William Friedkin was born in Chicago on August 29, 1935. He died a few days ago of heart failure, just three weeks shy of his 89th birthday.
He began his career in the mail room of a local Chicago TV station before directing more than two thousand live shows. Then came his first TV film, the documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), which persuaded the governor of Illinois to commute its subject’s death sentence. He also directed segments of NBC's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (including the final episode) before making his first feature, Good Times (1967), starring Sonny and Cher. Then came The Night They Raided Minsky's and the screen adaptations of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (both 1968) and Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970).
But it was The French Connection (1971), made for around $2 million, that made everyone sit up and take notice. And the car chase even lifted them out of their seats. The result was five Oscars, including one for Best Director. Then came The Exorcist (1973), which was nominated for ten, including one for Best Director, and subsequently re-released in a longer version a couple of years ago.
After that was Sorcerer (1977) – the uncut version wasn’t released Down Under until 2002 – The Brink's Job (1979) with Peter Falk, Warren Oates and Paul Sorvino, and the controversial Cruising (1980) which was cut over his protests. He made Deal of the Century in 1983, and the heavily-underrated To Live and Die in L.A. in 1985, with another hair-raising car chase. The demise of Dino de Laurentiis’s production company meant that Rampage, made in 1987, wasn’t released until 1992.
In 1986, he directed Barbra Streisand's HBO special Putting It Together: The Making of 'The Broadway Album' and produced and directed the pilot of C.A.T. Squad for NBC as well as a sequel a couple of years later. After that there was another horror movie, The Guardian (1990), an episode of Tales From the Crypt (HBO, 1992) and Jailbreakers (1994), one of Showtime's Rebel Highway remakes of teen drive-in movies.
After Blue Chips (1994), written by Ron Shelton, came Jade (1995), written by Joe Eszterhas, a 1997 remake of 12 Angry Men for Showtime, starring Jack Lemmon and nominated for six Emmys, and Rules of Engagement (2000). In between there was a new venture – the opera, Wozzeck, in Florence – as well as a music video for Johnny Halliday.
Then came The Hunted (2003), with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro, the offbeat Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011), both written by Tracey Letts, and a couple of episodes of CSI (2007 and 2009). In 2017, his documentary, The Devil & Father Amorth (2017), saw him revisiting the nightmare terrain of The Exorcist. His final work, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023), the fourth filmed version of Herman Wouk’s 1953 play, this time starring Kiefer Sutherland, is scheduled to premiere at next month’s Venice Film Festival.
I interviewed Friedkin several times during his visit to Australia to promote the belated release here of Sorcerer, which was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le salaire de la puer). The following version winds together exchanges that took place over several weeks in hotel rooms and on stage at the Astor in Melbourne. I found him a gracious, giving interviewee, happy to go wherever our conversations led and delighted by the full-house opening of the film at The Astor, which he warmly embraced for its links with the past and its single-screen old world demeanour.
PART ONE: on Sorcerer
TR: Sorcerer was cut here by around 30 minutes.
WF: It’s my own personal favourite of all the films that I ever made. It opened uncut in the Far East and many other parts of Europe, but not in France, Australia or the UK.
Who was responsible for the cutting?
There was a guy named Pedro Teitelbaum, who was head of what is now UIP and was then called CIC. I believe he was subsequently fired for embezzlement and various other things. He used to cut movies at his whim, dependent on how he thought they would do in various territories. ‘Let’s take a half hour out of this and we’ll get more shows.’ He really didn’t care about films. He cared about a product and he was an altogether loathsome gentleman.
We learn about some of these things after the fact. And I sued CIC in France, where they have something called the droit morale, which gives filmmakers ownership of the film, not literally financial ownership but creative ownership. After lengthy trials in France and Germany, I won a settlement. They had to restore the picture. Their law did not and still does not exist in the US. But this guy just took it upon himself to change the picture.
But why? I know it hadn’t done especially well in the US…
That’s not really the point. He was simply going to do what he did regardless of whether the film did well in the US or not. He would say, ‘This will play better in Australia, or France, if we do the following.’ He had some crazy schemes and, as I say, a lot of this only came out much later. But it was completely arbitrary. The idea was, I guess, that the less there was of it the better.
My memory is that the first 30 minutes went…
That’s what I’m told. I never saw the version that played here. I only found out specifically what had been changed when Jim Sherlock called me and said, ‘You know the film was cut in Australia.’ I didn’t remember that, or know how it was cut. But he got some hacks together to just hack up the picture.
They don’t appear to have put much thought into it….
It is terrible. It would have been much better if they’d just never released it. He used to do this with a number of films. That was his basic m.o. He thought he could determine the value of a film in various market places by making alterations.
