Brian Russell De Palma ([de ˈpalma]; born September 11, 1940) is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood generation, he is best known for his work in the suspense, crime, and psychological thriller genres in a career spanning more than five decades.
Carrie (1976), his adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same name, gained him prominence as a young filmmaker. De Palma enjoyed commercial success with The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996), and made cult classics such as Greetings (1968), Hi, Mom! (1970), Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Scarface (1983), Carlito's Way (1992), and Femme Fatale (2002).
As a young director, De Palma dreamed of being the "American Jean-Luc Godard". His style is allusive: he paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock in Obsession (1976), Dressed to Kill, and Body Double (1984); Blow Out (1981) is based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966); and Scarface, his remake of Howard Hawks' 1932 film, is dedicated to Hawks and Ben Hecht.
De Palma's work has been criticized for its violence and sexual content but has also been championed by American critics such as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. Carrie has been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In 2015, he was interviewed about his work in a well-received documentary by Noah Baumbach.
Brian Russell De Palma was born on September 11, 1940, in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of three boys. His Italian-American parents, Vivienne (née Muti) and Anthony F. DePalma, an orthopedic surgeon, were from Alberona, in the Apulia region of Southern Italy. He has two older brothers, Barton and Bruce. Raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, De Palma attended various Protestant and Quaker schools, eventually graduating from Friends' Central School. He had a poor relationship with his father, and would secretly follow him to record his adulterous behavior; this would eventually inspire the teenage character in De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980). When he was in high school, he built computers. He won a regional science-fair prize for his project "An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations".
Enrolled at Columbia University as a physics student, De Palma became enraptured with filmmaking after seeing Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1962, De Palma enrolled at the newly coed Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student in their theater department, earning an M.A. in the discipline in 1964 as one of the first male students in a predominantly female school. Once there, influences as various as drama teacher Wilford Leach, the Maysles brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, impressed upon De Palma the many styles and themes that would shape his work in the coming decades.
An early association with a young Robert De Niro resulted in The Wedding Party. The film, co-written and co-directed with Wilford Leach and producer Cynthia Munroe, had been shot in 1963 but remained unreleased until 1969, when De Palma's star had risen sufficiently in the Greenwich Village filmmaking scene. De Niro was unknown at the time; the credits mistakenly display his name as "Robert Denero". The film is noteworthy for its invocation of silent film techniques and use of the jump-cut. De Palma followed this style with various small films for the NAACP and the Treasury Department.
During the 1960s, De Palma began making a living producing documentaries, notably The Responsive Eye (1966), about The Responsive Eye op-art exhibit curated by William Seitz for MoMA in 1965. In an interview with Joseph Gelmis from 1969, De Palma described the film as "very good and very successful. It's distributed by Pathe Contemporary and makes lots of money. I shot it in four hours, with synched sound. I had two other guys shooting people's reactions to the paintings, and the paintings themselves."
Dionysus in '69 (1969) was De Palma's other major documentary from this period. The film records the Performance Group's performance of Euripides' The Bacchae, starring, amongst others, De Palma regular William Finley. The play is noted for breaking traditional barriers between performers and audience. The film's most striking quality is its extensive use of the split-screen. De Palma recalls that he was "floored" by this performance upon first sight, and in 1973 recounts how he "began to try and figure out a way to capture it on film. I came up with the idea of split-screen, to be able to show the actual audience involvement, to trace the life of the audience and that of the play as they merge in and out of each other."
De Palma's most significant features from this decade are Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970). Both films star De Niro and espouse a leftist revolutionary viewpoint in the spirit of the time. Greetings was entered into the 19th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Silver Bear award. His other major film from this period is the slasher comedy Murder a la Mod (1968), his feature-length directorial debut. Each of these films experiments with narrative and intertextuality, reflecting De Palma's stated intention to become the "American Godard".
In 1970, De Palma left New York for Hollywood at age thirty to make Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), starring Orson Welles and Tommy Smothers. Making the film was a crushing experience for De Palma, as Smothers did not like many of De Palma's ideas. Here he made several small, studio and independently released films. Among them were the horror film Sisters (1972), the rock musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Obsession (1976), a variation on theme of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) scored by Hitchcock's frequent collaborator Bernard Herrmann.
1976–1979: Breakthrough and acclaim
In November 1976, De Palma released an adaptation of Stephen King's novel Carrie. Though some see the psychic thriller as De Palma's bid for a blockbuster, the project was in fact small, underfunded by United Artists, and well under the cultural radar during the early months of production, as King's novel was not yet a bestseller. De Palma gravitated toward the project and changed crucial plot elements based upon his own predilections. The cast was mostly young and relatively new, though Sissy Spacek and John Travolta had gained attention for previous work in, respectively, film and sitcoms. Carrie became De Palma's first genuine box-office success, garnering Spacek and Piper Laurie Oscar nominations for their performances. Pre-production for the film had coincided with the casting process for George Lucas' Star Wars, and many of the actors cast in De Palma's film had been earmarked as contenders for Lucas' movie, and vice versa. Its suspense sequences are buttressed by teen comedy tropes, and its use of split-screen, split-diopter and slow motion shots tell the story visually rather than through dialogue. As for Lucas' project, De Palma complained in an early viewing of Star Wars that the opening text crawl was poorly written and volunteered to help edit the text to a more concise and engaging form.
The financial and critical success of Carrie allowed De Palma to pursue more personal material. Alfred Bester's novel The Demolished Man had fascinated De Palma since the late 1950s and appealed to his background in mathematics and avant-garde storytelling. Its unconventional unfolding of plot (exemplified in its mathematical layout of dialogue) and its stress on perception have analogs in De Palma's filmmaking. He sought to adapt it numerous times, though the project would carry a substantial price tag, and has yet to appear on-screen (Steven Spielberg's 2002 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report bears striking similarities to De Palma's visual style and some of the themes of The Demolished Man). The result of his experience with adapting The Demolished Man was the 1978 science fiction psychic thriller The Fury, starring Kirk Douglas, Carrie Snodgress, John Cassavetes and Amy Irving. The film was admired by Jean-Luc Godard, who featured a clip in his mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma, and Pauline Kael, who championed both The Fury and De Palma. The film boasted a larger budget than Carrie, though the consensus view at the time was that De Palma was repeating himself, with diminishing returns.