The pressure on Brian De Palma was mind-boggled. When it all got to be too much, he'd just

stop and sit down with his walkman. Opera music was his escape. It was hard to

imagine that Brian ever thought it was fun to make movies, but it seems like he

once did when he was younger and maybe when less was at stake. I used to at our

assemblies used to run the Friday afternoon promo for the football game or

something. No, no, no, no, skits. I got little skits for what was coming up on the weekend.

You figure out where to put the camera if you want to know anything about still photography.

Then it's not such a big jump from that. That Dick Cavitt interview reminds me of

what excites the best directors. Where to put the camera. It sounds so obvious,

but very few directors know how to create a distinctive look. A dirty word to me is

coverage, you know, too shot over the shoulder. You know, stuff you see, you know,

all the time it just drives me crazy because this to me is not directing. You have to

have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material. That was

Brian decades later in an interview from the criterion release of Blowout. He

was discussing the work he's done with Wilmo Sigmund. Sigmund was a highly regarded

cinematographer who Brian had used on Blowout and Obsession. Brian would also bring

him into shoot bonfire. Sigmund would go to crazy lengths to capture the perfect shot.

Brian liked that. He needed Sigmund's creativity to bring his ideas to life.

I thought you had a familiar melancholy look when you were in the movie. Like one

scene at Obsession, a mellow drama about a man who loses his wife and then

becomes infatuated with a possible replacement. What was she like? She was very much like you.

Like me. She was Italian. No, she looked very much like you. In the scene two

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