In addition to Wolfe and Bharata, novelist and law professor Thane Rosenbaum will also be on hand for the post-film discussion.

Q: Can you recall any early memories at a movie theater that made you say I want to be an actor?

A: I don’t remember specifically. I saw the usual things; in those days there were a lot of Westerns, and there were the classic double bill features at the Loews Theater, movies with Spencer Tracy or Marlon Brando or Tony Curtis. One departure I remember was “Suddenly Last Summer” with Elizabeth [Taylor]. I also liked going to the movies because it was air conditioned when it was so stiflingly hot (laughs). I started studying acting when I was 10, going to acting school on Saturdays. I don’t know what actually kicked off my wanting to do it at that time. I forget. But when I was in my teens, I started up again.

Q: I first saw you in “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” so I was introduced to you as an offbeat comic actor. Has there ever been a plan of making a comedy then a serious one then a comedy?

A: No, you do what comes along, then find a way to rationalize why you want to do it or justify it. So my career has just happened the way it did. I guess I’m still a work in progress. I actually first worked for Brian De Palma on “The Wedding Party” when I was 19. I played one of the groomsmen. I think the only other person you would know in it is Jill Clayburgh.

Q: You’ve directed two films: “A Bronx Tale” in 1993 and “The Good Shepherd” in 2006. Any plans for another?

A: I don’t know. I want to do a sequel to “The Good Shepherd,” but I never planned on directing more than five movies in my life, so if I do another one ... well, it’s possible, but it would have to be really special.

There were not many surprises at this year’s Venice Film Festival, but one film that proved an unexpected joy was De Palma. A simple talking-head documentary, featuring Brian De Palma gassing happily about his entire CV from Murder A La Mod to Carrie to Scarface to Passion, it’s directed by the unlikely team of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow.

“I met Noah at a birthday party for Paul Schrader twenty years ago and Jake at a party about ten years ago,” De Palma told Empire in Venice. “And we just had a rapport and a love for movies”.

“There were so many conversations we had with Brian and things he would talk about that at a certain point we thought we should just ask him to talk about it on camera,” says Paltrow. “It was selfish at first. So we asked and he was up for it.”

The film drew overwhelmingly positive reviews after its first press screening because it’s not just a piece for fans of De Palma, but a thorough, sometimes rather indiscreet, monologue on what it’s like to go from being part of the explosion of young ‘70s filmmakers, alongside Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese, to becoming part of the Hollywood establishment, to then falling out of favour.

“Well you don’t want people thinking they’ve heard the same anecdote 863 times, because I’ve been asked about certain films rather a lot,” says De Palma. “My relationship with these two directors and my feelings for them and the questions they’re answering, means I’m not going to be stylized and on script”.

“What we were looking for was to get the feeling of those dinners we’ve had where Brian would regale us with these incredible stories,” says Baumbach. “And I think that’s what we got”.

Jonathan Romney, The Observer

Noah Baumbach seems an unlikely director to be making a film about you – his films are very different from yours.
I tend to be attracted to film-makers who are not like me at all. I met Noah almost 20 years ago – I immediately liked him, he’s very bright. Because we approach cinema from different directions, we were fascinated by our different views on how to tell a story. They did their interview with me five years ago, in Jake Paltrow’s living room, shooting on this digital camera, with Noah doing the sound. It was like the old cinema school days – you had three people and that was your crew.

You and your contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, were influenced by French directors such as Godard, yet you all ended up becoming American classics.
You’re in the right place at the right time, and you end up getting all these influences from the French New Wave, and the Hollywood system’s breaking down... We were all at Warner Bros at the same time – Francis had done Finian’s Rainbow there, Marty was there, I was there, and I knew Steven [Spielberg] through Margot Kidder, who was my girlfriend at the time, and that’s how we all came together...

