Regielegende Brian De Palma stellte sich freimütig den Fragen von Hans-Christoph Blumenberg zu seinem Umgang mit Wirklichkeit in Zeiten des Krieges, der Bildsprache des Internets und der Kunst, sich und sein Werk lebendig zu halten.

Blumenberg: „Since you told me before, yesterday alone you had watched four movies, you must have seen quite a lot since you came here: any recommendations? I mean, without going throut the whole list of what you have seen? Anything that has especially impressed you?”

de Palma: „Well, the problem is, that you see so many that you just remember certain things from them and because it's hard to remember the directors and the names and they're all sort of swashed around in your brain. I saw for instance, a Johnny Toe movie last night, I've never seen Johnny Toe before. And I said ‚Wow, this guy is really something!’ So, I discover things and it's good for me to see different directors and shooting different ways in different countries. The worst thing of course, is to be trapped into a movie that is really not good. And you are in a seat that you have to climb over at least 20 people to escape. This happened to me earlier this week and it just drives me crazy, because I'm at an age where I refuse to be bored! The worst thing you can do is bore me and I trap myself in a seat all the way at the end of the wall and I was trapped in this movie for god knows how long and I would have left in 10 minutes – that was a horrible experience. That doesn't happen so often, because I usually find an isle seat. Tthere have been many interesting movies I have seen so far and I'm sure, I'll see many more.”

Blumenberg: „You were kind enough, not to mention the name of the movie, I suppose that was on purpose. I think, we definetely have to talk about you're latest film REDACTED. That one, where I think you won the best director award at the Venice film festival last year. Most people here, including myself, have not seen it, simply because it hasn't been released in Germany yet, but from what we've read, what we've heard, what we've seen on the internet, it seems to be quite a departure for you, that you explore in this film about the war in Iraq some new formal means that you've not used before. Could you tell us about REDACTED a little bit, Brian?”

de Palma: „REDACTED came out of a whole bunch of unusual events. It all started in Toronto, where I was at the festival seeing movies and I was talking to a group of young directors and afterwards I went out for dinner with some friends and I was approached by one of the people that work for HD-Net and he said: ‚Would you be interested in making a movie in high definition? You have five million dollars and you can do anything you want.’ Memo to young directors: This is something, I was also talking to my students about... If somebody offers you five thousand dollars, you go home and write that script that night. And get the money and make the movie! So I said: ‚Five million dollars..., hmm, let me see...’ So. I thought about it and then I wrote about this incident that happened in Iraq that was exactly the same thing that happened in the incident that I depicted in CASUALTIES OF WAR and having lived through Vietnam and here we are going in another misadventure in mideast. I said, I gotta tell this story again. And then, in the process of discovering and researching the material of the actual incident, I went on the internet with my google search engine and I came up with all of these unique things I have never seen before, visualisation of bloggers or websites of wifes of soldiers or somebody ranting about what should be done to these guys and montages of iraqe causulties with very sad music. And I said, this is the way to tell the stories. It's all digital, so I make it like it's an acutal real event. I tried to be as close as I can, I couldn't use actual material from the real event, because the soldiers were all being prosecuted for the rape and murder of this innocent 14 year old girl and killing her family. So I had to change everything and I kept very close to the kind of characters and structure of causulties of war and I told it all in this new digital form.”

Blumenberg: „It is about to be released in France and I'd like to read you a little quote from ‚cahier du cinema’. Stefan Delon, one of the critics, has said about REDACTED: ‚Impossible, not to think of the formular of Marx, the history is repeated the first time in tragedy, the second in joke. For de Palma, Iraq is the bad remake of Vietnam, even more than that of the war of the Gulf.’ Is that a fair representation of what you were trying to do with that film?”

de Palma: „Yes, because having lived through Vietnam and listened to all of the lies from the administration, to have it all played back to you once again. And even done more skillfully and having the collaboration of the main stream media, it just drives you crazy. And everything in REDACTED comes from voices that, you know, they're not in the main stream, they are in the internet and you get a more accurate picture of what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, the American audience is completely uninterested in these movies about iraq or what we are doing there. And they’ve been all severely rejected by the audiences. So, it's a very distressing situation.”

Blumenberg: „And it was part of your strategy obviously not to use well known actors' faces but rather to work with unknown actors, right?”

de Palma: „The whole was supposed to look like a documentary. It was supposed to be like found footage, it's all told through, a French documentary about checkpoints, because the soldiers were all at a checkpoint. And the girl that they ultimately targeted and raped and killed used to go in and out of her checkpoint, so I told all the sort of checkpoint statistics in a documentary I made up called BARRAGE. And then we had the main narrator of the piece, he was a mexican american film maker that didn't get into USA and he thought he could join the army and made a film about his adventures in Iraq that this would get him into film school, based of course on something I had read on the internet. So he becomes the main narrator of what the incident is, and the rest is sort of covered by surveillance cameras at the in and out of the barracks, and interrogations when the guys are caught and interrogated by army lawyers. So the whole thing is actual fact and of course you're trying to make the audience aware that all this is crap you been watching on U.S. television is as made up as this is and don't believe a word of it.”

