The Black Dahlia
Brian De Palma Talks The Black Dahlia
“I mean, this is what we do as directors,” said De Palma. “We create these images for you people to watch and fall in love with and then watch what happens to them. We try to get you obsessed with our characters. Vertigo is the template on this. I create an illusion. You fall in love with it and then I kill it. Don't you feel bad? Oh, there she is again. You’ve been recreated and now I'm going to kill it again.”
Elizabeth Short is a famous unsolved murder of Hollywood. In James Ellroy’s dramatized novel and De Palma’s film, the detectives discover Madeline Linscott dresses to look just like Short. Swank looks nothing like actress Mia Kirshner, who plays Short, but De Palma never thought of letting one actress play both characters.
“That never occurred to me. Then it becomes like a Bette Davis twin picture or something. I love the fact that Hilary, it was her idea to use that black wig and to go to these gay bars.”
That choice also gave De Palma another opportunity to explore lesbianism in film. “I figured that there would be some really trendy club in Hollywood, some gay movie star type club that wouldn't be like a low down dive, but would be some really hip place and hanging out with my lesbian friends who like pretty girls too, and I thought, 'Why not have a lesbian chorus line of these drop dead beautiful girls making out with each other?' So I had this choreographer work for me, this French choreographer that worked with me on Femme Fatale and she got these Bulgarian dancers and a couple of ringers from Paris and she created this Bulgarian thing, and we had this great singer to sing the song and I shot it all night. It was my last night in Bulgaria and I kept on shooting it until the plane took off. Those dancers I had them
do it so many times, and poor K. D. Lang said, 'If I have to come down that staircase one more time…’”
Shooting the film like an old school noir piece, De Palma left much up to his colleagues. “Vilmos [Zsigmond] likes to play around with the saturation of the color and in this present day of technology you can shoot something one way and later adjust it in the digital process of making the final negative of the movie. It all depends on the places. You have to find the places first, and then you have to build places like the whole street that shoot out occurs and The Dahlia murder scene and the whole zoot suit riot. I mean, you have to build those places, and so Dante [Ferretti] built like three or four city blocks in Bulgaria.”
By the time De Palma gets to post production, all of the decisions have been made. “Post production is just you’re there with the editor. So many of the decisions were made so long ago, it’s a very refine and shaping thing. I’m not a director that has seven cameras running and he has to sort of make the movie in the editing room. It’s all preplanned and you’re making very subtle changes. In post production you can only dress the corpse up. You cannot bring it to life.”
The Black Dahlia opens to theatres Friday, September 15th.
For the trailer, posters, synopsis and more movie info, go to The Black Dahlia Movie Page.
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