Editor's Note. This is the second part of a conversation that took place in Melbourne in 2002 when William Friedkin was visiting to promote the revival of his film Sorcerer. The first part can be accessed IF YOU CLICK HERE
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| Al Pacino, William Friedkin on the set of Cruising |
Generally, to coin a cliché, you don’t tend look on the bright side of things, as it were. Cruising, which I find deeply unsettling, is so full of moral ambiguity. As in many of your films, everything is dangerous for and within the relationships between your characters. Most of all there’s the moral danger that they have to deal with. It’s as if all of them are being sucked into a quicksand.
But, you see, I’m not conscious of that going in. On reflection, or when it’s pointed out by someone like yourself, Tom, I can’t help but agree. Among my favourite films are Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, but I think there’s room for all kinds of films. The films that draw me for the most part do so because of their intensity.
I just get interested in a story and I’m drawn to certain stories that, I guess you could say, are on the darker side. But then most of the interesting films I’ve ever seen are about crime in some way, or moral ambiguity, or evil, actually, good versus evil. I'm fascinated by human nature and ambiguity. I recognize the darkness within myself as well as decent impulses, and it’s a constant struggle within me to not mess things up.
And perhaps, if I was stronger in my faith, I would be less troubled. I’ve never been in psychiatry. I don’t believe in that. I think if you have a good friend, you know, or relative, or somebody, or do a lot of interviews, as I do, you’re able to talk about things rather than keep them pent up.
You should be sitting here then [I was on a couch, he was in a chair].
I always am. I’ve never tried to run for cover about things like that. These films are on the dark side, but, believe me, the dark side has served dramatists well over the centuries and I did Cruising because I was fascinated by the notion of a murder mystery set in the savage gay world. Not the polite gay world. At that time, there were a lot of gay activities the public was aware of, but not the leather bars. Not that sort of extreme role play. And there had been all these murders taking place: bodies rolling up from the East River, body parts.
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| Cruising |
I don’t know if you ever heard this story, about the connection between Cruising and The Exorcist. This is how Cruising came about. There’s a scene in The Exorcist that we shot up at the NYU Medical Center: the arteriogram that the little girl is given. It was used for years afterwards as a training film: a radiologist performing an arteriogram. I used an actual radiologist and his assistant. We did it step-by-step the way it would be, without actually injecting her. We made it look like that.
It became a training film!? But you shoot it like a violation.
But that’s what they do! I didn’t make anything up. That was an arteriogram. There was the chief radiologist and then there was his assistant, who was a guy that’s in the film. He’s wearing an earring and a stud bracelet, and in the early ’70s you virtually never saw that. You never saw someone wearing the outer trappings of the gay life. This fellow was and he caught my attention. I’ve forgotten his name.
Then a couple of years later, there were these body parts floating around in the East River and a lot of them were in body bags which were traced to the NYU Medical Center. The police go there and start asking around. Then they get up to the Department of Radiology and there’s this fellow who, it turns out, they’re able to connect to some of the people who were killed.
One of them was the theatre critic for Variety in New York, a man whose name I remember was Addison Burrell. And this fellow had killed Addison Burrell up at his apartment and had picked up these other guys in the leather bars, cut them up and placed them in these body bags which they threw in the river. They arrested him for these crimes.
So I see this in the New York newspapers and I get in touch with his lawyers and I visit him in Ryker’s Island where he’s being held for trial. And the first thing he asks me is ‘How’s the film doing?’
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| Al Pacino, Cruising |
So he’s up for multiple murders. I didn’t ask him whether he’d done it or not. He was pretty laid back and he told me – and I put it in Cruising – that the cops had offered him a deal. They had him for half a dozen or more of these, what they call, ‘cuppi’ murders. The body parts which they couldn’t identify were labelled ‘cuppi’: c-u-p-p-i, circumstances unknown pending a police investigation. They had him for a good-sized handful of these and they offered him a deal. They said, ‘If you confess to fifteen or twenty unsolved murders, we’ll make sure you don’t go the chair and that you get a reduced sentence.
He was at that time mulling over whether he was gonna confess to a whole bunch of murders that he hadn’t even done. And he’d been promised that he wouldn’t do more than eight years of jail. The police just wanted the headlines that they had solved all of these unsolved murders, headlines that said they’d brought this mass murderer to justice. That was more important to them than actually solving the murders.
And that was the seed of Cruising, as well as some articles written in the Village Voice at that time in New York by Arthur Bell, a gay journalist who’s since died. He wrote about the leather bars and that was the first time I’d heard about them and of murders that had been taking place there, and of how the make-believe was getting out of control.
The producer, Jerry Weintraub, had the rights to a novel called Cruising, by Gerald Walker, which was not about the leather bars at all. It was about this young guy who had been committing these crimes, who never knew why. There was no tie to his father or anything else in the book, no reason. He was murdering gay men whom he’d pick up in above-ground gay bars, killing them, not savagely. It was from that basis that we created a completely different take, which was the film Cruising, set in the leather bars.
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| Cruising |
So there was nothing but an interest in that story set in that world that came about through knowing this fellow from making The Exorcist. It was, you know, fate. There he is and what’s he’s done, and I’m looking for a new film to make and it just clicked in.
I never thought about the fact that a mainstream audience had never seen a film set there. I had seen a lot of pornographic films, gay and straight. Some of them are very good, like Deep Throat. I had seen another film by the same director, a very dark film, a horror film, horror pornography, called The Devil in Miss Jones. And it’s terrific. So I was exposed to that kind of thing even if the general public wasn’t.
