Brian De Palma

Brian Russell De Palma (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 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 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.

During the 1960s, De Palma began making a living producing documentary films, notably The Responsive Eye, a 1966 movie about The Responsive Eye op-art exhibit curated by William Seitz for MOMA in 1965.

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 and becoming one of the first male students among a female population.

Once there, influences as various as drama teacher Wilford Leach, the Maysles brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and Alfred Hitchcock impressed upon De Palma the many styles and themes that would shape his own cinema in the coming decades.

An early association with a young Robert De Niro resulted in The Wedding Party.

The film, which was co-directed with Leach and producer Cynthia Munroe, had been shot in 1963 but remained unreleased until 1969, when De Palma's star had risen sufficiently within the Greenwich Village filmmaking scene.

De Niro was unknown at the time; the credits mistakenly display his name as "Robert Denero [sic]".

The film is noteworthy for its invocation of silent film techniques and an insistence on the jump-cut for effect.

De Palma followed this style with various small films for the NAACP and the Treasury Department.

De Palma's most significant features from this decade are Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970).

Both films star Robert De Niro and espouse a leftist revolutionary viewpoint common to the era in which they were released.

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.

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 that included stand-outs Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), and Obsession (1976).

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."

His films include mainstream box office hits such as Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996), as well as cult favorites such as Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Casualties of War (1989), and Carlito's Way (1993).

De Palma was a leading member of the New Hollywood generation of film directors.

His direction often makes use of quotations from other films or cinematic styles, and bears the influence of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

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 November 1976, De Palma released a film adaptation of the 1974 novel Carrie by Stephen King.

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 the source novel had yet to climb the bestseller list.

De Palma gravitated toward the project and changed crucial plot elements based upon his own predilections, not the saleability of the novel.

The cast was young and relatively new, though Sissy Spacek and John Travolta had gained attention for previous work in, respectively, film and episodic sitcoms.

Carrie became De Palma's first genuine box-office success, garnering Spacek and Piper Laurie Oscar nominations for their performances.

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 played by Keith Gordon in De Palma's 1980 film Dressed to Kill.

When he was in high school, he built computers.

He won a regional science-fair prize for a project titled "An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations".

Enrolled at Columbia University as a physics student, De Palma became enraptured with the filmmaking process after viewing Citizen Kane and Vertigo.

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.

Each of these films experiments with narrative and intertextuality, reflecting De Palma's stated intention to become the "American Godard" while integrating several of the themes which permeated Hitchcock's work.