Behind the Scenes: Blow Out (De Palma, 1981) with John Travolta and Nancy Allen

For many of your movies, you have either might be an article you've read, or an image, or something that triggers the movie for you. Do you want to talk about what that was for Blowout? Well, Blowout was when I was mixing Dressed to Kill. I had this sound designer named Dan Sable, who had worked for me for a whole bunch of movies. And in Dressed to Kill, we were talking about we literally, I mean, it's literally the line where there's like a wind effect. And I hear this wind effect, and I look over at Dan. I said, Dan, we've used that wind effect for the last four movies. Don't you have anything new? And he says, well, what do you want me to do? I said, why don't you go out and record some new wind effect? And he said, sure, OK. So he goes out in his backyard in the country and this microphone, and he records this new wind effect. So that was sort of the idea of this sound man that had to record these effects, who was working for this sort of schlocky horror film company. Then, of course, there's the Kennedy assassination, all the pictures, that whole idea where you could show something particularly filmic. You know, like Blow Up, you're blowing up a picture. The conversation, you're trying to weed through all the ambient sounds to figure out what the conversation is. You know, when you start a movie with a helicopter shot of New York, it's like, is this an idea? Oh, we're in Manhattan? Or these boring drive ups, where the whole opening the movie is a car driving up to a building? I mean, this is not an idea. Because especially in the beginning of a movie where the audience is ready for anything, to waste that time with some boring geography shot mystifies me. Every take, we added something else, something more obscene. I love even just a shower on the door. You know what that's going to be. Much of the film was very arduous to shoot. In the Wissahickon Creek, because of these huge lighting setups, we have to deal with owls and frogs and all kinds of things that are difficult to deal with. This is the first time you used Steadicam. Yes. Bill Mosigman, who shot the film, said, you know, Garrett's got this rig. He's designed himself. And we should try it for this shot. And Garrett Brown, the guy that invented the Steadicam, came to where we were shooting in Philadelphia and shot that first shot in Boyle. I shot all my movies up to, I guess it was, I shot in a wedding party. And I shot Dionysus in 69. But I had an eclair. That was the first sort of handheld camera. And I shot a lot of documentaries with it. So I was very used to the movement and had choreographed shots. Well, I had worked with Pino before. I had worked with Vilmos before. John Lisko from Obsession. Travolta. Travolta from Carrie. Yes, these are people I, Nancy, my wife at the time. So it was a wonderful making process of the making of the movie process. I was shooting in Philadelphia, a city I loved and grew up in. All the locations I had been to when I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia. I love the score. There's something very, it almost seems to play some kind of undercurrent of the inevitability of that relationship. Yeah, I mean, doomed. You know, basically doomed. Pino, I usually, with Pino, who did my first score, Carrie, and then Dressed to Kill. He speaks sort of not too good English, and I speak sort of not too good Italian. But somehow, having made so many pictures together, we managed to communicate in hand signals or whatever. And he did an extraordinary score there. I mean, it's one of my favorites. And with Pino, I would usually lay out temp tracks and give him some idea of what. Some composers don't like temp tracks. Morricone does not like temp tracks. You just have to sort of describe what you're doing to him or give sort of classical references. Pino, I can give scratch tracks to, and he sort of gets what you're going for. There's something about the editing in this one also, because it's kind of this other subtext about filmmaking and about process and about sound and picture. You do that thing where you keep coming back, yeah. Well, because I had to find two ways to shoot that, because he was going to remember it. Now, obviously, the easiest way is to shoot it from his point of view, which is how he remembers it, you know, when he's sitting in the chair. Yeah, exactly. He's holding the pencil, and he's moving it around. And I can cut to his point of view of what he sees, whether it's the lovers on the bridge, or the frog, or the owl, you know, until the car comes. So I had that in my mind for when he recalls where the sounds were. But when I was going to shoot the initial sequence, I had to figure out, how am I going to shoot this from a different perspective? And I got this idea, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's sort of an idea I kind of use in Snake Eyes, where you have to go through the same thing again. The first time, I keep it on the people watching the fight and never show the fight. And then when everybody recalls things, then you start seeing the fight from various points of view. But you just hear the fight the first time. And this was very much the same idea, was we're doing these elaborate pullbacks, but we're never seeing his point of view. We're saving that information for when he's recalling. There's also something just very dynamic about that, that jumping back. For this movie particularly, about the individual and then the world around you, and what you can hear, and what you can't hear, and what's happening that you don't know. Similarly, the shots from the ceiling