You made a film about American involvement in Iraq – Redacted – before The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty made it respectable for US cinema to tackle such issues.
People disliked it in America. You can’t criticise the troops. It was [my Vietnam film] Casualties of War all over again – you put these kids in a situation, old men sending young men to war in places that are completely mysterious to them, and a culture that they don’t understand, driven by a political ideology that makes no sense whatsoever, and they go crazy. You feel so frustrated that your country is involved in something that you’re financing with your taxes, that you have no power to stop. Unlike Vietnam, where there were pictures that finally turned off the country, there are no pictures, there are just drones shooting people out of heaven.

De Palma contains some great stories about difficulties on set – like Orson Welles refusing to learn his lines on your 1972 film Get to Know Your Rabbit.
What does he care? He’s playing a tap-dancing magician in some silly comedy. A lot of actors, when they get older and extremely famous, think learning lines is not really necessary any more, whether it’s Brando or Orson or Bob De Niro, and they come up with excuses like, “It’s gonna be more spontaneous.” When you see them looking around the set, you think they’re taking a dramatic pause – they’re really looking for the line over there or over there.

Jill Lawless, Washington Times

“My movies tend to upset people a lot,” De Palma says in the documentary. Not that it particularly bothers him.

In the documentary - titled simply “De Palma” - the filmmaker turns out to be a funny, perceptive and candid judge of his own work...

De Palma, who received the festival’s Glory to the Filmmaker Award before a Venice screening of the documentary on Wednesday, said “it’s kind of overwhelming, literally, to have your whole life and movies lived in front of you in two hours.”

“But it’s very honest and it’s very much me,” he said. “I have a sense of humor about what I’ve done. How could you live life in this business and not have a sense of humor?”

In past years covering TIFF, I’ve generally avoided the parties. There are a few reasons for this.

First, I am generally contemptuous (or at least wary) of celebrity and everything it connotes, and really don’t care if I am, technically, standing in the same room as George Clooney or Susan Sarandon or Pete Postlethwaite or whoever. Second, as a working journalist, parties have previously served a purely utilitarian function, providing free food and booze that I can suck back, hunched over a tiny cocktail napkin, wearing a knapsack like a cartoon turtle. I also generally try to avoid any social event where I’d have to wear much more than jeans and a t-shirt.

But in the spirit of experiencing new things, pushing myself outside my comfort zone, wearing pants that aren’t stained with mustard, etc., I accepted an invitation to the cocktail party celebrating the premiere of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, starring Matt Damon as a NASA botanist accidentally left behind on the Red Planet.

The movie itself is a fairly hollow crowd-pleaser, workshopped to feel massively appealing — funny enough, tense enough, propelled by Drew Goddard’s glib, Sorkin-lite dialogue. It’s fine. Is it as good as Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, in which Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen’s slow dance in Zero Gs to Van Halen’s Dance the Night Away? No. Of course it isn’t. But then, what is?

No matter what he did, though, two things could be counted on: bubble-headed critics would still call him a clone of Alfred Hitchcock with an obsessive interest in voyeurism and kinky sex,..and the hardest core De Palmians would stand by their man.

Until...Well, every story has one...Until he put out a completely non De Palma movie entitled Mission to Mars. And you'll have to travel far and wide to find a movie this reviled.

I mean, really, imagine a De Palma Movie with just one splashing bloody sequence, no kinky sex and almost no trademark camera work. What is [it] about? Well, it combines, quite wonderfully, elements of Gravity, Interstellar and the upcoming movie, The Martian. We begin, Interstellar-like, with a sequence set on earth, in which we get to know the characters. The 15 minutes are well-spent. The flight to Mars is shown in an interesting compression of time. The astronauts land, explore--and are gruesomely dispatched by--we cannot be certain if it's a force of nature or...maybe an alien presence. A rescue team is sent. Lovely scenes aboard their craft until the rocket springs a leak. Gravity-style repair work. Not entirely successful. Exquisite suspense and a heartbreaking loss as they abandon ship and try to reach the dispatched rescue vehicle. They land...search...find graves, indicating someone's still alive. And then...

