Film director Brian De Palma was born on September 11, 1940, in New Jersey, USA. His father was an Italian orthopedic surgeon, but his parents showed little interest in him and divorced when he was young. He grew up in a complicated family. At age 17, he won the Delaware Valley Science Medal for his thesis, "The Application of Cybernetics to the Solution of Differential Equations." He went on to study physics and industrial engineering at Columbia University, but was so moved by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo that he began shooting 16mm films. His short experimental film, Woton's Wake, won the Rosenthal Foundation Award. This prompted him to begin serious film studies under stage director Wilford Leach. De Palma eventually began shooting independent films, winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1968 for Robert De Niro's Blue Manhattan II. In 1976, he moved to Hollywood and released Carrie, a horror film based on a Stephen King novel. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, and he quickly became a rising star among young directors. De Palma subsequently received acclaim for his psychological horror and action films, including Dressed to Kill (1980) and Mission: Impossible (1996), starring Tom Cruise. These films frequently utilized techniques such as split-screen, 360-degree rotation, long takes, slow motion, and eye-level angles, and these scenes, known as "De Palma cuts," thrilled many fans. In 2007, he released Redacted. Although the film drew mixed reviews in the United States due to its depiction of the Mahmoudiya Massacre, in which US soldiers killed Iraqis during the Iraq War, it won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

In his personal life, he married actress Nancy Allen, who starred in "Carrie," in 1979, but divorced four years later. He has since married several times, but each has ended in divorce.