He doesn’t have any Academy Awards to his name, and his relationship with the critics has been tempestuous at best, but there is a school of thought that argues Brian De Palma may be the most gifted American filmmaker of his generation (a generation that includes Martin Scorsese,Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas et al.) Certainly he is a supreme visual storyteller, a cinematic orchestrator of menace and mayhem who elevates sordid and perverse suspense stories into transcendent works of operatic impact. Movies like Blow Out, Carlito’s Way, Scarface, Carrie, Obsession and The Untouchables (all screening in our accompanying retrospective) demand to be savoured on the big screen, where they belong.

In this candid, compelling, often very funny interview conducted by fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, De Palma talks us through his long rollercoaster career, and talks illuminatingly about the nexus of cinephilia, voyeurism, politics, Hitchcock and Hollywood that have produced such a flamboyantly personal yet commercial body of work.