Production
De Palma and Schrader devised a story with a narrative clearly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film that both of them admired. Schrader's original screenplay, titled Deja Vu, was reportedly much longer than the final film, with a coda that extended another ten years beyond where the film now ends. De Palma ultimately found Schrader's screenplay unfilmable due to its length, and rewrote and condensed the finale himself after Schrader refused to make the requested changes. According to De Palma, "Paul Schrader's ending actually went on for another act of obsession. I felt it was much too complicated, and wouldn't sustain, so I abbreviated it." The film's composer, Bernard Herrmann, agreed that the original ending should be jettisoned, telling De Palma, after reading Schrader's version, "Get rid of it--that'll never work". Schrader remained resentful of De Palma's rewrite for years, and claimed to have lost all interest in the project once the change was made. De Palma said, "It made Schrader very unhappy: he thought I'd truncated his masterpiece. He's never been the same since."
After the film was completed, Columbia executives expressed unease over the incest theme, especially as it was portrayed in such a heavily romanticized manner. Consequently, a few minor changes were made to a pivotal sequence between Robertson and Bujold, in which dissolves and visual "ripples" were inserted in order to suggest that the consummation of their marriage was in fact simply a dream. The film's editor, Paul Hirsch, agreed with the decision to obscure the incest theme, noting, "I thought it was a mistake to drag incest into what was basically a romantic mystery, so I suggested to Brian, 'What if it never happened? What if instead of having them get married, Michael only dreams of getting married? We have this shot of Cliff Robertson asleep. We could use that and then cut to the wedding sequence.' And that's what we did. It became a projection of his desires rather than actual fact."
Read more about this topic: Obsession (1976 film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)