Now comes the movie's first big surprise--which I won't reveal. Another, still bigger, is coming. What I will say is that, in a two-hour film, the structure and pacing are both spot-on. The acting and scripting are equally good. ('I didn't travel 100 million miles to stumble in the last ten steps.' Or: when chided because he can't dance, the hero tells his wife: 'Hey, some couples tango and some go to Mars.') The movie's inner Swiss watch ticks as we advance on schedule to the Big Reveal.

As for the last fifteen minutes...Here we come to the great I Don't Know. I didn't like the ending. I'd wanted something different. Many viewers have hated the ending and condemned the entire film because of it. Stand back, though. We can't have it all ways.

We can't have a Real Deal Rebel who's been completely housebroken and repeats all the tricks we love best, at our call. The Real Deal is subversive and loves to thwart expectations. The Real Deal will transform a kinky, borderline sleazy film like Femme Fatale into a dream, onto which he then tacks on a lush, romantic ending. The Real Deal, late in his career, [will] thwart all expectations with a beautifully calm thriller, Passion.

Because he refuses to 'heel' on command, we should never grow too comfortable in the presence of such an artist. The best are loving people--with a streak of junkyard dog.

But relax. They're not out to hurt but delight us as they take us by the throat. Now and then they succeed at that by showing us their hearts.

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
"The early films have seldom had the scenic thrill of the Italian outdoors. But happily Brian De Palma was here to bless, and be blessed by, a tribute documentary: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma. Wow! What other word is there for being avalanched by De Palma imagery for two hours? The bearded, darkly twinkling director talks to the camera — great stories, great thoughts on art, life and cinema — between movie clips so resplendent they run everything else at Venice ragged. Carrie, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables, Scarface. De Palma did action painting on a movie screen. His images should hang on museum walls. He is, or was, the Jackson Pollock of high-drive narrative cinema."

Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
"I found myself wishing that De Palma was twice as long; the movie does touch upon his entire filmography — including obscurities like Get to Know Your Rabbit and Home Movies, as well as the video for Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark — but I would have loved to have heard as much detail about, say, Femme Fatale as there is about Carlito’s Way. You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist."

Peter Debruge reviews Our Brand Is Crisis for Variety
"In Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s new Brian De Palma documentary, the director tells a story about how Columbia exec Dawn Steel flew to the set in Thailand, took one look and caught the next plane home. That’s the sort of character [Sandra] Bullock seems to be channeling here: She wields the power, but is also susceptible to the elements, hit with altitude sickness and forced to drag around an oxygen tank from the moment she lands in Bolivia."

John Bleasdale, Cine Vue
"Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's unpretentious documentary De Palma (2015) reveals a clear-sighted and fascinating director, who often seems as bemused by the vagaries and inconsistencies in his own career as everyone else. Brian De Palma was initially seen as the most talented of the Young Turks who came to prominence in the seventies. Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg all deferred to him and his fierce intelligence. However, De Palma was to be left struggling in their wake as they all went on to accrue massive commercial and critical success while his own career, despite the occasional peak, suffered from troughs of ever-deeper despond.

"The directors eschew the conventional prologue to such 'Extended Features' fare that would involve a chorus of praise from De Palma's peers, perhaps to forestall those obvious comparisons. It's consistent with his no-frills approach, which has De Palma sitting down for presumably a day-long conversation about his career, interspersed with a little archive footage and clips from his films. De Palma talks about his financially comfortable if emotionally-stunted childhood. He was the son of a famous surgeon who had little time for his children and cheated on his wife. The latter caused the young De Palma to spy on his father and the attraction and guilt of voyeurism seems to have been imprinted."