when his place is trashed, or when he's leaning back on his couch, and you have this sort of sense, or outside his window, that the camera is another. The growing paranoia. I always have been saying, and have said for years, that the position of the camera is as important as what you're photographing. A dirty word to me is coverage. Two shot, over the shoulder. Stuff you see all the time just drives me crazy, because this, to me, is not directing. You have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material. And this whole kind of swirling idea of all those tape machines turning, turning, turning. And then the whole idea of everything's been erased. And it becomes more and more that sound of white noise comes louder and louder, and faster, and faster, and faster as we go around. And a very tricky shot to do, because nobody could be in the set. Vilmos and I were overlooking the set. And I was cueing people to come in. And the camera is making this relentless thing. Which is somewhat the inverse of what was going on in Cary when they're dancing, and we're in a low position. And we see all those lights up. And we are going around them as they are spinning. It's going faster and faster. And we're racing around them like this. Which is also a shot in Obsession, when they meet at the airport and they embrace. And again, Vilmos and I are racing around them faster and faster and faster. It's fun, if you can pull it off. Do you feel like you always know when you get it? Or do you end up doing one more? Or do you end up stopping? You get a really complicated shot like that. If you get it once, it's a miracle. You use so many. Split screen is something you use a lot. And you also use a lot of your movies. But in Blowout, there are a lot of split diopter shots, too. Do you want to talk a bit about using the whole screen? It's like Greg Toland in Citizen Kane. You want to keep everything in focus. I don't see anything great about shooting a shot where somebody in the foreground is in focus and that person in the background is out of focus. What's the value of that? Who wants to look at a blur in the background there? Or you rack focus from one to the other. And the person in the foreground is out of focus. Well, a split diopter is that you put a piece of focusing glass that's split right on the lens. And you have this focal plane focuses on that. And then you have another focal plane that focuses on this. And you have to figure out where to put the split so the audience isn't very conscious of it. I remember Carrie's. There's one where Tommy is in the foreground or in class. And he's got the blonde hair. And then you see Carrie way in the background. And she's also in focus. So you have two focal planes simultaneously. I mean, in the old days, when we were shooting Citizen Kane, we were on a sound stage. You could have wide angle lenses and get the f-stop up so high that you have tremendous depth of field. And that's why all those things are in focus. But we don't have that luxury. We're using probably fast film, fast lenses. So you have very little depth of field. So that's why there's a lot of sort of there's one focal plane, then everything else is out of focus. The advantage of split screen is that you have this juxtaposition of information. And there could be a synthesis because of the juxtaposition. And it's also good for very slow developing things, because you have a lot going on. And of course, I first was introduced to it when I shot Dionysus in 69, in which I shot the whole thing in split screen, which is constantly juxtaposing what's happening with the audience and what's happening in the play and how they affect each other. Blowout was like a very small picture, because it was so dark. I had conceived it as a very small movie. And then John, I was on the phone with John. He wanted me to read some script he was doing. And he said, well, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm doing this for you know, you know how this works as a director. I'm doing this little picture. It's about a sound guy. He never was thinking for a moment that he would be interested in this. And well, John says, why don't you send it to me? And I said, OK. And he really loved it and wanted to do it. And John is a dream to work with. The only trouble was that the first stuff we shot in Penn Station, where he runs, he fell and twisted his ankle. So I had to shoot a whole bunch of stuff without him running for a long time. There's a gentleness to him. Yes. You really feel sympathy for him at the end. Yeah, I know. You don't blame him. You feel like this is a guy, like Jimmy Stewart in Way and Vertigo, you feel like this is a guy who had to take it to this conclusion. Yeah, even just the way he's moving the microphone. And there's something so graceful about it. And it also makes something very visual that could be kind of boring to watch. The production design is really great in that, too. I mean, again, like the Dennis Franz apartment, the green and red walls are so, there's a real, even though it's in color, it does have a really kind of sultry film noir feeling to it that I feel was badly imitated throughout the 80s. There's red lights. But you use a lot of iconic things, but it's so located in real Philadelphia, which is obviously so personal to you. Yes, I had a very great location guy, Eric, that I discovered on Body Double. He used to go and find these incredible, like, all the untouchable locations. Or Eric is going all through Chicago, an incredible eye. But there are some movies where I literally walked to all the locations. And this is one of them. What you discover, this is the most intensive