William Friedkin

Interviews

Christopher Lane, Christopher Lane

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496827104
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school–educated filmmakers of the directors' era, Friedkin got his start as a mailroom clerk at a local TV station and worked his way up to becoming a full-blown Hollywood filmmaker by his thirties. His rapid rise behind the camera from television director to Oscar winner came with self-confidence and unorthodox methods. Known for his gritty and auteurist style, Friedkin's films tell the story of a changing America upended by crime, hypocrisy, the occult, and amorality. Although his subsequent films achieved varying levels of success, his cultural impact is undeniable. William Friedkin: Interviews collects fifteen articles, interviews, and seminars spanning Friedkin's career. He discusses early influences, early successes, awards, and current projects. The volume provides coverage of his directorial process, beliefs, and anecdotes from his time serving as the creative force of some of the biggest films of the 1970s and beyond—from his early days in Chicago to his run-ins with Alfred Hitchcock to firing guns on set and witnessing an actual exorcism in Italy. Through previously unpublished and obscure interviews and seminars, the story of William Friedkin's work and life is woven together into a candid and concise impression for cinephiles, horror junkies, and aspiring filmmakers alike. Readers will gain insight into Friedkin's genius from his own perspectives and discover the thoughts and processes of a true maverick of American cinema.

Exorcist Director: It Worked Because “I Made That Film as a Believer”

Stephen Galloway / 2014

From The Hollywood Reporter, March 29, 2014. Reprinted by permission.

William Friedkin reveals the film’s star was an atheist, discusses how his belief in God helped make the movie a hit, and says he risked lives shooting The French Connection chase scene.

1973’s The Exorcist, the first horror film nominated for best picture, earned $441 million because its creator believed in God, said director William Friedkin.

“I made that film as a believer,” he said March 26, speaking to students at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television. “What [the sequels] attempt to do is to defrock the story and to send the thing up.”

The filmmaker said he never contemplated making a sequel, nor any other horror film: “I would never go back and do another Exorcist. Or anything with demonic possession or exorcism in it. I did it. I couldn’t do it any better than that.”

The director, whose other films include The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Killer Joe—which helped usher in star Matthew McConaughey’s career rebirth as more than a handsome devil—was taking part in The Hollywood Masters interview series, conducted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway. Others in the series include directors David O. Russell, Alfonso Cuaron, John Singleton, Judd Apatow, former Paramount chief [and Friedkin’s wife] Sherry Lansing, Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn, and Hunger Games writer-director Gary Ross.

—Tim Appelo

Stephen Galloway: Hi everyone. I’m Stephen Galloway and welcome again to The Hollywood Masters filmed on the campus of Loyola Marymount University. I’m really thrilled to have our guest, one of the great American film directors. I don’t know if he agrees with that assessment, we’ll see. I think of his work as defined by paranoia, darkness, and I think the very way he uses the camera is completely unique to him. All these things he may disagree with. He’s done classic things that have become completely part of our culture. We all know The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A., recently some very dark films. He’s also recently written his autobiography, The Friedkin Connection. I’ve now read it two and a half times. It’s really terrific. He talks about his mistakes. He talks about having the chance to get a free [Jean-Michel] Basquiat painting and throwing it away; having the chance to produce Star Wars and saying no; having the chance to be an owner of the Boston Celtics and turning that down. Then he says this: “I’ve burned bridges and relationships to the point that I consider myself lucky to still be around. I never played by the rules, often to my own detriment. I’ve been rude, exercised bad judgment, squandered most of the gifts God gave me, and treated the love and friendship of others as I did Basquiat’s art and Prince’s music. When you are immune to the feelings of others, can you be a good father, a good husband, a good friend? Do I have regrets? You bet.” I’m delighted to welcome William Friedkin.

William Friedkin: Thank you. Thanks a lot. I have to tell you that I have bronchitis tonight. So, if I go off on a coughing or a sneezing jag, I hope you’ll understand. It’s like an epidemic of it out there. I’ve had this now this is the fourth week. I have to tell you, I don’t know if you’re aware, but I gave a commencement speech here about ten years ago and I was given an honorary doctorate by Father Lawton, who was formerly the head of the school. So, you could call me Dr. Friedkin. [laughter]

SG: You say in your book you did not have success in your DNA.

