Vale William Friedkin - Tom Ryan pays tribute to the great American director - PART THREE: “I often get better ideas about my films after I’ve finished them.”

 Editor's Note. This is the third 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. The second part can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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There’s an extremely visceral quality to all of your films: the way you get in close, the cutting, the intensity of the action. There’s no better example of this than the extraordinary sequence in Sorcerer of the two trucks crossing the bridge. When you were planning it, did you have an inkling about how it was going to look?

 

No. I just had a general idea. I knew what the goal was, what these guys had to do, how they had to get these two trucks across the river. And while it appears to be something that’s actually happening, it is of course impossible, except in the world of cinema. My films are often called realistic, but the last thing I’m looking for is realism. 

We ran into nothing but problems. This scene was shot in a place called Tuxtepek, Mexico, in the deepest part of the Mohave jungle, below Vera Cruz. But it was originally supposed to be shot in the Dominican Republic. We’d found a great rushing river there. It was about twelve feet high and it had never run dry. ‘The memory of man runneth not to the contrary.’ We started building this bridge there, and as we were building it the river began to recede. It became a dry bed. So we had a scene of a bridge across a dry river bed. So we took down the bridge and had to find somewhere else.

We found this place in Mohave, shut down the production, moved the company there, and built the bridge again over a rushing river about twelve feet high that had never run dry. 

‘The memory of man…’ And it went down during the scene to about two feet. I then decided to obscure that fact by adding the rain. We had enormous hoses to make all that rain because the river bed had become virtually dry… again.

That was a mess of a shoot. Someone was trying to tell me something while I was making this film. There were a lot of things that just went wrong. 

 

The magic of cinema! It convinced me…

 

Well we had to do everything you see. There were no digital opticals then or any opticals that would be convincing at all. As in The Exorcist, everything had to be done mechanically.

Benicio del Toro, Tommy Lee Jones, The Hunted

If you had to do it today, would you use CGI?

 

[Long pause] That’s a very difficult question. I’ve just finished a new film called The Hunted, with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro, and it contains some very hair-raising sequences. And we did them all mechanically. You know, part of what I love about film is creating things on the spot. Digital opticals is another world, another discipline, another skill. I think it has an important place in cinema, certainly in creating backgrounds that are otherwise unattainable. 

But I’m not keen on using digital opticals to create an action scene, although the chase scene in the first Mission Impossible is all digital opticals. Tom Cruise is on this train with a helicopter over him that’s trying to kill him. No train, no helicopter, no landscape. It was done on a sound stage with the crew riding around on something. And then they put in the train and the helicopter and bridge and the countryside passing by. And it’s totally convincing. 

To do it that way is much more expensive, but it’s much less dangerous. So I would probably opt today for the opticals and not put people in danger. I mean, these people and the crew and I were all in danger in this scene. There’s no question about it: I used to do that when I was younger. Then, by the grace of God, I got a little older.

I did a lot of things that I’m not all that proud of. It came from a single-mindedness.

Willem Dafoe

 

There’s an alternative ending to To Live and Die in LA, isn’t there?

 

Bill Petersen gets killed in To Live and Die in LA. He was the star of the movie. And the producers of the film said, ‘What do you mean, you’re going to kill the star of the movie, the hero?’ They tested the picture. So I shot another ending in which he lives. He just got shot in the head and he lives! And it tested better than when he dies ’cause people didn’t want him to die. But I thought, ‘No, this is just jive! Forget it.’

There’s a new DVD of the film coming out next spring in the US, a perfect print, and they asked me to put the alternate ending on as an extra, and I said, ‘No. Why should people see it? It’s terrible. It’s stupid.’

 

I understand that there was also an alternative ending for The French Connection? With tramps seeing dumped heroin in the East River.

 

I often get better ideas about my films after I’ve finished them. I’ll be taking a shower or something and it’ll occur to me how I should have ended the picture. Years after I’d finished The French Connection, I was thinking about an ending where two junkies are sitting by the East River stoned and this barge goes by. 

What they did in those days was take all these packages of heroin which they’d confiscated and put them into their inventory. And then, when the case was closed, they’d cut them up and dump them in the East River. 

And so I had this image of two guys, stoned, by the river, while $15 million of heroin is cut up and thrown into the river in front of them. And thought that would be a really wonderful ironic ending. But unfortunately it never occurred to me while I was making the film. 

 

I understand there were problems getting The French Connection off the ground?

 

When the producer and I took The French Connection around to the studios, every one turned it down, some of them twice. No-one was gonna make the picture and then finally the head of 20th Century Fox, Dick Zanuck, the son of Darryl F. Zanuck, called us back months after he had passed on the film. He said, ‘You know, I got a hunch about that film. I don’t know exactly what the hell it is that you guys wanna do, but I’m gonna get fired in about six months. And I’ve got about a billion and a half dollars hidden away in a drawer. If you can make that film for a million and a half, go ahead. I won’t be around when it’s done.’ He was right. He was fired before we finished it.

Oscar Night, William Friedkin (far right) and the Oscar for
The French Connection

We had a budget close to $3 million at the time and it included stars like Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. We told Dick Zanuck and he said, ‘You’re not gonna get Paul Newman. He costs too much, at least half a million.’ Today that amount’s called ‘chump change’ in America. Now $20 million is scale. 

So he said, ‘You don’t need a star. Just get the right guy.’ 

I got the original cops and tested them, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t act. And they had a different view of them than I did, getting girls and beating up all these guys on the street. 

