The World Wasn’t Ready for Body Double

Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double was seen by many at the time as a deliberate provocation — a vigorously thumbed nose at the commentators who’d called his work misogynistic and sadistic as well as at the MPAA, which had given his 1983 film Scarface an X. De Palma himself reportedly said that Body Double was meant to go over the top in all of his alleged cinematic sins. The 84-year-old director now admits that was mostly publicity-friendly bluster. But the movie, which is coming out in a special 4K edition to honor its 40th anniversary, is extreme in all sorts of ways: It’s gory, violent, sexy, stylized, ridiculous, an extremely suspenseful picture that is somehow impossible to take too seriously. It also happens to be a masterpiece, which would come as a surprise to the critics and audiences that rejected it back during its release: The film flopped at the box office, De Palma was nominated for a Worst Director Razzie, and even Pauline Kael, a longtime defender of his, called it “an awful disappointment.” Looking back on it now, De Palma says, “You’re always judged by the style of the day, but sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative.”

In truth, Body Double is the kind of movie that could only work with the unique mix of formal charge and playful self-awareness that De Palma brought to it. It’s a thoroughly transfixing thriller, filled with elaborately choreographed set pieces in service of an absurd story. A characteristic riff on Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and Rear Window, it follows a claustrophobic out-of-work actor (Craig Wasson) who breaks up with his adulterous girlfriend and winds up house-sitting a fancy, space-age pad in the Hollywood Hills. There, he becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman across the street who loves to dance erotically at an appointed hour. The insanely gruesome series of events that follows pulls our hero deep into the 1980s porn industry (or at least a cartoonish version of it), where he then becomes infatuated with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, in what might be her greatest role), a performer who may or may not have a connection to that woman in the window. He also, at one point, winds up in the middle of a real-life music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” a wonderfully bizarre sequence that is left mostly unexplained but feels very much of a piece with De Palma’s earlier, more experimental films. “Somebody at Columbia said, ‘We should have a music video for this movie,’ De Palma recalls. “And I said, ‘Why don’t we put the music video in the movie?’”

Body Double has a pointedly colorful and artificial look that seems to highlight its “movieness,” which also happens to be what the film is about. The protagonist falls in love with a woman whom he only sees through a telescope as she dances, her face hidden, behind a window. His claustrophobia and general awkwardness often prevent him from being able to get close to this person, which effectively turns him into a stalker. He is, in effect, a perfect audience surrogate — a voyeur who increasingly has trouble telling the difference between the movies and reality, a tantalizing boundary that De Palma’s film zigzags across many times.

Body Double is beloved today. But it’s also the kind of movie that nobody could make today. Speaking from his New York City home, De Palma, whose most recent picture was 2019’s little-seen Domino, has some thoughts on that as well as the current state of cinema. He also says that he is working on a new film.

When Body Double opened, it was not a success. Over the years, it’s become one of your signature movies, and a lot of us think it’s your best work. Why do you think it’s endured?
Well, you never can tell with these things. You have to get over the emotional and financial catastrophe. I’ve done a lot of interviews about Phantom of the Paradise recently, and it’s the same thing. It wasn’t successful when it came out, and now, 50 years later, it’s considered a classic. You’re always judged by the style of the day, but sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative. There’s something obviously enduring in the way it was done. I was always doing innovative things, always dancing on the edge, to some extent, and that upset a lot of people.

I think why my type of movies last so long is they’re very cinematic. Cinema kind of died with celluloid, because you don’t have the same cinematographers anymore. You don’t have film anymore. It is now completely dominated by the writers and showrunners, and the movies and shows are basically radio plays, full of people talking to each other. Plus they’re all shooting digitally, so it doesn’t look very interesting. That form of cinema went out with celluloid. That’s why I think people look fondly upon these movies, because they’re quite stunning visually, and you don’t see that anymore.

Photo: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

You started off as a more experimental filmmaker, and from your Hollywood period, Body Double might be your most experimental work. Was that something you were conscious of while making it?
The way it evolved was unusual. I first had this idea that I had another director and writer develop. Robert Avrech wrote the screenplay. And the director, Ken Wiederhorn, had done a movie set in Florida with a deaf girl that I thought was quite good; that’s how I got onto him. The treatment was originally set in New York. It all started, basically, because I live in lower Manhattan. And I have an apartment building facing my apartment building across Fifth Avenue. It always occurred to me the best way to disguise a murder is first to get someone looking at a certain window. And the best way to do that is to have a woman in some form of undress to catch their eye and make sure they’re going to be watching while you stage something for them to be a witness to. That was the initial idea. But we couldn’t get it made with the other director. The only way to get it made was for me to direct it. So I proceeded to rewrite the script. And having been out in Hollywood for quite a while because of doing Scarface, I moved the movie to Hollywood.