WF: No, there was no art in my family, no music. My mother and father were immigrants from the Ukraine and they came over at the turn of the twentieth century during one of the many pogroms that took place there. And there was no literature, or art, or music in my family at all. By the time I came of age to see movies—you know, not films, movies—it was just pure entertainment to me, nothing to do with cinema or art or anything like that. Just pure entertainment. I’m not sure that’s not the best way to view a film anyway—as simply entertainment.

SG: When did that change?

WF: When I saw Citizen Kane. I was somewhere under twenty, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. Someone told me that there was this great revival of a real film called Citizen Kane playing at a revival theater in Chicago. I put off seeing it. Then I saw in the newspaper that it was going to close in a day or two. So, I went to see it at this little revival theater on the near north side. I was just stunned by the experience. It’s, I’m sure, what happens to painters when they first stand in front of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt. I first experienced film as art. And I stayed in the theater for five or six showings that day. And I’ve since seen it hundreds of times. Because to me, it’s still a quarry for filmmakers in that everything about it is as well done as can be done; I’m talking about the acting, writing, direction, cinematography, editing, the design, everything. It’s a quarry for filmmakers in the way that James Joyce’s Ulysses is a quarry for writers. Or, in my case, [Marcel] Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Which I read continuously. Proust’s writing is extremely cinematic. You have to work at it. You know, it’s not going to lay down in front of you. You’ve got to give yourself to it, which I think is the mark of a great film. To me a great film is one that makes me think about it afterwards. The first thing I get from great cinema is, I’ll say to myself, “Self,” as I often address myself. [laughter]

SG: Doctor Self?

WF: Doctor Self to you. I’ll say, what in the hell have I just seen? That occurred to me with Citizen Kane, and then a film like Blow Up, and Belle de Jour. Have you ever seen Belle de Jour? When I first saw that and it ended, and the way it ended, I thought, what in the hell is this? But I couldn’t get it out of my mind and I still haven’t been able to after thirty or forty years. The same with [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s Blow Up. And both films sort of blur the line between reality and illusion.

SG: Well, don’t all films, to some degree?

WF: No. Most films are probably worthless in that regard. [laughter]

SG: Yours too?

WF: Oh, absolutely. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. [laughter]

SG: Well, I don’t agree with that.

WF: No, but we’re talking about works of art. We’re not talking just about a movie that’s playing this week somewhere.

SG: Even though you did say three minutes ago that entertainment was a good way of judging a film.

WF: It might as well be because …

SG: You shifted.

WF: But if you’re going for anything else, other than entertainment today, the chances are you may be disappointed. And that’s with the onset of digital cinematography and computer-generated imagery where they can now do anything. And that’s part of the problem. We can do anything. And I think the very best films were made when they had very little money but great invention, and great powers of invention, and everything was not at hand.

SG: Have you changed your mind about a film?

WF: In what respect?

SG: That you hated then loved, or the other way around.

WF: Well, I don’t see a lot of new films today, to be very honest with you.

SG: Ever?

WF: Seldom. Seldom—maybe I see six or seven a year. My wife was up here a few weeks ago, I guess—Sherry Lansing—is still a great fan of the movies. I used to be, but certainly not as much anymore. I’ve taken now to watching a lot of the shows that you can stream or binge view on television, the cable shows, or stuff on Netflix or stuff like that, I think is more interesting than most of the films.

SG: But don’t you think that it’s interesting that some great films, is that you come to them, maybe with rules and formulae that you have in mind, and what makes them great is that they break those rules? And I think of some of the films that have most marked me is the ones I didn’t initially always like.

WF: Well, I may differ from you in the sense that I don’t come to a film with any rules. I just want to be swept away. I simply want to be overwhelmed by the ideas, by the performance, by everything else in combination. Because film is the most collaborative art form there is. And you know why? You want to be a painter, all you’ve got to do is fill a blank canvas yourself. If you want to be a writer, all you needed was a blank sheet of paper and a typewriter. Now you don’t even need the paper if you have a computer. But you create this work of art, you the painter or the writer. But in film we call it “The Five Ton Pencil.” You’re working with literally hundreds of people; people who have great skills and who contribute so much to every film that’s ever been made—

SG: And yet a great filmmaker puts his stamp on the film. How?

