Controversial Untouchables filmmaker finds himself
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5:00AM
Friday April 04, 2008
By James Mottram
De Palma's 40-year career has frequently irritated the Moral Majority.
Who: Brian de Palma, director
What: Redacted
Where & when: World Cinema Showcase, Academy Cinema, April 10, 12.30pm; April 11, 8.15pm.
Past films: The Black Dahlia (2006); Mission: Impossible (1996); Carlito's Way (1993); The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990); The Untouchables (1987); Scarface (1983); Carrie (1976)
Brian De Palma is facing another rough passage. In a career of storms and tempests, his latest film, Redacted, a multi-format examination of US soldiers' savage behaviour in Iraq, has inevitably proved unpopular back home.
"In America you cannot criticise the troops," he says. "So now it's all over the web that I'm a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped."
But then what would you expect from a film-maker who has courted controversy right back to the early 1980s when he made the coked-up gangster classic Scarface? "I hardly think of myself as a safe director," he says, baring his mouldy teeth like a decrepit shark.