investigation ever done on anything. So of course, much like blow up, the more you blow it up, the less clear it becomes. And after reading the 27,000 book about the assassination in which they postulated, I think, that they changed the exit wounds to the wounds of the back to the wounds of the front on the plane, flying back to Washington. You go, oh my god, they're carrying the body around. They're changing the wound. You go, this is getting crazy. So there was that. And then, of course, having lived through the whole beginning of the assassination, seeing those pictures in Life magazine where they showed the Zapruder film frame by frame, that's where I got the idea of syncing the sound up. And all the paranoia, all the assassination paranoia all the key witnesses all, you know, I just have that in greetings where they're all disappearing and have strange deaths. There are a lot of things you set up like the bad scream in the beginning, the Liberty Day parade, the news clips that are going on where they feel, just when you're watching the movie, they feel like just color. It feels just like it's filling in the world that they're living in. But as you get going, each one starts to pay off in this way. How much of that stuff did you have in the beginning? How much of it did you find later, do you remember? If you're going to cover up a murder, you make like the sleeping car murders. You make the person you really want to kill the third person in the series, and you have to kill a couple before, which is what Lithgow's doing. He's finding girls that look like Nancy, bumping off so it looks not like a political murder, but basically just another crazy serial murderer who's killing a certain type. And of course, I grew up in Philadelphia, and all the sort of iconic images of independence and liberty, they're all there. Not to mention the Mummer's Parade, which of course, I've attended many times. William Penn. What were your feelings about Blow Up? I mean, the movie. I mean, were you a big fan of Blow Up? I like Blow Up because Antony has this incredible visual sense. And you just sit there and look at these images he creates. And the idea from Blow Up, and as in the conversation, these are great ideas for movies. So needless to say, in fact, I remember going on the set of Godfather II and interviewing Francis about the conversation. I wrote an interview piece for some magazine about the conversation, because I really loved the conversation. Francis, the sort of famous story is how, when Cindy Williams and Frederick Forrester are having that conversation, and we keep hearing it throughout the movie, that he changed the line readings. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The line readings changed. Right. So the emphasis is different, as our emphasis is different. Did you do anything like that in Blow Out? No, because my movie is basically about syncing the blowout with the shot before, with boom. So there's no cheat of changing the sound. I mean, it's just the fact that he realizes the tire was shot out. It just didn't blow out. When you first started to make movies, was this something that, as you got more experienced, and by the time of Blow Out you've done this for a little while now, that you know exactly where everything should be in the frame, and what information you need to know when, is this? But no, I think this is the great disadvantage that we operate under, that we lost because of the studio system. Listen, read the whole chronological diary of the making of Psycho. I mean, you have a whole unit on a lot, and you go to the editor, and he says, well, that's really great, but you really need a tighter shot here of the hand, and that thing of the body going over isn't exactly right. So you just call everybody back to the set and reshoot it. When did we have those kind of freedoms, where you could just go, I mean, when you think about Charlie Chapman, he just, I have to think about how to do this. How am I going to know it's the girl when she comes by, if she's blind? How am I going to figure out she's blind? So let's take a month off while I think about this. You think, holy mackerel. I mean, this is a way of making movies that's like a dream. Can you imagine being able to go back and think about, gee, how am I going to do that? That's not right. We'll just reshoot the whole thing. Unbelievable. And so that's, of course, you have a whole very strict vision of how you storyboard, you look at it, you take photographs. But of course, you're not going to get it all right the first time. You're going to pick up things as you look at it in the other room. Gee, I need a shot of this, or to make this really work. That happens all the time. Yeah. And we're just doomed to try to deal with material we've shot, because you've got eight weeks, that's it. Goodbye. Right, and you only have the location for that day. Exactly right. Figure it out, pal. Also, your big hit before Blowout was Dressed to Kill, which was very much on your terms anyway. It wasn't like you had done one for them and one for you. You were doing two for you, it's just that Blowout was. Well, the good thing about Dressed to Kill was it was a very hot script. I had a lot of people bidding for it. So that gives you a lot of power. But you're very lucky when those things happen. It was a very enjoyable experience, the making of the movie, even though we had some horrendous problems. I mean, of course, the greatest tragedy was, as I was mixing the movie, somebody stole about 10 boxes of original negative. So you're at a mix of a movie in which you don't have the original negative for. And what sequences were they? Not