Blumenberg: „You mentioned two titles, including GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT and WISE GUYS that you would prefer maybe not to find in your filmography, but are there some films that you are especially proud of, some of you own favourites?”

de Palma: „Some of them got like impossible to get made, like CASUALTIES OF WAR took me like 20 years to get made, so that I'm very proud of that we were able to finally get that made only after I had that big success of THE UNTOUCHABLES , only because Dawn Steel who was the executive that was with THE UNTOUCHABLES at Paramount became the head of Columbia and used to work with Michael J. Fox' Company and got Michael to play Ericson, otherwise the movie would have never been done, they never make movies like this. And of course BLOW OUT, kind of a magical movie came, because I'd had a big success with DRESSED TO KILL. So you have a big success and a nitwit idea of yours is suddenly the brightest thing in the constellation. I had come up with this idea and it was supposed to be just this little movie about a sound editor, mainly as the sound editor I observed over the years working on my movie and the irony of that of course is that John Travolta called me up and sent me some script and I wasn't interested in it and he said: ‚What are you doing?’ And I said: ‚I'm making this little movie about a sound editor.’ And he was like: ‚Why don't you send it to me?’ ‚But John, it's just a little movie about a sound editor, it's not...’ ‚No, I wanna read it!’ And so I sent it to him and he would really like to play the part and so this litte five/six million dollar movie became this spectacular John Travolta movie right after he had his first one/two hits in the seventies. So that turned it into a gigantic production and that was the movie that ended a film company. I'm kinda proud of that.”

Blumenberg: „There is a number of websites devoted to your work. Some of them are very good. One is called: ‚Le Paradis de Brian de Palma’. One is called: ‚De Palma á la mode’. So, the guys who run ‚Le Paradis de Brian de Palma’ have made a poll and I think seventy five percent of your work of their favourite Brian de Palma movies. So, I'd like to read you their list and maybe you can comment on that? ‚Le Paradis de Brian de Palma’: No. 1 BLOW OUT, the film that finished the company. No. 2 DRESSED TO KILL, No. 3 CARRIE, No. 4 CARLITO’S WAY, No. 5 FEMME FATALE, No. 6 CASUALTIES OF WAR, No. 7 SCARFACE. Do you think that's a good choice? What do you miss in that list?”

de Palma: „That's a pretty good list. I'll take it. It's kinda interesting that movies that do not do well initially, especially BLOW OUT. It's another good lesson for all of the young directors that movies that you made that nobody liked made 20 cent of the box office, maybe one of the best movies you ever made. That has happened many times with me.”

Blumenberg: „Yeah, it's amazing that some movies that I especially like of yours are very low placed in this list. I tend to shock people when I admit that my favourite Brain de Palma movie is THE BONFIRE OF VANITIES. I told you in 1993 when we had this bottle of Grappa in Hamburg and you were so kind to accept to appear in my movie the next day as an actor and at that time you also felt that it was one of your most underrated films. Do you still feel that?”

de Palma: „Oh boy! I think that you're not so attached to the way that the story in the book is told, which of course is a brilliant book, but I took a whole different tact and how to do it and in retrospect, because the film was like dead on arrival. I was a student of Alexander McKendric and he made THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, which is probably one of the best movies about New York communists and the media in that period. It ended his career. I remember running into him in the Disney school and it was like after he made this great movie and this movie like ‚died’, it was very difficult for him to work after that. I should have made THE BONFIRE OF VANITIES just like THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, it should have been as tough, and those people should have been as repugnant as they were in the book, but unfortunately when I arrived on the project, they had Tom Hanks! Tom Hanks as an unlikeable character?”

Blumenberg: „Well, you did your best.”

de Palma: „So I said, this is a very expensive movie, do I wanna wind up like Alexander McKendric teaching at the Disney school? So I said, maybe we make Sherman McCoy not as reprehensible an asshole that he is, we'll make him, well like Tom Hanks. Which works I guess in some way, but it's so against the Sherman McCoy of Tom Wolfe. And then the other problem was with the jewish judge, because the movie has so many negative jewish characters in it, so I thought maybe in order to change that a little bit, we'll make the judge black. Bad idea! And though I know you admire this booby, you're maybe one of the few, does it have some fantastic things in it? You bet! But I would have been a lot happier, to make it a lot tougher than it was.”

Audience: „We mentioned the opening sequence in SNAKE EYES earlier. Could you tell us, how you're interested in opening sequences without visual editing? Was it something that was in the script, or was it something you had in mind and maybe wrote it yourself?”

de Palma: „In SNAKE EYES  the idea was to show the casino world that Nick Cage lived in and how he was just the biggest and smartest operator in the whole world. And it was also the idea to always be shooting in at Nick, especially. You show the fight the first time and you just see Nick, you never see what's going on, you never see what he is seeing until the assassination takes place. So it was a way of showing the whole world in this very fluent way and Nick is a very electric actor and he can just sort of carry a shot like that where he is just talking to that guy and then he is just wizzing along. In BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES I sort of got the idea of watching Truman Capote tumbling to a literary celebration once he is completely drunk and you know: ‚Hii..ii..ii..’ And everybody is punning all over him and I said this is a great opening for BONFIRE, because here is the author of a book being praised and honored by everybody that has anything to do with the story of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. And then I had to construct a shot, that starts in the basement of the world trade center and enters up in the palm garden. And the interesting thing about that shot is, when you do a shot like that it takes all night to shoot and I think we did like 37 takes. It is that one person – this is also true for THE TOUCH OF EVIL – in the shot the guy at the gate, who is letting the cars through, blew his line every time. And I had the same problem with the embassador's daughter. Every time this whole film thing would work his way up to them, she would literally almost like throw up, she was so anxious with this whole camera crew climbing at her at the elevator, she completely throws up in the whole shot. And I had to take her aside and calm her down and keep her from throwing up some more. We finally got it just when the sun was coming up. It took us all Saturday night until Sunday morning.”

Blumenberg: „Well, thank you very much, Brian de Palma! Thank you very, very much!”