"For his first, truly adult film about sex, De Palma’s perspective matures in Dressed to Kill. Kate’s manhunt, set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, equaled the jailhouse symbolism of Jean Genet-Jean Cocteau’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). It also explored the same existential territory seen in a breed of underground New York porn films like Sam Scott’s Non-Stop (where seemingly spontaneous, peripatetic episodes ranged from rendezvous at Manhattan’s West Side piers to street assignations in Greenwich Village). De Palma outclasses porn, but his artistic connection to Surrealist filmmakers from Hitchcock to Cocteau to Bunuel proves he was unafraid to depict subconscious, even outré, desires.

"Kate’s bored gallery browsing is depicted when she stares back at an Alex Katz portrait that mirrors her own impatience. Her sexual frustration is caricatured when she observes a painting of a gorilla whose oversized, hairy, supine nakedness mocks her own, suppressed, animal instincts. She abstractly writes in her memo pad, 'Pick up turkey.' (Come now, Brian!)

"It’s all prelude to her noticing the handsome man wearing sunglasses who invades her space and stirs her curiosity. Their cat-and-mouse politesse (a game of high-class silent flirtation) deepens Kate’s interest which De Palma sensualizes by having the camera follow them in slowly flowing perambulations through museum exhibit space. This silent sequence (except for Pino Donaggio’s tense, teasing music score) is a long, masterful pantomime, delicately acted by Dickinson. The desperation and feints of cruising are clearly presented in details so timeless that the sexual hunt is immortalized (including Kate feeling wanton and exposed as she stands before one of Eric Fischl’s satirical nudes)."

Michael Koresky's essay for the Criterion edition of Dressed To Kill

"De Palma the political filmmaker might seem at odds with De Palma the teasing sex-horror specialist, but these two halves of his split personality have worked in tandem throughout his career, and certainly do so in Dressed to Kill. This film is a minefield of potential offense—with its horrific butchery of a middle-aged woman and its full-frontal images of naked women shot like soft-core pornography—and, especially at a moment when studio output like Kramer vs. Kramer and Looking for Mr. Goodbar was being accused of containing reactionary responses to second-wave feminism (respectively, for demonizing a woman for abandoning her marriage and child and, like Dressed to Kill, depicting the murder of a woman trying to liberate herself through sex), it was bound to incite some anger. Indeed, feminist groups publicly protested Dressed to Kill, creating a perception of it as misogynistic. Yet the film is far more sympathetic to its women than its men, and more important, its recognition of its own voyeur-horror lineage, its ratcheting up of nearly every element—from the nudity to the graphic bloodletting to the extravagant camera work to the often absurdly drawn-out slow motion—to orgiastic heights, places the sadistic impulses of Hitchcock’s work (so, the Movies) explosively at the forefront. It’s both ghastly and erotic, impeccably crafted and dirty-minded, a luxurious wallow in the dream and nightmare that is cinema.

"Kate’s explicit shower reverie at the beginning is our first clue to the way De Palma is playing with Psycho’s indelible imagery in Dressed to Kill. The camera slowly peeks around a corner and flaunts in lewd close-up her naked breasts and genitals (aptly, actually those of a body double: Victoria Lynn Johnson, direct from the pages of Penthouse). What had once been impossible was, in 1980, not only permissible but also marketable; this is the true titillation, the dark heart of Psycho laid literally bare. The fact that the film ends with a second shower scene—also imaginary—underlines its relationship to Hitchcock as a game of surreal one-upmanship.

"In this and all the entries in De Palma’s grand project of showing us Hitchcock’s thrillers stripped of pretense and elegance—so that, for example, Vertigo becomes Obsession (1976), the double of the protagonist’s dead wife revealed to be his daughter; and Body Double (1984) brazenly combines Rear Window and Vertigo into a tawdry peep show, set in the underworld of Los Angeles porn—we can see De Palma the thrill hound and the confrontational artist. Janet Leigh’s cinema-shattering shower seems to be a primal scene for him, something he needs to return to over and over. His oeuvre is soaked with shower scenes, as parody (Phantom of the Paradise, 1974), locker-room fantasy (Carrie), tragedy (Blow Out, 1981), and travesty (Body Double). (Even 1983’s Scarface has one, a chain-saw massacre visited on the protagonist’s male friend—which our antihero is forced to watch.)