Why did you use the title Sorcerer?
You have two choices: the existential answer or the honest answer. The true one is that I was listening to a Miles Davis song called “Sorcerer”. The other is the one that I often give to journalists, Tom: a sorcerer is an evil wizard, and the evil wizard is fate. Now that sounds better than saying that I ripped it off from a Miles Davis song, doesn’t it?
I just didn’t have the guts to tell people that at the time, especially those who thought it was a lousy title. I mean, I don’t imagine anyone said to Miles Davis that it was a lousy title. So I thought, if it worked for this guy, maybe it’ll work for me. That’s the truth. It’s because I was asked endlessly about the significance of the title that I made all this other stuff up.
Interestingly, the Clouzot film starts in South America. You actually invented the earlier sequences….
I didn’t follow the Clouzot film other than in terms of the basic storyline. The content, the characters, the basic stunts are all different. What intrigued me about the Clouzot film – in addition to the fact that it was a masterpiece – and what intrigued me about Georges Arnaud’s novel was that it was kind of a metaphor for the world. And I still feel that way.
Four strangers who were suspicious of one another, who hated one another, and who were yet totally dependent on one another for their survival. And it seems to me that that’s a reasonable metaphor for the state of the world, then and now: all these hostile countries that can’t get along, that keep threatening each other, and, unless they find a way to pull it off together, they’re not gonna survive. And many of them won’t survive anyway. So that was the underlying idea in making that film.
I get the sense that, on a more personal level, you’ve got these four characters who are essentially all waiting to die. This is kind of like their eulogy. I’m thinking your writer, Walon Green, The Wild Bunch, people at the end of their tether who come alive for a moment…
Yeah. That’s very true, Tom. The existential thing was something else that attracted us to this particular material. But we didn’t set out to copy anything. The characters are all different and the one thing I did, which we were doing in America in the ’70s anyway, was try to bend the audience’s interest toward characters who were not heroic. None of these guys in Sorcerer is really heroic, although they perform heroic functions in the film and put their lives at risk.
I’ve always felt – perhaps it’s a Catholic idea, although I’m not Catholic – that there’s good and bad in all of us. And I believe it’s a constant struggle for our souls between our better character and our evil spirits. And so that’s in the film. All of these guys have committed crimes.
If you look at it with hindsight, it was almost suicidal to make one of the lead characters an Arab terrorist. That’s what he is: a Palestinian terrorist, 25 years ago. So you can imagine the reception that this character would get today in most parts of the world. It’s hard to know how an audience will respond today because at that time I thought there was goodness even in a terrorist who was fighting for a cause that was the only thing he understood.
I’ve been to that part of the world a number of times and I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve never felt closer to a people than I did to the Iraqis. They do not want war with anyone. It’s this horrible leadership of the Ba’athist party that’s ruled there for, I guess, 40 or 50 years or more. But the people are like people anywhere: they just want to be with their families and have a good education for their children and have the roads fixed and live a decent life, but they’re not allowed to because of their leadership.
I was there for the prologue to The Exorcist and I stayed for about three months. I was completely fascinated by Iraq. I was up in the north for the most part in Mosul, which is where the Kurdish territory is and where most of their missile sites are, I’m told. It was a great experience.
And I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I think it’s got out of hand totally. But, at that time, there was nobody paying attention to the Palestinian cause so I felt there was a certain sympathetic side to that particular character’s nature. I wouldn’t do that today. I would not make this guy a Palestinian terrorist.
Why not? You’re don’t appear to be the kind of filmmaker to avoid treading on toes.
Because it’s escalated beyond the pale. And I think it completely turns off an audience to try to suggest that there’s humanity in someone who’d put a bomb at a bus stop and blow up a bunch of innocent people. That was going on to a much lesser extent when I was over there.
This is the Hollywood filmmaker talking, but I don’t hear the artist talking here, the one who plays around with ambiguous moralities and makes viewers rethink their position. I’m surprised to hear William Friedkin saying he wouldn’t deal with a terrorist now.
No. Not to that extent. Sorcerer has become sort of a cult film. But I had the same intent with it that I had with The Exorcist and The French Connection, which was to appeal to a very large audience. I never saw my job as a filmmaker to appeal to a niche of one sort or another. I never thought I was taking that audience any farther than they were prepared to go in terms of entertainment value.
But still you use subtitles? If you were making wholly commercial decisions, you wouldn’t have used subtitles. You would have dubbed them or had them speaking broken English.
In those days you’d see subtitles, and even today. Spielberg used them, I believe, in Close Encounters. And you see them from time to time in very commercial films. The subtitles didn’t bother me so much as the nature of the four leads: one guy is a hit man, one is a bank robber (robs a Catholic church) – he’s the wheel man – another is embroiled in a case of stock market fraud in France. That sort of person is much less sympathetic today as well. And it’s very difficult to get an audience to go with a terrorist in any sympathetic way.
