Davis also talked about the film to Brendan Kelly of the Montreal Gazette. "“Oh my God, the masterpiece of 2013, in my opinion... It’s riveting, it’s funny, it’s brilliant filmmaking. Imagine an Israeli version of the Coen brothers, mixed with early Brian De Palma, and Park Chan-wook. Also imagine Les Sept jours du talion re-imagined as the most sinister black comedy, but at the same time wickedly entertaining and funny. It’s just the perfect movie.”

'DISCOPATH' RECALLS ITALIAN GIALLO, JOHN CARPENTER, & BRIAN DE PALMA
Making its world premiere at the Fantasia fest on August 3rd will be Discopath, the feature debut of Renaud Gauthier, who sold his own home to finance the film, according to Marc Lamothe on the Fantasia web site. Gauthier served as director, screenwriter, art director, and music composer on Discopath, about a man who goes into a homicidal trance whenever he hears disco music. "Nostalgia is already [Gauthier's] stock in trade, his knack for evoking the smiles and styles of the ’70s, so it’s no surprise that his first feature is soaked in disco culture," Lamothe states in the notes. "But beyond the art direction, the mise en scene connects to the era by recalling the golden age of Italian giallo and lessons of masters like John Carpenter and Brian De Palma."

Computer Chess opened this past Wednesday in New York. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it a "profound, peculiar work of genius."

Armond White writes of the film, "Mumblecore originator Bujalski has found the wit to break out from its conspicuous routines and make the genre’s most stylistically varied, artistically adventurous film with Computer Chess. Bujalski actually employs montage and style–idiosyncratic style–that goes past simply being unHollywood and creates its own uniquely nerd vision."

A. O. Scott of the New York Times calls it "peculiar and sneakily brilliant." And NPR's Ella Taylor writes, "The beguiling Computer Chess is about the dawn — one of many, but that's another story — of the tech revolution. It's also a reminder that you don't need state-of-the-art toys to make a formally playful comedy about man versus machine."

Strombo: "You came of age in the cinema when you guys were picking big fights with society, the counterculture movement was in fact not about just looks."

BDP: "No, no, no."

Strombo: "It was the opposite of that."

BDP: "And we had another war we shouldn't have been in: Vietnam."

Strombo: "Is that what it was, you think the war's..."

BDP: "Oh, absolutely."

Strombo: "Because then where are the countercultural films today, then?"

BDP: "That's the problem! Because you don't see many sort of political films other than the... I mean, obviously, you don't have to make political films all the time, but when you see a lot of stuff going out there that's annoying you, you would think that, you know, your blood would be stirred. That you'd go out and make a movie about it saying, 'This is not right'"

Strombo: "You obviously have to keep busy, but you also said there isn't enough anger in American cinema anymore."

BDP: "Well, I was very upset about the whole war, and what the Bush administration was doing, so that's why I made Redacted. Because I didn't think that they were telling us the truth. What else is new? Your government is lying to you, what else is new? But I felt we were doing some very bad things in far away places."

Strombo: "And you didn't think that was the right coverage of it."

BDP: "Oh, I knew-- an embedded reporter? That's like having somebody on the payroll."

De Palma's appearance comes just two days after Steven Bauer appeared on the show (see video above). Bauer is making the rounds for his role on the new Showtime series Ray Donovan, but spent most of his interview talking about Scarface. Stroumboulopoulos asked Bauer, "Does the Manny from Scarface thing happen every day in your life?" To which Bauer replied, "Every single day is a Scarface day." In discussing his role on AMC's Breaking Bad, Bauer mentioned that, again, Scarface came through for him, because creator Vince Gilligan, a fan of De Palma's film, had the idea to basically take Manny and put him in the show.

Bauer was also interviewed by Parade's Joel Keller, and dicussed screenwriter Oliver Stone getting banned from the Scarface set: "There was so much disagreement on some points that Oliver Stone was banned from the movie. He was banned from the set. Brian [De Palma] didn’t want him around. For the most part, Al [Pacino] didn’t either, because Oliver would show up with a big fat script under his arm and he’d say ‘Have you shot this today?’ And he would always find me: ‘Steve. Steve. Come here. Have you shot this scene?’ And I’d say, ‘No. They cut it. We’re not doing it.’ And he’d go crazy and he’d run into Al’s dressing room and he’d be nuts. He would have a big battle with Brian De Palma and Brian was just like ‘You know what? You did your job. You let us make the movie.’"

Bauer also told Keller about the initial bad reviews: "Some of them were really horrible on Al, on his acting. They were like ‘Oh, he’s over the top. He’s become operatic. He should go back to acting school.’ It was really, really terrible, and it’s funny because he had prepared me for it. We were together all the time and I used to speculate. I used to drive him crazy and say, ‘What do you think? Can you imagine…’ because we’d finish a scene and it would be so out there, so crazy. He always kept me with him and I would make him laugh and stuff. We’d joke about stuff and I’d say ‘What do you think your fans are going to think of this Montana character?’ He used to say, ‘All I can do is do what I do every day and try not to think about their responses.’ He said ‘They’re either going to love it or they’re going to hate it. It’s not going to be middle ground.’ And that’s exactly what happened."

Interviewer: In 1984, you ended up in the Brian De Palma movie, Body Double. How did that happen?

Deborah: Same way—I went on an interview and they were looking for a blonde. [Laughing] There’s something about... Yeah, I have a blonde personality. And I met him, and he was very quiet. And the executive producer was talking to me all the time, and the casting person. And Brian just sat there and was like [lifts her chin up to mimic De Palma, slowly nodding as if quietly watching and contemplating what he was seeing]. And sometimes he looked away, and he didn’t… I thought, “Oh, get me out of here. This is a lost cause.” And when I left there I stopped off at the bathroom on the way out of the building. And when I finally got out of the building, the lady who was the casting director was running around hysterically outside searching for me. And she said, “Where were you?” Then I told her I’d just stopped off. And she said, “Brian wants to see you tomorrow at his office, and he wants to work with you.”

And he worked with me, with the screenplay… oh, I can’t think, with Liv Ullmann… Scenes From A Marriage, on a scene where she had just learned her husband was fooling around for a long time, and that her best friends had known it. She was very angry and frustrated. And another scene from Body Heat… where the two meet on a bridge. And so, he told me he wanted the sensuality of Body Heat, and the frustration and panic, and those kind of feelings from Scenes From A Marriage. So we worked on those two scenes, and those are the ones I did with my screen test. Because my part didn’t really have so much dialogue. And I got it.

And how was he as a director? I mean, on the set…

Wonderful.

Really?

He’s very intense. He almost has an unnerving way about him. And you know Vincent Price? The actor? He has a way of looking, the piercing eyes, that just kind of go into your backbone, and take feelings out of you. And I think that’s the way Brian is.