The film is very tongue in cheek in its portrayal of the porn world. But how familiar were you with that world? Did you do a lot of research?
I looked at a lot of pornographic movies of the period, and I saw Annette Haven. I said, “Well, we got all this porn stuff to do; let’s get a porn actress.” I went to San Francisco, and I met her at a hotel, and we had breakfast together. I gave her stuff to read. She’d never been given lines, you know, to act. I sort of sent her to acting school. And I also videotaped her, doing long interviews with her, and some of the things she said were put into Holly Body’s dialogue. I ultimately tested her and the only other girl that wanted to play the part, Melanie Griffith. And Melanie blew it out of the sky! Strangely enough, Annette wasn’t that sexy. But I used Annette to give us advice while we were shooting the film. But then there was the great rumor that I had women up to my house, masturbating for me, which went on for decades. It was ridiculous! The only girl who really came up to my house was Annette, where we worked on the material together. And Melanie, who worked with Annette to work on the masturbating-at-the-window routine that I basically worked on in my house on the hill. I would go outside with a camera and let Melanie just go through her routine that Annette had taught her. This rumor went on for decades. It’s a rumor that never dies.

Tell me more about working with Melanie. This might be her greatest performance.
Well, I knew Melanie because we played Trivial Pursuit together — I think it was Trivial Pursuit. It was Steve Bauer, and Melanie, and a bunch of other actors. These were all actors that had come out of, like, Cocaine Anonymous. They were all being rehabilitated. I got to know Melanie quite well. And she really wanted to play the part. I was talking to her about Jamie Lee Curtis, and she just says, “Why don’t you let me play the part?” I said, “Okay.”

Body Double has a lot of references to Vertigo, and I know that was a big influence on your work. You talked about it in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s 2015 documentary, De Palma, about the first time you saw Vertigo as a kid. But in the ’60s and ’70s, I think it was actually quite hard to find, because it was locked up in Universal’s vault with the other Universal Hitchcocks. Were you able to revisit Vertigo during this time?
Yeah, Paul Schrader and I went to see it at the L.A. County Museum. That’s where we got the idea for Obsession. But somehow, it hadn’t been seen in, I don’t know, 20 years. And suddenly there was a screening at the museum downtown. Schrader and I went, and then we went to Musso & Frank’s, and we came up with the scenario for Obsession.

And then Rear Window is a fantastic visual idea of Hitchcock’s, which I employed in Body Double. What’s amazing about Hitchcock is that he comes up with unique ideas based purely on a visual image that you can’t get out of your mind.  I guess that comes from making a lot of silent movies. The whole idea of observing everybody — something from one point of view — all of the windows across the street in a Greenwich Village townhouse. That’s something I’ve lived in, basically.

Hitchcock’s inspirations for films would sometimes be just one image or one scene that he would then create a whole scenario around. Was that the way you sometimes approached it as well?
Not really. Something like Obsession was an attempt to retell Vertigo a whole different way. Because the flaws in Vertigo are when you see Kim Novak in her brown hair, walking down the street — she’s Kim Novak! She’s a movie star. And it’s a huge hole in the plot. Like, “Why doesn’t he just recognize it’s Kim Novak?” I felt we dealt with that problem in Obsession by making it Genevieve’s daughter, so she could look exactly like her. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference in Vertigo, as absurd as that is. I mean the whole nature of a movie star is that you recognize them.

Were there any scenes in Body Double that you weren’t able to do the way you originally envisioned?
The ending didn’t come off exactly how I had planned it. We went back to do some reshooting. At the end of Body Double, we pan down and show you what a body double actually is and demonstrate it for the audience. I originally had that at the start of the movie, where you see Craig working with the girl and he’s supposed to be some type of vampire. Somehow, I felt that gave the whole idea away right in the beginning. So I stuck that scene at the end. But it’s not a great ending. Endings are very tricky in movies. If you could have a couple of movies that have great endings, it’s a miracle. Bridge on the River Kwai has a great ending.

Body Double’s ending isn’t that bad! Having the end credits roll over the close-up of a bare breast is pretty inspired, given the tone and subject matter of the film.
Well, again, the movie’s called Body Double. You’re trying to instruct the viewer about a certain cinematic technique. You’re showing them something they don’t know or have never seen before. So it works in this kind of piecemeal way, but it wasn’t something that was preconceived. It was tacked on. For some crazy reason, it seemed to work. But things have to be very carefully structured. Blow Out has a great ending. And The Untouchables has a great ending, a great line that David Mamet wrote. Carrie has a great ending.

