Recreating the Los Angeles of the 1940s: “There is a great documentary called 'LA Plays Itself that shows all these locations as seen through the movies. Well, the problem was first finding the locations and what exists. And then with me, the locations give me all kinds of visual ideas.
This was an unusual movie because the financing kept falling through, so I had to go to different capitals and find the locations all again. I keep thinking the Linscott Mansion I found in four different countries. You have to deal with what you actually have and then, with your art director, you figure out how I can change it to sort of fit into the design of the movie. In this case the key locations changed many times until we finally got enough financing to make the movie in Bulgaria. By then I had gone through a permutation of these different principle locations, like the Linscott’s and the circular staircase which I originally found here in Los Angeles. I found something in the municipal building in Bulgaria that was somewhat similar to my initial idea.
What happens is that these ideas, they become concrete in photographs. And then they go into your brain and you then design a sequence to make it, and that becomes the design of the movie. And of course you're collaborating with Dante Ferretti who was a great eye. He'd come up with something that is an original look for the noir piece.”
De Palma says his vision of The Black Dahlia had to do with specific places. “The process of making a movie is that you take what's in your head and then you have to concretely represent it, the things that have to be photographed. So you start with what's available in terms of the places that you can shoot. Immediately you look around and you can tell a lot about how a director – this is something that I used to teach a little bit... When you see a movie and someone just drives up in front of a hotel and gets out and it's not like a very interesting hotel and it doesn't tell you anything about the characters and the story, you say, 'Was anyone thinking about this particular selection?' I mean, these days people see movies all the time and you go – I've also gone into movies and said, 'Any idiot can do this,' because it doesn't look like there is any thought that goes into this. I mean, I think about everything that goes up on that screen because I remember movies where I was entranced by the selection of the actors, the costumes, the locations, the historical period, all of those things.
Take Pride and Prejudice, for an instance. There is a subject that has been told many times over and suddenly you have some director bring some specific vision to it with a great art director. You go, 'Wow. I've seen seventy three Pride and Prejudices. Why does this one seem to jump off of the screen?' It has a lot to do with the selection of those visual elements.”
Padding Out the Black Dahlia Character: James Ellroy’s book uses the life and death of Elizabeth Short as the backdrop to the story, and details on the murder victim herself are barely sketched in. De Palma discussed how he took Ellroy’s book and developed the character: “…All he had was The Dahlia in her 8x10 and then this grotesquely carved body. So everyone talks about her in all kinds of not too positive of ways, whether it's her father or the Cleopatra [character]. They all have sort of bad stories about her so I thought that we had to show the audience her so that they cared about her, and so they could get involved with this tragedy the way that Lee and Bucky ultimately did.
There were a bunch of screen tests in an earlier version of the script, so Mia [Kirshner] and I got together and we started with that. I played the director and she played a person auditioning, and I would just do what a very destructive director trying – I guess I was Otto Preminger – to destroy the actress before your eyes, and Mia played off of it. She's an actress and she's insecure and she wants the job and I'm saying, 'Is that acting? Is that sadness?' She brought it right to the heart of the audience. It was very moving stuff because it's all real. It was just one long take after another. The reason that it seemed so vivid was that it was happening right before your eyes.”
Page 2: De Palma on the Lesbian Floor Show, Chemistry, and Capone Rising
