Brian de Palma is an American director, filmmaker, and scriptwriter whose net worth is $40 million Brian Russell de Palma was born in Newark, New Jersey (USA) on September 11th, 1940. Son of a surgeon, from an early age he was mainly interested in science and technology.
He won twice the “National Science Fair Competition” While studying physics at college, he discovered his passion for the seventh art, being especially interested in Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and Jean-Luc Godard’s works. From 1962 to 1964, he studied drama at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and he directed several short films.
Career.
After seven independent productions, in which he emphasizes his first glance towards the war and, particularly to the war in Vietnam, Greetings (1968), with a young Robert De Niro, he became famous with (Sisters) (1973) and uses for the first time the voyeuristic style that later will be, along with the divided screens, a characteristic in his style.
The success of this film would lead him to make a cinema where thrillers with strong Hitchcockian influence would become his be his label, although they would be two fantastic genre masterpieces. Phantom of Paradise (1974) and above all, the huge success of the first adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, Carrie (1976), which would place him as one of the most interesting authors of the new Hollywood cinema that emerged in the 1970s.
As a curiosity, it is important to point out that George Lucas and him, great friends then, did a casting set for Carrie and Star Wars. He also helped write the script that appears in the first scene of this film.
1980s.
In the 80s, he would get successes and failures in equal parts. Whenever he returned to the Hitchcock thriller triumphed (Dressed to kill and Body Double), but his anxieties led him to accept the commission to shoot a new version of the classic Scarface (1932), with Al Pacino as a big star. Despite being one of the highest grossing films (grossed $ 65 million) and nowadays is a cult classic, it was destroyed by criticism, that made Pacino only made one film from there until 1989.
After inadvertently filming an absurd comedy where the director’s personality is nowhere to be seen, Wise Guys arrives at the zenith of his career with another custom work, The Untouchables. Pioneer in television series adaptation to the big screen, both the critic and the public backed it.
In the film, there is a magnificent group of actors, including Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia, and a splendid Sean Connery, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film, and Robert De Niro dazzling in the role of Al Capone.
After this sensational success, De Palma turns his eyes to his old obsession about Vietnam taking advantage of Oliver Stone’s Platoon Award (1986). On this occasion, he remembered a news that marked him in his youth, the rape of a young Vietnamese girl by American soldiers, in Casualties of War (1989).
The film, despite its good intentions, did not work well on movie theaters, and was ignored despite (or perhaps because of) Michael J. Fox as the protagonist. It should be noted that this story was taken up years later in Redacted (2007), but framed in the Gulf War.
