Brian De Palma names the “nuttiest movie” he ever made
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After beginning his career in the late 1960s, director Brian De Palma steadily built a body of work that established him as one of the most highly regarded filmmakers of his generation. While mainstream audiences are most familiar with his hits like Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission: Impossible, De Palma has also directed a number of intense thrillers that veer into decidedly strange and unsettling territory.
De Palma’s most notable oddities include 1974’s comedy horror musical Phantom of the Paradise, a glam rock-era reworking of The Phantom of the Opera. Then there’s the 1980 work Dressed to Kill, a frenzied Alfred Hitchcock homage which gave Michael Caine one of his most eyebrow-raising roles. We might also mention 1984’s Body Double, another Hitchcockian thriller which gradually turns into a neon-lit fever dream, with madcap twists and meta-textual flourishes galore.
Despite the unhinged nature of many of his films, the one title from Brian De Palma’s back catalogue that he has personally singled out as likely the most off-the-wall work he’s ever produced is his 1992 film Raising Cain. This psychological thriller stars John Lithgow as a child psychologist with multiple personality disorder, whose more violent alter-ego emerges when he discovers his wife’s infidelity.
Discussing Raising Cain with CHUD in 2011, De Palma enthused, “Isn’t that the nuttiest movie? The interesting thing about that movie is that I could not make the beginning work, and it drove me crazy. The idea essentially came from an experience I was having. I was having an affair with a married woman. She used to come over to my house before she went home, and we would make love. Then, one time, she fell asleep, and I thought, “What would happen if I didn’t wake her up and she slept through the night?” That was what I always wanted to start the movie with – that and her dilemma instead of with the Lithgow story.”
However, the more De Palma worked on the story, the more the focus shifted: “The concept of Raising Cain is fantastic. The idea that every time you have some traumatic event in your life, you create another personality so you forget it happened to you… I mean, what a great idea for a movie!”
While De Palma himself may have been very pleased with his work on Raising Cain, the film proved to be one of his more divisive entries among audiences and critics. Reviews were somewhat mixed, whilst its box office takings of $37million off the back of a $12m budget meant that it was only a modest commercial success.
This did not stop De Palma from returning to his signature brand of high-octane suspense thrillers in the years that followed, with 2002’s erotic thriller Femme Fatale, 2006 period noir The Black Dahlia, and 2012 erotic thriller Passion. True to form for De Palma, these were all met with mixed reviews and tepid box office performance, and the director’s career has cooled off a great deal since. His last film, 2019’s Domino, was released direct-to-VOD, and with the director now in his 80s, it’s widely suspected his filmmaking days may be over.
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