Brian De Palma (born James Giacinto DePalma on September 11, 1940 in Newark, New Jersey) is a prolific American film director. His is known for films such as Scarface, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way.
He is notable in Star Wars history as the director of Carrie, since the pre-production process for Carrie coincided with that for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, then simply titled Star Wars. De Palma and George Lucas held joint auditions for the two films, and according to Carrie Fisher, De Palma interviewed the actors instead of Lucas. It is frequently rumored that De Palma would have cast Fisher in Carries title role, but she refused to do the required nude scenes. Fisher denied this in an interview with Premiere magazine. It's also rumored that De Palma mocked an early cut with unfinished effects of Star Wars during a meeting where Lucas showed the film to some of his friends and that only Steven Spielberg saw potential in the project, though De Palma has affirmed this isn't true yet he did rib about the concept of the Force as he felt that it didn't sound like a great name for a power of spiritual guidance. He later admitted to be wrong after the film was released.
After seeing a rough cut of Star Wars in mid-February of 1977, De Palma disliked the six-paragraph opening crawl, and helped Lucas shorten and rewrite the crawl into the three paragraphs seen in the final release. As Star Wars was meant to be the saga's fourth chapter with characters the audience still didn't know about, De Palma recommended Lucas to include a crawl reminiscent to those of the Flash Gordon movies, but as Lucas' initial crawl was too long, De Palma and screenwriter rewrote it to make it shorter and more meaningful.
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- Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – The Official Collector's Edition
- Light & Magic