Brian De Palma

Brian Russell De Palma ([de ˈpalma]; born September 11, 1940) is an American film director and screenwriter. With a career spanning over 50 years, he is best known for work in the suspense, crime, and psychological thriller genres. De Palma was a leading member of the New Hollywood generation.

Carrie (1976), his adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same name, gained him prominence as a young filmmaker. He enjoyed commercial success with 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), and The Fury (1978).

As a young director, De Palma dreamed of being the "American Godard". His style is allusive; he paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock in Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984); Blow Out (1981) is based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966), and Scarface (1983), his remake of Howard Hawks's 1932 film, is dedicated to Hawks and Ben Hecht. His 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. In 2015, he was interviewed about his work in a well-received documentary by Noah Baumbach.

De Palma was born on September 11, 1940, in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of three boys. His Italian-American parents were Vivienne DePalma (née Muti), and Anthony F. DePalma, an orthopedic surgeon who was the son of immigrants from Alberona, Province of Foggia. He was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and 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's Citizen Kane (1941) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1962, De Palma enrolled at the newly mixed-gender Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student in their theater department, earning an M.A. in the discipline in 1964 and becoming 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-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's 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."