"Shower scenes, with their combination of sensuality and danger, are particularly right for a film as fueled by hallucinatory erotic energy as this one. De Palma himself says he was actually more influenced by Luis Buñuel than Hitchcock when making Dressed to Kill (and there’s certainly a touch of Belle de jour in the opening masochistic daydream). Its central murder is an event that occurs at the convergence of two characters’ sexual fantasies: Kate’s and her killer’s."

SENSE OF HUMOR IN THIS BUSINESS, AND LUCK, TOO
"If you're in this business, you'd better have a sense of humor. Because when you make a film, the reaction is usually the opposite of what you expect. You know, you think, 'Oh, they're gonna hate it,' 'no, they seem to like this one.' And then, 'Oh, this is my great masterpiece,' 'Ehh, it's terrible!'" [Laughter]

DIRECTORIAL COMRADERY
"You know, when I started in this business, I was associated with a group of young filmmakers. And we all used to hang out together, we used to talk about our movies, actors that we thought we’d like to use. We’d review each others’ scripts. And we did that in the seventies, and then suddenly everybody got kind of big and kind of went to different parts of the planet, and I missed that kind of directorial comradery. And I was very fortunate, because we all lived downtown in New York, and I met Noah like twenty years ago, and then Jake about ten years ago, and they're very close to Wes Anderson. So we started a group that basically met every week, and had 'directors talk.' And it's a great thing to have, because we're the only ones that understand what we go through."

ON WALKING AWAY FROM 'HAPPY VALLEY' - TOO MANY MEETINGS, TOO MANY NOTES
"I find that television executives are very intrusive. I've never had so many meetings with so many notes, about a script that I developed for Al Pacino that he wanted to do, that they proceeded to try to influence it in a way that made it unworkable. And I got to a point where I said, 'Guys, I'm done.' So, you gotta understand about television: it's a producer/writer's profession. The producers and the writers run the show. The directors [shakes head no], they bring 'em in... [looks at Paltrow next to him] well, you've actually done this. They bring them in, Director A is over there, Director B does this section, Director C does this section, and if you can tell the difference from one episode to another, God bless you."

AND FROM THE PRESS CONFERENCE, EARLIER THAT DAY...

Regarding De Palma, A24 said in a statement, "Noah and Jake have not only created a funny, nuanced and deeply insightful portrait of one of the world’s most masterful and uncompromising filmmakers, but they have made a film which explores the very essence of filmmaking, and presents a unique and enormously entertaining perspective on both the art and the business of movies."

'DE PALMA' ON-CAMERA INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED DURING ONE WEEK IN 2010
From the press conference in Venice and other interviews, it emerges that for their documentary, Paltrow and Baumbach filmed De Palma for one week in 2010, collecting about 30 hours worth of interview footage. De Palma, sitting in Paltrow's living room and talking about his career, wore the same shirt every day for continuity's sake. If you've seen Baumbach's recent film While We're Young, in which Ben Stiller plays a documentary filmmaker with his own excruciating continuity challenges, you might let out a little chuckle at details such as that.

"I'M A FINAL CUT DIRECTOR AND THAT'S VERY DIFFICULT TO OBTAIN IN THIS DAY & AGE"
Variety's Nick Vivarelli posted an interview today with De Palma, Baumbach, and Paltrow. "It really comes out of our friendship," Paltrow says in describing how the documentary came about. "Noah and I have known and admired Brian De Palma as a director since we were very very young. Making this movie comes out of us spending so much time with him, and talking to him about making films, and watching films. I can’t tell you how many films I’ve been introduced to by Brian, and Noah, and our group."

To which De Palma says, "And vice-versa."