At the time, I thought I was moving the boundaries as to who you could feature in an action film as a protagonist.
I also think that today you couldn’t end an American film made by a major studio the way we did Sorcerer then. There would have to be some clear resolution. But in those days, you know, I always thought I could trust the audience first. And I always left a lot of the details with them. I also happen to think that not too many things are resolved in this life.
You originally wanted Steve McQueen for the role, which would have made it a very different kind of film.
Yes. It was written for Steve McQueen. Waley and I – Walon Green – met with McQueen and I told him I was writing this film for him. I always wanted to work with him. I think he made some really great films: Bullitt, The Magnificent Seven, The Thomas Crown Affair. This guy was a really fine film actor, and an action star.
So we met with him and told him we were writing this script for him and he said, ‘Hey, great. Love to work with you. Let’s do something.’ In fact, he had come to me much earlier in my career to do a film with him, and it didn’t work out. So we told him what it was and gave him the script and he said, ‘This is probably the best script I’ve ever read. I really want to do it. Where’re we gonna shoot it?’
I told him that we were going to be working on it in South America, and he said, ‘I just can’t go to those places and hang out for six months. I’m in a new relationship – with Ali McGraw – and I don’t want to leave the United States for that long a period. You’ll be away forever, I know it.’
And I said – I was very arrogant then – ‘Just bring her with you.’ He said, ‘Well, can you write a part for her? She’s a pretty successful actress.’ I said, ‘You just told me this is the one of best scripts you ever read. There are no women in it, as you know, certainly no major role for a woman. You want me to rewrite the script? It won’t be the same script.’ He said, ‘OK, you’re right. Why don’t you just make her associate producer so she can be with me and feel involved.’
As I say, Tom, I was extremely arrogant at the time. And I said, ‘I’m not gonna do that. I don’t need an associate producer. You can bring her with you, we’ll pay her way over there, put her up at one of the nice villages that you’ll see in the film…’ And he said, ‘No. You’ve got to give her something to do so that she doesn’t feel like she’s just there as my wife. It goes against the grain for me.’ And that was that.
It took me a while after that to realize that I was wrong, that the close-up is much more important than the wide-shot. A close-up of Steve McQueen’s face is worth more than the most beautiful landscape ever filmed. And that’s what I feel today. That was my vision for the picture.
I don’t feel that the film is any lesser because of Roy Scheider. I think he did a great job and I love what he did. But Scheider did not have the goodwill of the audience that McQueen had and which, I now realize, the film was so dependent on. An audience’s goodwill, an audience’s ability to identify with a rogue, which McQueen often played. Maybe Ali McGraw could’ve come along and saved him?
Maybe…. But it’s a darker film without McQueen.
Sure.
In his book, ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’, Peter Biskind says that you were conscious of Apocalypse Nowand ‘Heart of Darkness’ hovering in the background through all of this…
Not really. I knew Francis very well. He’s one of my best friends. And I knew that he was making Apocalypse Now. But I had no idea what he was doing over there or whether the film would ever be completed: Martin Sheen had had a heart attack. Most filmmakers of my generation have always been in a friendly competition with one another, but we also rooted for one another. And I never felt the spirit of Apocalypse Now hovering over me.
That quote is just not true. I was single-mindedly focussed on Sorcerer: we had a lot of problems making it. And you’re right. It’s a lot darker with Scheider, but what I intended was a film for McQueen. And he was going to do it.
What I wanted to make was a film about the mystery of fate, the fact that someone can turn the corner and something falls off a building on to them, that none of us have any control over our destinies. We do not have control of our birth or our death or anything in between. We were put here, in my opinion, and I really believe this, by the grace of God for some purpose of which I’m not totally clear. But Sorcerer plays with that idea, that fate is what controls our lives, period. All of our births are an accident finally.
Have you always believed that?
Yes. Ever since I was young. I was not raised in the Catholic Church. I was raised in the Jewish faith, but I never particularly bought into the Jewish faith. I don’t know why. I was bar-mitzvahed, but I found it sort of off-putting. But then when I got interested in Catholicism through The Exorcist, specifically the Jesuits, it was almost as though I had found a spiritual home. I obviously can’t buy into the whole package but I think the myth is much more compelling than the myth of the Jewish faith or almost any other faith.
And of the people I met in the Church, I guess I was really fortunate to meet some really decent guys. That’s why Sorcerer is much more personal than all of my other films because, basically, it reflects my feelings.
(To be continued. In Part Two Friedkin discusses Cruising and The Exorcist)
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