Re-Mission

Brian De Palma on withholding information

LOS ANGELES -- Still chafing, perhaps, from criticism that his last Mission was more incomprehensible than Impossible, Brian De Palma opens an interview with a step-by-step recounting of the plot and creative processes behind his latest thriller, Snake Eyes.

"You can think about it scene by scene in your head and then you might get lost," he begins, seeming to get lost in thought himself. "There's the assassination . . . and then there's that scene with Dunne and then he goes to talk to the fighter and then there's the flashback where you see the fight and then after that there's this press conference and you see Carla sort of wandering around . . . "

Any questions? Actually, it's this kind of literalism that De Palma disdains.

"Having followed Hitchcock's career," he says, referring to the master to whom he's compared, for good and ill, "you see how he used to be reviewed until he was discovered by the French in Psycho. You're considered an entertainer and never taken too seriously. I think visual storytelling is the most exciting thing, but critics don't really write about it. They write about what the actors are doing or what the text is about.

"It's really hard to find the perceptive critic who sees what I'm doing. Other directors see what you're doing. Kids come up to me on the street. But I'd say for mainstream criticism you're basically some kind of . . . entertainer! Let's hope! I've got a standard review on Mission Impossible. They acknowledged that there was some kind of thought processes going on with those sequences. Then they said it didn't make any sense and who cared anyway."

De Palma is confident that Snake Eyes will not only make sense but that people will care. Mostly because its tale of corruption and moral responsibility is socially relevant and dramatically resonant. But also because the film confronts the issues of perception, memory, and truth in an age of high-tech media overload in its story of a political assassination revisited from different points of view.

"Basically it's a matter of withholding information. In the beginning you have the camera pointing in at Rick [the main character, a corrupt cop played by Nicolas Cage]. And then you want to see what he saw, but you don't really show them until you go back and see what he remembers. Hitchcock was a master of this, of holding back information."

The film begs comparison to other works on the same theme: Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, De Palma's own Blow Out, and the granddaddy of them all, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.

"Everybody brings up Rashomon. I haven't seen it since college. All I know is that it's basically the retelling of a rape from multiple points of view. I remember a lot of stylization in the different versions -- even the actors were acting differently from sequence to sequence. This isn't exactly like Rashomon. For me the question was how to make it interesting, because when you do flashbacks, they tend to stop the dramatic action. I was trying to make them look the same but completely different."

So, it's back to the bottom line of being an entertainer. And a businessman. When it comes to the film's budget and production schedule, De Palma is at his most lucid.

"Sixty-eight million dollars," he says. "I was the producer: we budgeted at $72 million and we shot it at $68, and we were 12 days under schedule."

-- P.K.

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