From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

My guest, Brian De Palma, if you ask him the question, is it safe for a director

to court controversy? He would probably say, how can you not? The Man Responsible for such films

as Carrie, The Untouchable, Sisters, and his newest redacted, is unafraid to ask questions that a lot

directors might shy away from. Brian, first of all, thanks for coming back. Thank you. And it is a thing that you sort of, you like to provoke audiences.

I seem to provoke audiences.

You could tell the audience what redacted is about.

Redacted is based on an incident that happened during the Iraq War, which is spookly similar to a movie I made in the late

80s called Casualties of War, in which a squad basically goes a little crazy and rapes and kills and innocent in casualties of war, a Vietnam

farm girl, and then redacted an Iraqi teenager. And they also kill her family and set her body

on fire.

What's fascinating with this movie to me is it's like a series of journal entries.

And you've done films that have been sort of episodic a while ago, probably over 30 years ago,

but you hadn't done anything like that in a long time.

What provoked it here besides just the context of blogging?

Well, it's how I found the material.

What's sort of surprising to me is the kind of, you know,

incredibility that the movies met with, like, you know, like, how could these things be?

And this is nothing like we understand or know about what's going on

in Iraq, which is exactly the point of the movie. I didn't make this stuff up. It's all on

the internet. I found it all when I researched the material. And then I found these unique

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