In a long and exhausting story conference at the dawn of my screenwriting career, as Brian De Palma and I wrestled with the Byzantine plot of Body Double (1984) I asked Brian what on earth was the motivation for our main character’s line of action.
“There are only two valid dramatic motivations for anything,” said Brian with a chuckle, “sex or money, and they usually go together.”
Of course, in Brian’s movies, this dramatic reductivism is usually at work.
Over the years, I’ve refined Brian’s cinematic philosophy to an even simpler and more stark formulation: Every great movie is, at the core, a love story.