CraveOnline: That’s interesting because the villain… Well, that’s a bad word for it. Christine is in many ways this cold, manipulative person and we don’t necessarily have sympathy for her the whole time but you made it very clear, whenever you showed her on her own, that there’s a genuinely emotional, kind of tragic element to her life.
Brian De Palma: Yeah, and I think Rachel brought that to the character. That’s not in the original film. I mean, every once in a while, she’s completely cracking up. You know, the sad story about the twin sister, she has everybody crying. Whether it’s true or not, who the hell knows? And then, when she’s at home and the date cancels out on her, she completely freaks out. And you see a kind of woman unraveling and she does evoke a little sympathy for the character.
And in some ways, she’s actually kind of the victim. I mean, Isabelle is sleeping with essentially, her boyfriend and then there’s this scene, where they sort of go through her sex drawer. That’s kind of violating, in a way. That’s kind of humiliating for her, even if she doesn’t know about it.
[Laughs] Yes, all those props were brought to the set by the production designer. Things that “I” had never seen before…
Did they bring you like, a whole table full of sex toys? Like, “No, that one’s too big.”
That’s exactly correct. I said, “Wait a minute! Let’s take that out… I guess we can get away with this… What the hell is this for…?”
Tell me a bit about the costume design. I found Christine’s costume really interesting because it seemed like she was wearing really bright colors at her work place and yet, at home with people she likes, she got way more muted and comfortable.
Well, we kind of came up with that. You know, the maker of the showhorse and Isabelle, everything’s going on in her brain, she’s completely uninterested in what she’s wearing so she goes completely in black throughout the movie, basically. She’s the creator. She’s the idea person. She doesn’t really think about what’s around her or what she’s wearing, as opposed to Christine; all she is is a creation of what she wears and the style that she evokes.
In a lot of your thrillers, your characters seem to be barely holding themselves together a lot of the time and they’re very emotional and very damaged. And in Passion, everyone seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping a facade going, keeping themselves a little bit more restrained compared to say, Raising Cain where John Lithgow’s obviously having an enormous problem with it.
Well, both of them, especially in front of the boss, they’re presenting a certain competence, facade and calmness but they’re really sort of destroying each other. And Isabelle you think is basically having some sort of mental breakdown, motivated by Christine’s viciousness.
I think maybe what I’m getting at is sort of the restraint that “you” brought to it. I watch a film like Raising Cain, which I love, and it almost seems like you’re directing it in a way that seems almost as mad as the protagonist is. It’s scary, actually the way you visualize his mindset. You use some very sharp and almost frightening camera angles a lot of the time and it feels very dangerous, and here, you’re controlling yourself the way the characters are trying to control themselves because it’s kind of like a business environment and they have to be on their best behavior.
Well, the interesting thing about Raising Cain is that the way I originally wrote it, is not the way I ultimately released it. Interestingly enough, some Raising Cain aficionado got the film together and released it on the web the way it should have been constructed. And it kind of worked! [Laughs] I thought it was too complicated but the original idea of Raising Cain is you start with the wife’s story, you don’t start with his story, and you follow her story, all the way until she gets smothered in bed and then, you start to pick up his story. The problem was, I felt at the time, was that Lithgow was so commanding, so fascinating to watch what he was doing I didn’t think that a movie could sustain this kind of soap opera beginning. You know, this woman getting involved with this old lover, threatening her marriage, did she sleep with him or didn’t she? So, I started the Lithgow story and flashed back to the wife’s story and in retrospect, I think it was sort of a mistake. I should have left it the way it was.
Do you think there’s room out there to properly release that in a nice transfer, a nice cut on DVD?
Well, usually, a studio has to come to you and say, “Look, we have a lot of demand here. Would you like to change anything? Would you redo it?” Which I did, with Casualties of War. I put some scenes back in that I took out of the initial release. Sure! I’d be interested to try to put it back the way it originally was edited.
Are there other films that you’ve directed, that you made these sort of changes to, later on whether or not you thought they were good ideas in retrospect?
Yeah, absolutely. I took these two big scenes out of Casualties of War, which Michael Fox is interrogated by the Army, after the incident. There was one scene. And there’s a whole scene when he’s on the stand and the defense lawyer really laces into him. At the time, we just felt that we were beating up on him too much and that’s why we took them out but in retrospect, I thought they should be in the film and they’re in the revised version.
