![]() You shot tens of hours of footage, but the final film is a pretty lean 100-or-so minutes. But it was very… yeah, I don’t think there was anything that would really be different. I think if there’s any sort of us “directing it together,” it’s us in the editing room - going through the footage and agreeing, and, when there are disagreements, sort of talking those things through. ![]() Like, there’s no version that’s really just, like, co-directing on the floor with Brian, beyond us talking the way we normally talk. ![]() ![]() So that part of it’s really just an extension of our friendship with him.Īnd I guess there’s a real give-and-take with the two of us on one side of the table talking to Brian, just in life, that translated sort of seamlessly to doing it. Before we filmed the movie, there were several years of having access to him in this unusual way, of him being open to tell these stories or versions of stories that aren’t necessarily in the film, and also recognizing this isn’t the way that people talk, who’ve had his experience or success or these sorts of things about movies, and if he’d agreed to do it on camera, the way he does at dinner, it’d probably seem very valuable. Paltrow: I don’t think… this all grows out of our sort-of-shared experience of talking with Brian. Paltrow, might have brought something to the Noah-Brian dynamic that helps give this movie its ultimate shape. It’s very much Brian being himself, but he’s also aware of, “This is the version that’s being filmed and I’ve got to do it.” I think having a filmmaker as the subject, in a way, he knows what’s needed to tell the story properly. The timing on many of the stories is often very funny. So he was telling things, I think, in more concise - or trying to - ways. I think something we discovered, too, is that Brian, in agreeing to do it, also kind of knew what the task was an actor in a movie. We always knew where we were going to go, because we had to get to the next movie. We’d ask follow-up questions and things, but there were things we knew we wanted to cover, stories we knew we wanted him to tell again, but it really was a kind of free-ranging conversation that had a structure to it. What about the comments here might be more fitting for a film?īaumbach: It’s organized, because we went in order: we started at the beginning and went through every film chronologically and let him kind of tell the story of each movie. I’d like to know how what we see here changes from when the two of you talk in private. Baumbach, made a comment I found really interesting: that what we see in this movie is “a version” of the conversations you often have with De Palma. Paltrow: “Come June, you better have an answer.”Īt that same press conference, you, Mr. “I’m gonna come interview you in six months, and…” Paltrow, couldn’t come up with one, and I was hoping that perhaps you can sit on it a bit and, when we come to this interview’s end, you’ll have an answer.īaumbach: You should’ve said that then to him. Baumbach, said something about loving the bit in Wise Guys where they say, “Thank you, Mr. At last year’s NYFF press conference, I asked what De Palma movies you tend to defend the most -Īnd you, Mr. The Film Stage: We’ve sort of spoken before. And believe me: this is far from the last thing we’ll have to say about Brian De Palma. Our previous experience helped start off the interview, which I’d like to get into now, since you, fan or skeptic, should be planning a trip to soon see their great film. This was not my first time speaking to them - only the first in a truly “official” capacity. To interview the directors behind a film that is itself a feature-length interview presents some interesting challenges, not least of which because said film makes for so engaging and revealing a discussion - but so it is when the subject possesses as much experience and honesty as Brian De Palma, an artist about whom people are never lacking opinions. The directors are Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, who I spoke to in the main theater of New York City’s Metrograph - the site of a full, ongoing retrospective - about the form and function of De Palma, film and filmmaker alike.
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