Brian De Palma on modern movies: "They all look the same"

It's probably a different kind of pressure faced by directors going mainstream nowadays. The powerful advertising lobbies, legions of corporate executives and rabid shareholders are now regularly looking to break into the billions - no longer just the megamillions - and they have a multitude of merchandise deals to uphold while batting a family-friendly audience back and forth with the Pixar network.

Brian De Palma's generation was called "the first film school generation". They had a fertile training ground - there was the rise of the independents (led by maverick filmmaker Roger Corman) and the freedom offered by drive-ins, veteran studio system directors becoming teachers and lecturers at the institutions of education they attended, huge gaps appearing in the market as audiences moved away from the MGM "million stars" ethos and embraced unpredictable starlets and white t-shirt rebels with pompadours. Clearly, the time was right to forge ahead with something new, and they did exactly that, during revolutionary times.

De Palma is an audio-visual stylist of wide arcs and audacious camera movements, inventive hand-held / steadicam shots and elaborate tracking shots. Some influential directors that came before him, like Sidney Lumet for example, had demonstrated that you could reap benefits in the quest for technical audacity if you were prepared to do things the hard way (it's no coincidence that both Lumet and De Palma would go on to work with legendary location-based movie producer Marty Bregman). For example, rehearsing entire casts like theatre troupes (which is why Lumet liked theatre actors), or devising the kind of complicated blocking you might expect to see in a Paul Brown NFL scheme (which is why Lumet liked theatre actors). De Palma's best set-pieces are miniature masterpieces in themselves, created through hard work, talent, skill, daring and ingenuity.

Nowadays, it seems so much of cinema is filled in afterwards. As a result, this current cycle has reared a new breed specialising in blue screen, green screen and the hot body athletic, directors who request of their actors that they groom excessively and dehydrate for days to create Vince McMahon-style steroid frames. It's said actors today are more into body-enhancing drugs than mind-altering substances, conscious they are always on somebody's private camera, understandably disgusted by tobacco smoke. Equality demands more Hollywood actors bare their well-toned bottoms, while actresses often negotiate multi-million dollar, no-nudity, modesty clauses within contracts, instead offering up exclusive lingerie deals, restricted camera angles, digitally-enhanced side-boob, and, in some cases, carefully planned nipple slips (though the nipple might be digitalised as well as exclusive). Imagine De Palma trying to work around that? It's another reason Paul Verhoeven returned home to Netherlands.

Then there's the use of big screen fireworks rather than camera crew innovation, which to be fair, is nothing new. Set off explosions and then shoot, place the spectacle before the audience, distract them with shiny objects. Steven Spielberg, of the Hitchcock school, mined plenty of suspense before the arrival of a deadly dinosaur in 'Jurassic Park' (1993). Clive Trevorrow simply invited a ton of them to walk on screen and generated $1.6 billion in box office revenue.

I still turn out for indie directors, but some of them were active in the 1980's or 1990's, be it Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater or Noah Baumbach. I was largely put off by the Sundance Film Festival's embrace of indie mumblecore in the 2000's, which became more about exploring peoples' inner-feelings and less about reinventing genre cinema (as De Palma's generation had done before them).

Still, I do see talent emerge. Be it Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle or Sean Donohue, the talent's undoubtedly there. So I'm not fussed, nor am I worried -  I just vote with my wallet. That's why I stopped watching the assembly-line comic book pictures, because they stopped working for me (as a horror fan, I find later sequels trotted out in slasher series usually aren't as effective as the earlier ones). But I'm glad a lot of people still enjoy them, and I speak with Marvel fans who believe the films coming out now are the best yet, so it's just not my thing.

When De Palma's generation step aside, which I believe they're in the process of doing right now, we'll see what these hotshots are really made of.