Do feel that you've finally lived down "Bonfire of the Vanities?"

I have nothing to live down about "Bonfire of the Vanities." I made some aesthetic choices that I like and nobody else did. Most of the people who were upset about "Bonfire of the Vanities" were people who thought if I changed the book it was sacrilege. I made changes because I felt that there were too many anti-Semitic characters in the book. So I changed the Jewish jokes to black jokes, and I made Tom Hanks' character a lot more sympathetic than he was in the book. If I had made him, or the whole material, as tough as the book was, we would have had "The Sweet Smell of Success," which will be revered now but ended [director] Alexander Mackendrick's career.

Were you surprised by the uproar?

When you make a movie, you sort of step into a little kind of shell and stay in it until it comes out. You have no idea how, exactly, it's going to affect the audience or how strong their feelings are going to be. I've usually been very surprised one way or another about how audiences or critics have reacted to my movies. They never seem to go by anything I can predict.

Does it ever bother you that you sometimes don't get the critical respect of fellow film-school grads like Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola?

I have enough esoteric doctoral theses being written about my work. [Laughs] We'll just see what lives through time. I have this big retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris and I've noticed that most of my fans are extremely young. I think you kind of live off of that. That's why I know about Salon and a lot of the Web sites. I've met the people who run my Web site and the French guy just graduated high school. If I want to know anything going on about my movies, I go to De Palma à la Mod. [Laughs] This guy [who runs the site] has an ability to find everything.

You know, I really believe in these Web sites. I think this is where our legacy will exist. This is not flattery, but I do feel the most interesting people are writing on the Web sites if you want to read criticism.

Why do you think your work inspires such rabid devotion?

I guess it has to be pretty tough to defend me all the time, so they have to have their stuff together. [Laughs] If you like De Palma, I guess you're going to have to square off with the establishment ideas of what De Palma is and hold your own.

Voyeurism and violence are two recurring themes in your work. Why?

Well, these are two things I've been talking about for close to 40 years and everything I say about them, I feel like I'm throwing a paper airplane against the wall that keeps bouncing back. I will explain it for the nine-hundred-thousandth time and maybe when you write it down and somebody reads it, it will get through. I haven't been lucky so far. [Laughs]

The reason violence is interesting to me is because it's filmic, it's action, it's movement. And sometimes movements can lead to death and sometimes they can lead to chases -- whatever. It's visual. That's why I am drawn to it. And since I'm a visual stylist, I have people following each other, running after each other, stabbing each other, stalking each other. I use situations that have these kind of musical beginnings which get faster and faster and onto some kind of crescendo which works very well on film. It's the only forum that you can use these kind of visually violent images.

Voyeurism is just one of the primary tools of cinema. Hitchcock and directors before him in the silent era, when you shot a close-up from somebody's point of view, you were tying the audience very directly into the experience. It's the only art form in which you are showing the same piece of information to your character and the viewer in the audience simultaneously. That's what's unique about it and that's why people are drawn into film -- because they're experiencing the same visual information as the character.

How do you respond to those age-old charges that you're a misogynist?

It comes out of making my thrillers in the '70s and early '80s; I had women as protagonists and we had a strong feminist movement emerging. If you put a woman in a situation where she's gonna get killed or chopped up or stabbed, you were a misogynist. I make thrillers; I think women in peril are more interesting than men; and I like to have a woman in a negligee wandering around in a dark house rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm sorry. It works for me better.

Do you enjoy your controversial reputation?

I don't know. It's whatever works as far as I'm concerned. I'm just interested in getting my movies made. I'm not interested in picketing in the streets. We're in a big, money-grinding industry, and I'm not interested in antagonizing anybody. I basically just want to make the best movie I can, hope people enjoy it, go to see it, but if they don't -- too bad. On to the next one.

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