WF: Not necessarily. Look, it’s possible, I suppose for a student of film, a film historian, to look at a piece of film and say Orson Welles directed that. Or possibly Federico Fellini. But Joseph Mankiewicz? That would be a lot different. Or even [Luis] Buñuel’s film of Belle de Jour, which to me is a masterpiece, a great, great work of cinematic art. And yet it’s filmed so simply. But behind it, behind the simplicity and the lack of style, the lack of technique, is the sensibility of Buñuel, one of the creators of surrealism. There’s no more surrealistic film imaginable than Belle de Jour or if you really get into it, more disturbing than that. It’s way out on the edge. It’s about human desire. And it’s about the difficulty of achieving a sexual relationship between a husband and a wife and the extent to which they both go to make that work. And, boy, it’s graphic without being upsetting. Although there are parts of it that could upset people.

SG: It’s not very graphic. One of the things that makes it so great is Buñuel, who takes what would, in somebody else’s hands, be a tawdry subject—

WF: Yeah.

SG: —and strips it of those elements. When he made that film his friends said, are you out of your mind? This is pulp fiction. Not that Pulp Fiction. A different pulp fiction. Why are you doing this? And what he did, he takes a story of the woman of the bourgeoisie who works on the side as a call girl and he took all sexuality out of that.

WF: You know what’s happening though. You know what’s going on with her at all times.

SG: But he does it in such a way, that the very thing that subject is about is not what you feel in the film and that’s what gives it this disconnect that makes it a great film.

WF: Well, I won’t dispute that. But I still do not believe that it is so profoundly stylistic that you could look at that, even having seen Buñuel’s other films and said, this is definitely a Buñuel film. Whereas you can with Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, even films that Orson Welles didn’t direct but just appeared in you can see his touch, in The Third Man, which he was an actor in for a brief period of time. But the whole film reeks of Orson Welles, even when he’s not on screen. So, there are great stylists.

SG: Did you ever meet Orson Welles?

WF: No, I never met Orson Welles. And I’m glad I didn’t.

SG: Why?

WF: Because I heard he was a miserable son-of-a-bitch. [laughter] It wouldn’t be too good for two such people to meet over a meal.

SG: Are there people going around saying the same about William Friedkin?

WF: Probably. Undoubtedly. You might, perhaps, after this evening. [laughter]

SG: I want to go back to what you said about rules.

WF: I don’t have any rules. I want to be … I don’t want answers. I don’t want a film to give me answers, only questions. And the films I just named, like Blow Up—Blow Up is like a murder mystery with no solution. There is no solution and after you’ve seen the film—how many of you have seen it? Let me see your hands if you’ve seen it. Yeah. After you’ve seen the film, you don’t know what the hell to make of this, except you’ve been totally involved if you’ve given yourself to it. The same with Belle de Jour. When it’s over, the last shot, what the hell have I just seen? That’s what I’m looking for. And I don’t get it a lot today. You get other things, certainly.

SG: When have you had it recently?

WF: What’s a film that really captured …? I love the film Prisoners [dir. Denis Villeneuve]. I thought that’s the film last year that moved me the most in all respects: performance, direction, cinematography, the story which ends on an ambiguous note, it’s filled with surprises. It’s very involving and very disturbing. And that’s what I look for. I no longer expect to find the kind of comedies that I once loved, like the Marx Brothers, or even The Three Stooges, or early Woody Allen. Those are comedies. But you don’t go to Woody Allen anymore for comedy. He’s basically not doing the kind of slapstick satires that he once did. He’s doing more serious films.

SG: Does it bother you when you read about Woody Allen and his personal life? Does that impact how you view his films?

WF: I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Filmography
• Harold Lloyd Master Seminars with William Friedkin
• William Friedkin Interview
• Tense Situation: William Friedkin in an Interview with Ralph Appelbaum
• The Cruising Controversy: William Friedkin vs. the Gay Community
• Harold Lloyd Master Seminars with William Friedkin
• William Friedkin: Auteur of the Dark
• Harold Lloyd Master Seminars with William Friedkin
• Cruising with Billy
• Exorcising the Past: A Retrospective with William Friedkin
• William Friedkin: Why Sorcerer’s Spell Refuses to Die
• Exorcist Director: It Worked Because “I Made That Film as a Believer”
• A Discussion with William Friedkin: “I See a Diminishing of All Art Forms These Days”
• “I Never Thought My Films Would Find a Large Audience”: William Friedkin Interviewed
• We Need an Exorcist!
• No Sympathy for the Devil: The Exorcist Director William Friedkin Looks Back
• About the Editor