, and I just killed me and I said, I'm going to go out and make a big success. Then I my agent of many years, sort of went crazy, and Mike Ovits wanted to represent me, and he had a problem.

He had Sydney Pollock, who had been working on Mission Impossible with the two writers, and Sydney wanted to get off of it. You've been working on it for a year and it wasn't working out. So Sydney wanted to make Sabrina and suddenly OVI it's had to Palma and he came to me and he said, would you be interested in Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise? And I said, Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible, you bet you cynical bastard, and I made the biggest hit of my career. That was

the biggest one. Yeah, did you guys like Mission Impossible? Number one? I love that movie, and I know and I love the other ones, and I'm glad. I was so excited to go work with him when I first saw that first one. It's like when I saw Jurassic you know, there's movies that were like seminal movies to me in terms of putting the piece together, not just the helicopter scene, but all that stuff, all that's shooting. That scene at the beginning where Christin Scott Thomas dies. Yeah,

that was our first problem to me. Mission Impossible, the television series is about five characters with no personality that go and do things. Tom Wicks wants to make a movie about him, So what do I do with the other five characters? So my first idea is we killed them all in the first mission worked out rather well. If ever, you sent me a script and I'm the

fourth lead in the movie, I'm gonna pass. I'm not gonna come to the movie with you, I mean the lead or I'm not doing it, And so kept I wrote, David kept the great David kept who has written a countless great movies, and I can't even mention did you write it with you? Or did you just go right it and hand it to you? Well that's a that's

say that story. Uh. It started with see once Sydney left and I had to I was I was dealing with two screenwriters that I knew, Tom didn't like what they were doing, and ultimately we had to find another screenwriter. And Zalien, the famous Steven's Alien, great screenwriter paramount owed him some money, so they said, well why don't you

two get together and come up with something. So Zalien and I sat in his office in Santa Monica and ate a lot of peanuts and smoked a lot of cigarettes, as I remember, and it took us about six weeks to come up with the ten page treatment, which was the plot of Mission Impossible. And then Zalien said, I'm Addie here, I've had it. So then I ran into David, who was about to work on some remake of something. I said, Dave, come over and we'll do Mission Impossible.

So Dave and I, working from the Xalien and my story, came up with the script for Mission Impossible. And I was having a hard time getting Tom to commit to it. I mean, come on, Tom, I mean we're building sets. Got to commit to this movie now, Tom. But still there were things of the script that bothered him. But I finally got him to say okay. So then I got a call from the producer the next day and she says, the good news is your a girl. The bad news is fired David Cap because Tom wants to

bring on another writer. And that was a very sad moment for me to call up David and say, well, Dave, we're making the movie, except we're bringing out a new writer. And then what ultimately happened was the new writer did not really turn out well, and I brought David back in uh, and he rewrote the script once again, and that became mission impossible. Who's the actor who you had the best communication with, somebody who there's that Well you talk about how much you what a great actor Al is,

but he's also he moves so gracefully. And when I did that very complicated steadicam shot and uh, Carlito's way, I mean you have to you know your timing the steadicam operator with the way Al moves, and you know you're you know he's coming up the steps. He goes over to the edge and looks down in uh sperience Central Station comes back close ups. You watched the guys coming across incredibly complicated shot and I'll just you know,

but there was a really funny story about that. Is when we're trying to get the shot from subway train to subway train, when the guys are chasing him through the subway, and I wanted to get a shot from one subway to the subway that he's in. So the guys have to chase Al through the subway and we're going parallel to them, and as you can imagine, there's a lot of obstruction of you know, pillars going by and are they in the shot? Are they blocked by the windows? So we spent all night trying to get

this shot, and we shot Carlino's way. We started in the winter and we ended in the summer, and Al was in that black leather coat. So after about I can't tell you how, but he takes Suddenly I see the train going away and I talked to my assistant director. I say, what happened? Where's the trade going? And he said, Al's taking it home. I did this with the Miami Blues and Good Party not good. Who didn't like that? Well chopping fingers, Well I've didn't. I've done that. As

a matter of fact. How dare you look down on me? You say my films are too violent? Jesus Christ. But I don't want to just use the word violence but the drama, because the violence all has a purpose. The violence is all for storytelling. I've seen violent films, obviously, we all have their They're not really much of a story behind it. You've got great writing, great characters, and a necessary component of violence, But who's who's the performance? You watched me? Just oh my god, this is just

mentioning how beautiful this is. Well, I mean, that dying scene in Carlto's Way is just unbelievable. I mean, and the way I did it was I had them on, you know, on the ground, and you know, Penelope is leaning over him, alves on his back. He's been shot, and I knew I was going to have to loop it old later anyway, So I played this incredible romantic Puccini music, so yeah, on set, probably labom and the

music just got them going. I mean Penelope, I mean, she's tears are coming out of her eyes, and and then work quite well, which is used what they used to do in the silent days, when you had an orchestra on the set and they would play music for the actors could emote with. Where Brando would have books with photographs, not just music, but he had images that would kind of arrest him in a certain way, photography and paintings and things. I want to talk to you

about two other things before we finish. What is about untouchables When you shoot a film like that. There was a suggestion I was once going to work with Eastwood on a film years ago, and they came to and they said, but you can't get clever with him about the schedule. You don't give him any scheduling edicts. Your his You belong to him. Don't get date crazy. When you did, you got Costner and he got de Niro and he got Sean Connery. When you do a movie like that, do you get the run of show or

did you have to kind of do the mode right? Right? Okay, no way, No, I mean I think we we had Bobby for two weeks. While I was shooting the shootout in the train station. Bobby was getting in his makeup and learning his lines. And after that sequence we shot all the scenes. Did he gain all that weight for the movie or some of that presenting? You know, he gained a little weight, but he was wearing some sympathic

adding to give him some bulk. But he did, you know, shade back its head and it's almost impossible to see the range of and we manipulate some stuff. But it's interesting about de Niro, you know, And I started with de Niro. He was in my first three Underground movies. I met him in a loft in Greenwich Village when he was you know, nineteen Uh. When we got to do um the Untouchables, I kept on, you know, looking at the stuff he was doing, and I was sort of,

you didn't seem to be doing much. And you know it's the thing when you say, well, when balby, but you want to do a little more with this scene. He said, you'll see it in Rushes. I said, I'll see it Rushes. Don't worry. And sure enough, because when you're watching through the camera or even next to the camera, you know, it's like I'm looking at this guy in

the first row. Well that's that's what how much I can see, but when you see it on a huge screen, he's doing stuff that's so subtle that you really can't see while you're shooting it. Um what's entertainment for you? Now? You go to the movies match, or you stay home, you watch some Netflix, or you could you still go to the movie see some new movies. You do you still like movies watching? Yes, I still go to the movies. I like the Quentin Tarantino in a movie. You do

you didn't like that? And then the Noel Bombeck movie Marriage Story. Right, we got some really good directors working fantastic. Um. Well, in honor of someone who is one of the greatest directors in the history of the American Center, would you please welcome his daughter, Piper DiPalma. Come on out here paper tell them what you have. I have this beautiful glass lifetime achievement, amore. This is our lifetime achievement honor for nineteen the legendary Brian DePalma. I'm Alec Baldwin and

you're listening to here's the thing. Oh