"And I always had this idea for making a movie about a femme fatale, because I like these characters. They're a lot of fun, they're sexy, they're manipulative, they're dangerous"
About this Quote
De Palma’s fascination with the femme fatale isn’t a polite cinephile preference; it’s a mission statement for a whole strain of his filmography: cinema as seduction, trap, and spectacle. He lists the traits like a shopping list of pleasures - fun, sexy, manipulative, dangerous - and that blunt piling-on is the point. The femme fatale isn’t introduced as a “complex female character” or a social corrective. She’s an engine. A device that turns looking into risk.
The intent is openly transactional: he wants a movie built around a character type that reliably produces tension. “I like these characters” sounds casual, but it’s also a director staking his claim in the noir and erotic thriller tradition, where desire doesn’t soften people, it reorganizes them. The subtext is De Palma’s recurring interest in control: who frames whom, who performs, who believes they’re directing the scene until the scene directs them. A femme fatale is the perfect conduit for that obsession because she weaponizes narrative itself. She makes other characters tell themselves stories they want to hear.
Context matters: De Palma comes out of the post-Hitchcock, post-60s era where Hollywood got bolder about sex and paranoia, and where the erotic thriller turned female agency into both allure and threat. His phrasing also telegraphs the controversy baked into the archetype: it’s exhilarating on screen, and politically combustible off it. That friction - pleasure laced with unease - is exactly where De Palma likes to operate.
The intent is openly transactional: he wants a movie built around a character type that reliably produces tension. “I like these characters” sounds casual, but it’s also a director staking his claim in the noir and erotic thriller tradition, where desire doesn’t soften people, it reorganizes them. The subtext is De Palma’s recurring interest in control: who frames whom, who performs, who believes they’re directing the scene until the scene directs them. A femme fatale is the perfect conduit for that obsession because she weaponizes narrative itself. She makes other characters tell themselves stories they want to hear.
Context matters: De Palma comes out of the post-Hitchcock, post-60s era where Hollywood got bolder about sex and paranoia, and where the erotic thriller turned female agency into both allure and threat. His phrasing also telegraphs the controversy baked into the archetype: it’s exhilarating on screen, and politically combustible off it. That friction - pleasure laced with unease - is exactly where De Palma likes to operate.
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