More from this interview:

As directors there aren’t that many apparent affinities in your movies except that, in different ways, you all make personal pictures. Was De Palma a big influence?
Noah Baumbach: Yes. I think most of the movies I’ve made have some connection to my childhood, making something that purely comes out of your imagination. Brian’s movies had a major effect on me even before I’d seen them because as a child I would hear about them. I would hear my parents talk about them, I would see the ads in the subways. Even just the Dressed To Kill poster had an effect on me, independently from the movie, which I couldn’t see at the time until I was a little older. When I saw The Untouchables, it was the best thing that could ever happen to me. Now I have a friendship that’s almost twenty years old with Brian, a history, a personal relationship, and now this. The movie brings it all together. A silent narrative of the movie is precisely the personal relationship.

The film grew out of spending time with Brian for over ten years. Over how much time was it actually shot?
Jake Paltrow: five years ago we filmed for one week, and had Brian wear the same clothes every day to keep a continuity.

And then of course you had to weave in the materials, which you did with such directorial flourish.
Jake Paltrow: we wanted to maintain the rhythm of conversation, and let Brian’s storytelling direct us, in a way. The clips were brought in to illustrate things that Brian was talking about. It was often, like, ‘what clip from which movie would go well here?’

Brian, I don’t think you’ve talked that much about yourself before. How come?
Brian De Palma: because I’m basically a recluse. I only really talk about movies when I’m on a publicity tour. I had two French journalists follow me around for about seven or eight years, very bright people [Laurent Vachaud and Samuel Blumenfeld]. I talked to them and they produced a book that’s quite good. But it’s all in French and I’ve never read it.

Noah Baumbach: in terms of us, the friendship was already in place. So it was in some ways a document of it; in other words an extension of it. From when we met Brian the first time, we were peppering him with these kinds of questions anyway. It was really for us like: ‘let’s document this; let’s have it.’ Brian is a singular, unique, amazing filmmmaker; but it’s also kind of universally about filmmaking, only the way that someone as great and as personal as Brian can tell it.

It seems as though with these guys (Jake and Noah) you’ve recreated some of the same spirit there was among the New Hollywood directors in that era.
De Palma: it’s unusual to have a group of directors who are bright, talented – some even genial – who get along with each other, who are not competitive, who are not trying to cut each others’ throats for some job. I have been very fortunate to grow up with a group like that and to find a new group like this more recently. It’s a lonely profession unless you have other directors to talk to.

One thing that emerged from the documentary is that since “Mission to Mars” (in 2000) you have been working in Europe. It’s difficult, I guess impossible, for you to find financing within the U.S. studio system. Why?
De Palma: well, I’m a very troublesome director, because I’m a final cut director and that’s very difficult to obtain in this day and age. I discovered, when I was making Mission to Mars that they were spending a tremendous amount of money, and we didn’t even have enough money to finish the picture the way I would have liked to. I’m saying to myself: ‘we are spending a hundred million dollars on a movie. Yikes! This is crazy! And these days it’s more like three hundred million dollars. You don’t get much satisfaction worrying about what the grosses are the Saturday morning the movie opens; whether you are alive or dead.There is so much pressure on you that has very little to do with the quality of your work. I’ve made big hits, I’ve made big disasters, obviously it feels better to make a hit. And in order to make movies at that level you have to have that kind of success. It’s a terrible road to be on!

Discussing the documentary, De Palma said, "The genius of it was how they were able to take out their questions and then illustrate the film with all these pieces of other film, and to me its quite amazing."

THREE "FASCINATING EXPERIMENTS" - STAIRWAY SHOOTOUT, STEADY-CAM IN 'BONFIRE', MUSEUM PICK-UP IN 'DTK'

When asked to name his favorites of his own films, De Palma said that would be like a parent being asked to name a favorite child. Even so, he named three sequences in his films, saying, "All are fascinating experiments that turned out quite well"-- the stairway shootout in The Untouchables, the steady-cam shot at the beginning of Bonfire Of The Vanities, and the museum sequence in Dressed To Kill.