Photo: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

Tell me about how the Frankie Goes to Hollywood scene happened, where Body Double suddenly becomes a music video for the song “Relax.”
Somebody at Columbia said, “We should have a music video for this movie.” And I said, “Why don’t we put the music video in the movie?” I think he came back with the Frankie Goes to Hollywood group. And I said, “Let’s put them in the movie.” It’s really crazy. And the band was great to work with, too. They thought it was a great idea.

I know you did music videos after this. Had you done any before this?
No, the only music video I did was a favor for Jon Landau, who managed Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was shooting his video for “Dancing in the Dark,” and somebody was using a Louma crane. It was Bruce singing with the Louma crane going around, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But he didn’t like it. Jon came to me and said, “We’d like you to see if you could figure out an idea for a music video.” I said, “I’ll just shoot him when he opens the tour.” And I got this idea of him pulling somebody up from the audience when I was watching them do the song. And then we went out and cast Courteney Cox, and put her in the audience, and shot it live.

It’s almost like a very sweet version of what happens in some of your films, where two people are immediately pulled toward each other. Was it a challenge to work in that realm with music and timing things to that? You’d done Phantom of the Paradise, obviously.
Well, we were really in a time crunch. Because I could only shoot his first show. It was in Cleveland or somewhere. There was no time to do anything. They had spent all this time on this video that they did not like. I went right to work. We found the girl and got in a plane and took off for the opening. I shot it in two nights. I was very fortunate. It’s his most successful song of all time. Nobody’d seen Bruce in a couple of years. I discovered a star nobody’d seen before. Those things are just magical. You’re never going to predict them. Now, it’s great to watch when Bruce does that song and he pulls somebody out of the audience. I’ve seen concerts where he brings his mother up onstage and dances with her.

A lot of people will say that you can’t really make a movie like Body Double today. They might be right. And yet it’s more beloved than it’s ever been. That’s an interesting paradox.
What I find interesting when you see contemporary people watch these movies is they’re shocked by the nudity. They go, “Oh my God.” I’m thinking, What, are we living in the Victorian Age here? You know, they have these things on YouTube where they have two people watching a movie and reacting as they watch it? I saw two people watching the opening of Carrie. I thought they were going to have a heart attack! I was like, What has happened to this next generation? They seem to have gotten very Victorian.

You’ve noted that at the time you made Body Double, Columbia was owned by Coca-Cola. And they were worried about the film because corporations care so much about their public image. Nowadays, movie companies are all owned by publicly traded conglomerates — giant companies that can’t afford any kind of reputational risk. Hollywood was never known for being edgy, but it was edgier than it is now.
Yeah, that’s even worse today. Because they’re owned by tech companies. Does anybody want to affect Apple with some wild, strange movie? Absolutely not. That’s why all that streaming stuff is so bland and boring. It was bad when we had the execs. We’d have to fight through executives, but some strange movies would still get made, because somebody went out on a limb. Not anymore.

Speaking of corporations, did you see the movie Air last year, the Ben Affleck film?
I watched a little of it. I got kind of bored with it.

They used the music from Body Double in that film.
What?!

I don’t know if you got to that part.
Oh, I don’t think I got to that.

As you know, the movie is all about the creation of the Air Jordan Nike sneaker. When they actually reveal the shoe to Michael Jordan and his family, in the third act of the movie, it’s the first time we as viewers get to see the shoe. And they use the music from Body Double! They use the music that plays when the woman across the street is doing her naked masturbating window dance.
Really?! I’ll have to check that out.

So erotic thrillers, are they dead?
Boy, I think so. I don’t know what’s going to change. Something new will emerge. But maybe it’ll have to come out of Europe, which still has an independent filmmaking hierarchy. But I don’t see it. As I said, I’m constantly looking for stuff to look at. It’s in the hands of the writers and the showrunners, who are being paid a lot of money by tech companies. This is not a good place for independent art to evolve.

Are you planning to make another film?
Yes, I have one other film I’m planning to make. And we’re in the process of trying to cast it. I can’t tell you what it is until it happens. Then I’ll be very happy to announce it.

To direct the film, De Palma first reached out to Wiederhorn, who had made a stylish 1981 slasher called Eyes of a Stranger, about two sisters (Lauren Tewes and Jennifer Jason Leigh), one of them blind and deaf, who discover that they’re living across the street from a serial killer. After being unable to get Body Double off the ground, Wiederhorn directed Meatballs Part II.