After reading a Los Angeles Times review of The De Palma Decade by Laurent Bouzereau, I was reminded of the many times I interviewed the Italian-American director as an entertainment journalist and the articles I wrote about his movies.

I met Brian De Palma for the first time in 1978 in his New York office, when I was writing for the Cinema supplement of the Italian newsweekly L’Europeo. We spoke about his latest work, The Fury, and I asked him about some of the movies he had directed until then.

He said about Hi Mom! starring Robert De Niro: “We were seeing the Vietnam War essentially as a voyeuristic experience. America then became a cold nation in front of the horrible things that we were doing.”

Sisters: “It develops the classic theme of the good sister and bad sister, the two aspects of our personality, one light and one dark.”

Obsession: “I was imitating my favorite film, Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, telling a very romantic story.”

Carrie: “I wanted to represent the high school experience in a different way. It’s typical of a teenager to feel cut off like the ugly duckling.”

Scarface comes up in the conversation, when Marchese asks Pacino to illuminate something he read in Pacino's new memoir, Sonny Boy:

In the book you say directors have insulted you throughout your life. What’s an example? What was his name? The guy that directed the great Mozart film, “Amadeus”?

Miloš Forman. Miloš Forman! He’s so great. I’m having dinner with him, and he came out and said, “How do you do this [expletive] ‘Scarface’? You do ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ then you do this ‘Scarface’?” You know who else said it? My favorite, Lumet. Sidney Lumet said “Al, how do you go in there and do that crap?” He was so mad. I kept thinking, I don’t feel that way. I love their passion.

Somebody says, “How do you do that [expletive],” and you say, “I love your passion”? You’re enlightened! Yeah, and thank God merciful that it’s one of the biggest films I’ve ever made.

“Scarface.” It keeps going.

I wonder if, in terms of your acting, that’s a pivotal movie for you. Because “Scarface” was the first time you really went operatic, over the top. If you look at the roles you do after, you’re much more likely to go big. Yeah, I got that reputation. Some of the stuff I did in school, 14, 15 years old, was the best work I ever did. Not the best work. It was the most inspired work. Because I was so in it. That’s why the teacher came and talked to my mom, came to my house to tell her that I should pursue this thing. But what I’m getting at is, “Scarface” was done that way. “Scarface” came from a place that was different. That’s true.

Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” was dismissed upon release despite striking visuals and assured direction; is it ripe for a reappraisal?

This week’s Cage Match (as chosen by the random number generator from Cage’s entire filmography) was the chilling, still haunting 1999 thriller 8MM. For the People’s Pick, we put two other films where Cage plays a detective up for a vote: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Brian De Palma’s 1998 thriller Snake Eyes (1988). Snake Eyes won that match.

This divisive film received mixed reviews upon release and continues to inspire differing opinions, which you’re about to witness in this Cage Match!

Meanwhile, the new episode of the horror podcast How I Met Your Monster discusses A Tragic Antihero in Brian De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

Filmmaker and historian Laurent Bouzereau has been thinking and writing about Brian De Palma for most of his life, ever since he wandered into a movie theater to see “Obsession” and acquired an obsession of his own.

Since then, Bouzereau has probably devoted more hours to exploring and explaining De Palma’s oeuvre than any other critic; he was the author of the first English language book-length critical study on the director, “The De Palma Cut,” and has produced endless hours of supplementary features for Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of De Palma classics like “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” and “Body Double.”

Now, Bouzereau has synthesized all he’s learned about his master’s origins in “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.” It’s a book devoted to the period in which De Palma created and perfected the visual language for which he would become famous in movies including “Sisters,” “The Fury,” and his masterpiece, “Blow Out.” Bouzereau moves not in chronological but thematic order through De Palma’s 1970s and early 1980s output, grouping films together according to their visual and philosophical preoccupations and looking under the hood to see how and why De Palma achieved his effects.

Bouzereau does so via a combination of interviews and his own observations after over 40 years of study; as a result, “The De Palma Decade” becomes not only a critical biography of De Palma but a sort of autobiography for Bouzereau himself as he traces his own evolution as a moviegoer (and a gay man responding to De Palma’s complicated treatment of sexual orientation) via his responses to De Palma’s work. Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s section on “Carrie,” in which De Palma and members of his cast and crew recall the casting of one of his most iconic films.

Thursday… today is Thursday… and this is a momentous occasion in Muppet history: their first collaboration with legendary songwriter, singer, and actor Paul Williams! Then, we and our returning guest host Dallin discuss his role in the initially-misunderstood tragedy-slash-funhouse mirror history of popular music, Phantom of the Paradise.

Topics of discussion include songs about love songs, Bunsen’s odd position among the Muppets, how terrifying it would be to work at Rainforest Cafe while high, who the ultimate Muppets antagonist should be, Rick Baker’s post-Planet of the Apes filmography, and the unfortunate ongoing relevance of movies about exploitation in the music industry.

Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double was seen by many at the time as a deliberate provocation — a vigorously thumbed nose at the commentators who’d called his work misogynistic and sadistic as well as at the MPAA, which had given his 1983 film Scarface an X. De Palma himself reportedly said that Body Double was meant to go over the top in all of his alleged cinematic sins. The 84-year-old director now admits that was mostly publicity-friendly bluster. But the movie, which is coming out in a special 4K edition to honor its 40th anniversary, is extreme in all sorts of ways: It’s gory, violent, sexy, stylized, ridiculous, an extremely suspenseful picture that is somehow impossible to take too seriously. It also happens to be a masterpiece, which would come as a surprise to the critics and audiences that rejected it back during its release: The film flopped at the box office, De Palma was nominated for a Worst Director Razzie, and even Pauline Kael, a longtime defender of his, called it “an awful disappointment.” Looking back on it now, De Palma says, “You’re always judged by the style of the day, but sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative.”

In truth, Body Double is the kind of movie that could only work with the unique mix of formal charge and playful self-awareness that De Palma brought to it. It’s a thoroughly transfixing thriller, filled with elaborately choreographed set pieces in service of an absurd story. A characteristic riff on Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and Rear Window, it follows a claustrophobic out-of-work actor (Craig Wasson) who breaks up with his adulterous girlfriend and winds up house-sitting a fancy, space-age pad in the Hollywood Hills. There, he becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman across the street who loves to dance erotically at an appointed hour. The insanely gruesome series of events that follows pulls our hero deep into the 1980s porn industry (or at least a cartoonish version of it), where he then becomes infatuated with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, in what might be her greatest role), a performer who may or may not have a connection to that woman in the window. He also, at one point, winds up in the middle of a real-life music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” a wonderfully bizarre sequence that is left mostly unexplained but feels very much of a piece with De Palma’s earlier, more experimental films. “Somebody at Columbia said, ‘We should have a music video for this movie,’ De Palma recalls. “And I said, ‘Why don’t we put the music video in the movie?’”

Body Double has a pointedly colorful and artificial look that seems to highlight its “movieness,” which also happens to be what the film is about. The protagonist falls in love with a woman whom he only sees through a telescope as she dances, her face hidden, behind a window. His claustrophobia and general awkwardness often prevent him from being able to get close to this person, which effectively turns him into a stalker. He is, in effect, a perfect audience surrogate — a voyeur who increasingly has trouble telling the difference between the movies and reality, a tantalizing boundary that De Palma’s film zigzags across many times.

Body Double is beloved today. But it’s also the kind of movie that nobody could make today. Speaking from his New York City home, De Palma, whose most recent picture was 2019’s little-seen Domino, has some thoughts on that as well as the current state of cinema. He also says that he is working on a new film.