Brian De Palma

This time Lois fell off a building and Superman wasn’t there to catch her. Margot Kidder has died too young. In ‘Paperboy’ I wrote this about the DC Comics character of Lois Lane: ‘Lois would be humiliated, bullied, deceived and placed in danger by a man who was prepared to disguise himself under rubber masks just […]

I’m always on the lookout for anything that can help writers understand how to create reader interest, and very often I find it in studies of film. Film is in many ways analogous to books. Watching the excellent documentary ‘De Palma’ last night I was struck by something the director Brian De Palma said about […]

I’ve always written characters in pairs – it’s an unintentional recurring theme throughout my books. My mother was a twin whose brother died at 4 years of age from diphtheria (a now virtually forgotten illness), I have a brother to whom I’m very close, and I tend to form strong attachments with opposites for very […]

Brian De Palma’s ‘Phantom Of The Paradise’ appeared in 1974 and melded ‘Faust’ with ‘Phantom Of The Opera’, ‘Dorian Gray’ and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, with wonderfully deranged performances from Gerrit Graham and William Finney, the latter playing a songwriter whose magnum opus is stolen by rock impresario Swan (Paul Williams), for Death Records […]

It’s rare that a remake so perfectly reflects the faults of the original version of a film, but Brian De Palma’s ‘Passion’ is every bit as stilted as the French ‘Love Crime’. Both have generic titles and both are utterly absurd. In the Alain Corneau-directed version, Ludivine Sagnier is Isabelle and Kristin Scott Thomas is […]