Daily Inspiration Quote by Brian De Palma

De Palma’s “obsessed” isn’t a cute adjective; it’s a mission statement from a director who built a career on making the camera feel like a predator with taste. He’s not talking about plot, or even character, as the primary engine. He’s talking about cinema as choreography: information parceled out through framing, movement, and timing until the audience realizes they’ve been manipulated - and enjoyed it.

The slyness is in “material that allows me to explore it.” That’s the tell. De Palma isn’t presenting himself as a dutiful adaptor of scripts; he’s curating situations that justify his formal appetites: the split-screen as moral bifurcation, the prolonged tracking shot as seduction, the set-piece as a trap snapping shut. His films often read like arguments with Hitchcock, not in the mode of tribute but escalation - taking voyeurism, surveillance, and spectacle and pushing them into the open where they start to look like modern life instead of genre garnish.

Context matters: De Palma comes up in the post-studio, New Hollywood era, when directors could be auteurs and technicians at once, and when mass media anxiety (television, recordings, voyeur culture) seeped into the grammar of filmmaking. The subtext is a defense against the old accusation that his work is “all style.” He’s asserting that style is the story: the suspense isn’t what happens, it’s how seeing becomes complicity. Visual storytelling, for him, isn’t decoration. It’s the crime scene.