a close-up of Dancy in a room. It was the Mummers Parade. And all those shots, a lot of those shots on Wissahickon Drive, those huge shots of John with his microphone moving around. So we had to go back and reshoot all that stuff while we were mixing. On a movie about sound. Yes, exactly. So that was, I mean, I'm one of the rare directors that's had his negative stolen. And you, to this day, not know what happened. The truck was taking the original negative from New York to Los Angeles to be cut. It pulled into some place. It was open, and some kids, obviously, or somebody came in and just grabbed a whole bunch of boxes. They didn't even know what it was. And I'll never forget that phone call while I was mixing. And my editor and I, running through, tried to figure out what boxes they had stolen. I guess that's an insurance claim. Yes. Oh, needs to say we could spend as much money as we wanted. And where was John at that point? Was he working? No, we had to get everybody. But it was one of those things where the filmmaking community rallies together. It is such an extraordinary, horrible thing to happen that we just had people coming from all over. Laszlo came and shot. Vilmos was shooting another picture. So Laszlo came and shot the stuff that we did in Philadelphia that weekend. And we had tons of people. When you finished Blowout, you went on to make Scarface, yes? Yes. I mean, at that point, you had done a number of movies that could be sort of typed as De Palma-style movies that were sexy, tense, sometimes violent, sometimes. And you went on then to do Scarface, which was sexy and violent, but in a different way. And you've talked, and I think it's really interesting, about sort of how important you think it is for a director to get away from himself at times. Yeah, I think you have your own style of film. Well, look at Woody Allen. I mean, he's making movies in Manhattan forever. So they're going to get a little repetitive. He's going to go over the same material again. He'll find different ways to explore it. His earlier movies seem to be better than some of his later movies. But then he says, oh, I'm going to go to Europe and start making movies. Well, suddenly something new happens. And this is very much the way I've kind of approached my career, where I have very specific ideas. And I get these very visual ideas to make movies. And I construct scripts around them. And they're driven by kind of a visual idea or intellectual idea. And then I will just jump into something that's completely different from anything I've ever done just to see what happens. And Scarface is like, well, what do I know about Cuban gangsters? And I'll just see what happens. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. But I think it's good to get out of your own cliches. Don't start making the same movie over and over again, which is what one tends to do, especially when it's very successful at it. You have to think about what is something, when you're dealing in a certain medium, what is the thing that is best done in that form? I mean, obviously, if you're directing a play on stage, dialogue, character is paramount. Because you're sitting in the audience looking. And you have to choreograph the people on stage from basically an audience's point of view. When you're making a movie, you have all kinds of things that you can explore. And what Hitchcock discovered, well, first is the point of view shot, which is the idea of somebody walking or looking, and then you're showing what they see. And the audience member identifies with the character, whether it be Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or whoever it might be, Janet Leigh, and what they are seeing. And this is how we experience life, through points of view shots. They see what the character is seeing. So you digest that point of view. It's unique to cinema. So a lot of things Hitchcock discovered, which I talk about the grammar of cinema. This is one of the basic building blocks. You always notice Hitchcock when somebody is walking up, like going up to this creepy house on the hill in Psycho. He's tracking, looking at the house, tracking, looking at the house. Puts you in the character's head, instead of objectifying it, seeing the character walk up to the house. And Vertigo is an example where you follow a character. And because this is a process of getting to know the character purely visually. I mean, the whole following of Kim Novak in the beginning of the movie is he's got some ideas that the husband is stuck in his head. And he's basically observing what she's doing. But of course, what we find out later, she is acting. She is presenting a performance for him to digest as a suicidal person, obsessed from somebody that's dead that's going to kill themselves eventually. What's great about it is that what we do as directors is we create these illusions, which are many times actresses. And in the process of Vertigo is he creates this vision of this girl, makes you fall in love with it, and then destroys it and devastates you. And he shows you how he does it. And then what he does is he puts her makeup on and makes her the Kim Novak that we followed in that dream. He creates that illusion, which is what directors do. We create illusions for you to fall in love with. And that's something totally unique to cinema. Beautiful women doing exciting, interesting, erotic things. We follow them, we look at them, and we get involved with them. And it's one of the basic tools of movies. It's what's Godard, a gun and a girl. With a gun, when's somebody going to fire it? With a girl, when's somebody going to undress it? So that's movies.