Movie Profile

Brian De Palma, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas, shooting FEMME FATALE
© 2002 Warner Bros.

FATALE Obsession

By: MICHAEL TUNISON
Date: Thursday, November 07, 2002

The word that sets Brian De Palma off is "voyeur." As in: Does the director consider himself one, just because of the strong, often obsessive points of view that famously drive his thrillers in the vein of SISTERS, DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE?

"I keep on getting that question, and it's kind of irritating," De Palma responds testily when a reporter probes him on the issue yet again during a roundtable interview for his latest like-themed film, FEMME FATALE. "The way you guys use 'voyeurism' just drives me crazy. Movies, Hitchcock showed us a long time ago, are a lot of use of closeups and points of view. That's cinema storytelling. Why do you keep calling it voyeurism all the time?"

To De Palma, the "voyeuristic" or "Hitchcockian" visual style inevitably referred to in reviews of his work isn't some quirky personal statement, but rather the result of him utilizing the "basic tools of cinema."

"Where else

Fanboys rejoice: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is Brian De Palma's FEMME FATALE.

do you see closeups and points of view? Can you give me another art form you see this in?" he asks. "OK. So I use what is the basic form of cinema, which I must say, in most movies it looks like they're doing some kind of television show closeups and over-the-shoulder, and everything you can see with Charlie Rose interviewing people. I don't exactly consider this film directing."

That's certainly not the style moviegoers encounter in FEMME FATALE, a noirish mystery-thriller many are viewing as a return to form for De Palma after a series of '90s director-for-hire vehicles (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, SNAKE EYES, MISSION TO MARS) that failed to completely ignite artistically. Based on his own script (his first true writing-directing effort since 1992's RAISING CAIN), FEMME concerns a wily female crook (X-MEN's Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) who cuts out on her partners after a spectacular jewelry robbery during the Cannes International Film Festival. In a series of variations on familiar De Palma plot elements, the antiheroine takes over the life of her exact double, plays head games with a photojournalist (Antonio Banderas) trying to come to her aid, and otherwise does her best to bedevil everyone in sight.

Considering the striking French locations that dominate the film, it comes as no surprise that De Palma wrote FEMME during an extended stay in Europe. Interestingly, however, he originally set the story back in the U.S. with the opening heist taking place on an offshore casino boat.

"It evolved because I was in Paris, I was living in a little hotel off the Champs d'Elyses," the director recalls. "I had a lot of time on my hands. And I had this idea and it started to jell, and then I wrote it in this American venue." After spending some time at Cannes and some other French film fests, however, "I said, 'This is kind of pleasant here why can't I set it here?' So then I started to figure out how I could change the story."

De Palma confirms that FEMME became a more personal project than some of his more recent films.

"Yeah, because

FEMME FATALE

the whole thing happened so serendipitously," he says. "I was there just to see some friends, I had this idea. You seldom have, I think, really good ideas like this. I have ideas in my head all the time, and every once in a while they coalesce into something that seems to work. I wrote it very quickly, I liked being in Paris, and I figured out how to adapt it to the Parisian location."

As for its connection to the aforementioned thrillers from earlier in his filmography, De Palma says, "Well, it's linked because it's me and it's my particular genre that has a lot of things that I like to do."

"These are very visually inspired movies," he adds. "They're driven by visual ideas."

De Palma thinks of himself as "one of the few practitioners out there" of this kind of visual moviemaking. Looking at the films coming out of the U.S. these days, he sees little thought put into how to creatively use the tools Hitchcock and others perfected decades ago.

"There's a way of visually telling stories, and you've got to think about it," he says. "You've got to think about how you shoot them. I can't tell you how many movies I walk into and I say, 'Why did they choose this location? Is there anything particularly interesting about this alley?' I mean, I think about these things constantly. Put your camera there and take a picture what do you got? And I go there and I take the picture, I walk on the location, I have all the shots. And you look at it on film and you say to yourself, 'Do I want to put that on the big screen to bore the shit out of all you guys?' I see that all the time in movies and I say, 'What is this guy thinking? Is this interesting?'"

Asked to name other directors who follow this visual-driven filmmaking tradition, De Palma replies, "Well, Spielberg when he gets cooking in certain sequences."

He pauses for a moment, considering others: "Hmmm... Visual stylists. Darren..."

"Aronofsky?" an interview offers, supplying the name of the young helmer of PI and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

"Aronofsky," De Palma concurs. "Quite good."

The subject of stimulating visuals naturally segues to De Palma's selection of model-turned-actress Romijn-Stamos as his Barbara Stanwyck-obsessed femme fatale. After a long search that included "everything from American movie stars to foreign stars to unknowns everything," De Palma followed a suggestion from director John McTiernan and gave McTiernan's ROLLERBALL co-star a try. ("Something good came out of ROLLERBALL," Romijn-Stamos jokes during another interview session.) What did the relatively inexperienced actress bring to the table that made De Palma want her for such a juicy leading role?

"Look at her,"

Brian De Palma, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas, shooting FEMME FATALE

he says simply. "When you're making a movie named FEMME FATALE, you'd better have a girl who is drop-dead beautiful and can act a difficult thing to find." Picking up a copy of MAXIM featuring a scantily clad Romijn-Stamos peering alluringly out of the cover, he adds, "Need I explain more?"

With the film set to hit U.S. theaters this week after a respectable showing at European box offices, De Palma is currently at work on a possible screen adaptation of TOYER, Gardner McKay's stage play and book about a serial killer-like psycho who "toys" with his victims.

"The book isn't as good as the play," De Palma says. "[McKay] tried to expand the idea, but I don't think he did it very effectively."

Does De Palma believe, as many filmmakers claim, that it's harder to get interesting films made these days than it was when he started directing features in the late '60s?

"No, they just have to be good, and they have to be something you want to do," he says. "You know, I'm 62 years old. I've made a lot of movies, so I can see problems with my ideas and the ideas in the scripts that I read. You think, 'Is this really any good?' and you're very critical of your work and anybody else's."

For the record, De Palma has nothing to do with the new TV version of Stephen King's CARRIE, which he so famously adapted for the big screen in 1976. To him, the boob-tube remake represents "the poverty of imagination" in Hollywood something that isn't exactly new, he points out.

"They've been doing it since the beginning of time," he says. "The whole problem is selling. They've got a presold name and they're always trying to figure out ways to sell it again."

OK, but will he watch the new version when it airs?

"Absolutely I'll watch it!"

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FATALE Obsession

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