Blow Out

Brian De Palma hit on the idea while still working on Dressed to Kill, and swapped the photograph at the centre of Antonioni’s Blowup for a sound recording. What the hero hears on his tape is not a second blowout but a gunshot just before the tyre goes. The order of those 2 sounds is the whole case. About 70 per cent of the shoot happened at night, in De Palma’s home city of Philadelphia. During editing, 2 reels from the parade sequence were stolen and never recovered; they were reshot with insurance money at a cost of 750,000 dollars. Vilmos Zsigmond was no longer available, so László Kovács handled the reshoots. Al Pacino was considered for the lead first. It was John Travolta who pushed for Nancy Allen; De Palma, married to her then, hesitated before agreeing. On top of the 18 million dollar budget Filmways spent 9 million on marketing and said publicly the film would take 60 to 80 million. It took 13.7 million, and the bleak ending was blamed for the word of mouth. A good fit if you want a killing rebuilt sound by sound on tape rather than proved on camera. Not for viewers looking to be let off at the close; nothing the hero gathers is allowed to count as proof.