With a film resume that includes Carrie, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables and Scarface, Brian De Palma may have spilled more cinematic crimson than slashers Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers combined—and twice as stylishly. The bloodbath continues: the veteran director is ready to up the ante with his adaptation of novelist James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, an intense fictional exploration of one of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved mysteries.
“Brian has a sort of devil-may-care attitude about filmmaking which I love,” the film’s star Josh Hartnett says, citing the director’s way of balancing some of the story’s pitch-black elements with sly humor. “He wants to make it entertaining. He wants to make it pulpy in a way. He wants to make it operatic and fun.” De Palma dissects his latest creation with Hollywood.com:
Hollywood.com: Was your initial visual approach for this film to craft a recreation of Los Angeles at that specific era, or more of a recreation of “movie L.A.” of that period?
Brian De Palma: Well, there is a great documentary called L.A. Plays Itself that shows all these locations that you see in the movies. The problem was first finding the location and what exists, and then the locations give me all kinds of visual ideas. So you have to deal with what you actually have, and then with your art director you figure out how you can change it to sort of fit into the design of the movie. In this case, the key locations changed many times until we finally got enough financing to make the movie in Bulgaria. By then I had gone through a permutation of these different principle locations, like those winding staircases which I originally found here in Los Angeles, and then I found something in the municipal building in Bulgaria that was somewhat similar to my initial idea. What happens is that these ideas become concrete, and then they go into your brain and you then design a sequence to make it and that becomes the design of the movie. And of course you’re collaborating with Dante Ferretti, who was a great eye, and he’d come up with something, too.
HW: Did you have a location here in L.A. that was your favorite to shoot?
BDP: The locations in L.A. are pretty generic—it’s pretty much all Hollywood Boulevard. I mean, you had to have that because this is where it happened. I mean, we here at the Biltmore and it’s not in the [James] Ellroy book, but in every Black Dahlia story this is the last place that she made a phone call from.
HW: Can you talk about the dark comedy elements of this film because you extreme violence in this too?
BDP: Well, that’s the tone of the book. That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to someone about this being closer to Sunset Boulevard, with the funeral of the monkey. [When Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett)] arrives at the Linscott estate, it’s like, “Okay, how are we supposed to take that?” You take the whole wry sort of analysis that he’s watching and this [Sunset Boulevard feeling] is very much true in this piece, too, because you’re in a nut house. These people are insane, and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, “Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.” So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a [taxidemied] dog holding a newspaper with the first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started talking it off like the weather, you go, “Wow. I’m in a loony bin here, and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.” That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book.
HW: The character of the real-life Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, was not originally in the script, but you added scenes in which she appears on film in screen tests, which you yourself improvised off camera with Mia Kirshner—what prompted that approach to those particularly memorable scenes?
BDP: Well, that was something that wasn’t in the book. All he had was the Dahlia in her 8×10 and then this grotesquely carved body. So everyone talks about her and not in too positive of ways, whether it’s her father or the friend in the Cleopatra outfit—they all have sort of bad stories about her. So I thought that we had to show the audience her, so that they cared about her and so they could get involved with this tragedy the way that Lee and Bucky ultimately did. There were a bunch of screen tests in an earlier version of the script, so Mia got together and we started with that. I played the director and she played a person auditioning, and I would just do what a very destructive director—I guess I was Otto Preminger—trying to destroy the actress before your eyes, and Mia played off of that. She’s an actress and she’s insecure and she wants the job and I’m saying “Is that acting? Is that sadness?” She brought it right to the heart for the audience. It was very moving stuff because it’s all real. It was just one long take after another, and the reason that it seemed so vivid was that it was happening right before your eyes.
HW: You’re particularly proud about one sequence you invented for the film, that Busby Berkley-style musical chorus girl bit in the glamorous lesbian nightclub, complete with K.D. Lang playing the lead singer. How’d you come up with that one?
BDP: I figured that there would be some really trendy club in Hollywood, some movie star-type club that wouldn’t be like a low-down dive, but would be some really hip place. And hanging out with my lesbian friends, who like pretty girls, too, I thought “Why not have a lesbian chorus line of these drop-dead beautiful girls making out with each other?” So I had this choreographer work for me, this French choreographer that worked with me on Femme Fatale and she got these Bulgarian dancers and a couple of ringers from Paris and she created this Bulgarian thing, and we had this great singer to sing the song and I shot it all night. It was my last night in Bulgaria and I kept on shooting it until the plane took off. Those dancers, I had them do it so many times, and poor K. D. Lang said “If I have to come down that staircase one more time…”
HW: Did you see that immediate chemistry between Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, who apparently, who apparently carried it off-screen as well?
BDP: tell you the truth I never knew anything was going on until Scarlett came to visit the set after her shooting was done. I was like “Why would anyone come back to visit Bulgaria to visit the set?” That was the only time that I knew anything, but I thought that the way that Hilary and Josh were going at each other was like “Whoa.” I think the way that Hilary and Josh kiss each other is so erotic. I mean, she’s like tasting him like he’s a grape, a piece of fruit.
HW: When it comes to adaptations of his novels, James Ellroy is famous for taking Hollywood’s money and running, because he’s written the book he wants and is never overly concerned with the film results. But he’s been very enthusiastic about this one: when did he come back into the picture and comment on what you did?
BDP: Basically on this publicity tour, because we’ve been traveling around and I’ve been listening to his press conferences and I’ve been talking to him in our travels. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time with him and have sort of discussed some of the things that I did, and some of the things that he did. When you love a book that much, you try to be as true to it as possible. Otherwise why are you doing it?
HW: Much of this theme of this film depicts the consequences of obsession. Is that something you as a filmmaker can relate to?
BDP: This is what we do as directors. We create these images for you people to watch and fall in love with and then watch what happens to them. We try to get you obsessed with our characters. Vertigo is the template on this. I create an illusion. You all fall in love with it, and then I kill it. Don’t you feel bad? Oh, there she is again. You can recreate it and now I’m going to kill it again.
HW: Of your own films, do you have a favorite?
BDP: Oh, that changes. I see them on television and I’ll watch them for a while, but you know, people will come up to me and the movie that they talk about a lot is Scarface. They talk about Blow Out, Carrie—Everyone tells me about how they jumped out of their skin when the hand came out of Carrie. They talk about what a wonderful picture The Untouchables is, but they have more passion towards some of these other ones.