It became a cause celebre when it came out. It was like the opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the Theatre de Champs Elysees in 1913 in Paris. There were riots.
Cruising was cut by the censors in the US, wasn’t it?
That’s a story. Jerry Weintraub, who recently produced the new version of Ocean’s Eleven, was a great entrepreneur – he worked as a concert promoter with Elvis Presley, Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan – and he produced a couple of films too: Nashville and Oh, God! It was his idea to run Cruising for the head of the Ratings Board in the United States, privately, at his home in Malibu. That’s never done. The Ratings Board are supposed to all see the film at the same time. The head of the Board doesn’t even see the film unless there’s a controversy and Jerry said, ‘I’m gonna get the head of the Board there' – his name was Richard Hefner. He was an educator who had a TV show called The Open Mind, which many of us referred to as ‘The Empty Head’.
To our amazement, he came to Jerry Weintraub’s house, and Jerry made a beautiful dinner for him. We sat and talked and then put Cruising on Jerry’s screen for him. I was sitting behind Richard Hefner and I heard ‘Oh! Ohhhhh! Ohhhhhhhh! Oh, no! OH NO!’ And pretty soon his coat came off and he loosened his tie. And then the picture was over and he was a deep red and sweating and Jerry said, ‘So what did you think of the picture, Dick?’ And he said, ‘Jerry, this is the worst film I’ve ever seen.’
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| Al Pacino, Cruising |
I was just sitting there. And Jerry said, ‘I know. But what’s the rating gonna be?’ He said, ‘Jerry, there are not enough X-s in the alphabet for this. I can’t rate it. I can’t release the movie.’ And Jerry said, ‘What do you mean?’ He almost got down on one knee. ‘You don’t understand: this is my life, my life is in this picture. I don’t know what to do.’
Hefner’s predecessor was Aaron Stern, and he was very good and was head of the Ratings Board when we made The Exorcist: he released it with an automatic R-rating with no cuts, a half hour after he’d seen it. So Hefner sends us to Stern for advice on how to cut the picture to get a rating other than 59 X-s or something. I called him up – he was a psychiatrist in New York at that time – and told him that Hefner had sent us to him. He said, ‘Oh, yes. I do that all the time for the boy. I get $1000 a day to consult on how to edit films.’
Well, about 60 days later, we had to take out four frames here, eight frames there – well, I actually took out about 40 minutes of the movie. But in the United States, when it got an R-rating, there were riots. You know, the press went crazy. The film should probably have been rated X, but we literally bought and paid for an R-rating but had to cut this footage to get any of it released. But this time I knew what was happening. It wasn’t like this guy that took Sorcerer and just chopped it up.
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| The Exorcist |
You removed some footage for the original release of The Exorcist, didn’t you?
I took about twelve or thirteen minutes out of it, just for pacing. I just thought it was too long. Bill Blatty always thought that those thirteen minutes were the most crucial thirteen minutes of the film. He’s a great friend of mine, so I thought after all those years if he wants to see the film in that way, that’s fine. I’ll put the footage back in.
When I went back and looked at the footage I’d cut, I agreed with Blatty. I thought it should be seen. I took the spider-walk out because it didn’t work. You could see how it was done. But with the advent of digital technology I was able to take out the scaffolding, so to speak, and not show how we did that.
There were many effects that I shot for The Exorcist that didn’t work. The whole picture was trial-and-error.
Do you often change your mind about how you’d like your film to be seen?
When you direct a film, you have a vision, hopefully, of what that film should be. And the important thing is to stay with it as long as you can because along the road there will be people who will try to divert your vision, for whatever reasons. Reasons of censorship, prudery, or whatever it may be, or the studio, or just people who are working on the film that need to be convinced that the way you want to do it is the way it should be done. So you have to hold fast to a vision because it gets easily diminished.
You know, I often start a film without a clear notion of exactly how it’s going to wind up. I love the editing process. I love it much more than shooting the film, or even planning it. The cutting-room is where it all comes together, or doesn’t. Very often, the film comes to me in the cutting-room. While I’m out filming, I’m not clear on how it’s going to turn out. That’s true of all my pictures. What happens in the cutting-room is that film begins to dictate to me: it says, ‘This is what I want to be. This is the shape I want to go into.’ And so I don’t view myself really as the creator, but more in the way that Stravinsky did when he talked about The Rite of Spring: ‘I am the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed.’ And that’s how I feel about the films I’ve made.
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| Linda Blair, The Exorcist |
How do you decide on the rhythm for a sequence?
The film dictates itself. You look at it over and over again until it says, ‘This way, not that way.’ So you’ll try to put those two shots together. Maybe they won’t go together. So then you’ll recombine them, change them around, use a piece of this and a piece of that. The decision is made in the same way that Stravinsky said he used to write music. He’d never write it down first and then try to play it. He’d sit down at the piano and just start playing and gradually a melody or a rhythm would come to him, and if he liked it, if it stuck, he would then write it down.
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| The French Connection |
Let’s look at a specific example. Say, the car chase The French Connection.
There was a piece of music by Santana called Black Magic Woman. I was listening to it at the time and I laid that track up and we cut the picture against the beat of that piece of music. I didn’t use the music, but it gave me a wonderful sort of rhythm in which to lay the picture against the texture of the music. It was just a guide.
Do you know the Australian band called The Necks? I’ve started using their music in the same guiding track way.
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A mini-retrospective of William Friedkin's films has just been announced by Sydney's Golden Age Cinema. Details IF YOU CLICK HERE
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