I had this friend, a journalist at the New York Daily News: Jimmy Breslin, what we call a two-fisted journalist, a muck-raker, a blue collar guy who’d expose all these slum landlords, and so on, a big heavy-set Irish guy with a dark mop of hair. And he was my image for the lead role. So I said to Zanuck, ‘How about Jimmy Breslin.’ He knew who he was and he said, ‘You know what. That’s a great idea. Why don’t you go back to New York, see if he’s interested and shoot a test?’

We had cast Roy Scheider before I did this, and the young black actor who’s chased by him in the first scene. And I went to Breslin and said, ‘Let’s work on this for about a week or so and then we’ll shoot a test.’ He said, ‘Great.’ He’d never acted. He was a newspaper reporter! We’d go out on a Monday, and he’d be absolutely brilliant. Tuesday, he didn’t show up. He was drunk. He’d come in Wednesday and forget everything he did Monday, didn’t know what he was doing there. On Thursday, he would blow every line. Then we’d come to Friday and I’m thinkin’, ‘This isn’t gonna work.’ But he says to me, ‘Don’t you have a car chase in this picture?’  I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he said, ‘I gotta tell you. I told my mother on her death-bed that I would never drive a car. I don’t know how to drive.’ I said, ‘You’re fired.’ And that was the end of him for that role.

Then we offered it to Peter Boyle. He did a movie called Joe, which was an interesting picture that was very indicative of what was happening in many American cities. He was an awkward guy with a bald head and he said, ‘Nah. I wanna do romantic roles.’ So he turned it down. Then there were a few other people who turned it down too. 

Gene Hackman was the last man standing. I didn’t want to do the film with Hackman. I thought he was too soft, too laidback, no energy. But he did a great job. There’s such a thing as the Movie God that watches over films, and the casting of The French Connection was presided over by the Movie God.

Then we came to the casting of the French guy. I went to the casting director, who wasn’t really a casting director: he wrote for The Village Voice. But he knew every actor in the country and I said to him, ‘Let’s get that French guy who was in Belle de Jour.’ I didn’t know his name. He said, ‘Oh, that guy. I know him. He’s good. His name is Fernando Rey.’

Fernando Rey, The French Connection

So now I go down to the airport to meet his plane and I see him and it’s not the guy I was talking about. He’s got this little goatee and he’s very dignified and I recognized him. But he was not the actor from Belle de Jour. So I’m driving him to his hotel from the airport and I said, ‘You know, this guy you’re playing is a rough Corsican guy. That little goatee you have is all wrong. He said, ‘You don’t want me to shave my goatee because I have pimples all over my face and this covers them.’ 

In any case, he was not my image of the character at all. We get to the hotel and I go to the hotel pay phone and call the casting director. ‘You imbecile! This is the wrong guy. This is not the guy from Belle de Jour.’ So he says, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said, ‘We’ve got to fire him.’ Then by the time I get back to the office I’ve found out at the guy in Belle de Jour was Francisco Rabal, who’s in Sorcerer. And he wasn’t available anyway. So we stayed with Rey. 

Gene Hackman, The French Connection

He was not my choice. Hackman was not my choice. So there is a Movie God.

 

I want to ask you about your style as a filmmaker. With some filmmakers, you often get the sense that they’re really just shooting dialogue. With most of your films, there’s the impression that your starting-point is an image and that the rest comes later.

 

The camera moves that I use are never in the script. What I believe – I’m not always successful in doing it – is that a camera should only move to follow an actor, not on its own. Though occasionally I will push it in slowly to somebody’s face to try to draw us more into his thoughts. 

The real influence on the way I move the camera is Michelangelo Antonioni. My films don’t look anything like his, nor are they paced like them. He’d never repeat a shot. He’d get 70 or 80 shots without repeating one, while with most filmmakers, as you know, the shots are repeated all the time. 

So I try never to repeat a shot to ensure that there’s always something and only to move the camera with an actor. 

 

What did you think of Exorcist II?

 

When they made it, the people at Warner Bros. told me, ‘This film’s great. You’re a grandfather.’ And then they previewed it for the first time in Pasadena. And at this preview the Warner Bros. executives pulled up in limousines and they went into the theatre and, after about five minutes, there was a stirring in the audience and they knew something was wrong. But they had let their limousines go. They’d told their driver, ‘The film’s two hours long. Why don’t you guys go at get something to eat at MacDonald’s or wherever, down the block.’

Then after about ten minutes, a guy stood up in the middle of the audience and yelled out, ‘The people who made this piece of shit are in this room.’ And this other guy yelled out, ‘Where?’ The first guy turned to the back of the theatre and said, ‘There they are.’ The executives stood up and ran out of the theatre being chased by a handful of people from the audience. They got outside and their cars were gone, and so they had to run down the block to escape the audience. It’s distinguished by being the biggest money-back movie ever made: where people went and asked for their money back. 

To me, it’s like a horrible accident in the street. I don’t need to see it to understand.

 

You’ve become the go-to guy for car chases. Are you happy about that?

 

They’re not too easy to come up with. I can’t think of too many great car chases in films. There are a handful that appeal to me. One is in a Buster Keaton silent: it’s a brilliant chase. But they’re hard for me to think up and they’re very difficult to shoot. Critics often deprecate a film by saying, ‘Oh, it’s got a lot of car chases.’ But a car chase is pure cinema. It cannot be done in any other medium. You can’t see it on the stage; you can’t read it in a book; you can’t see it in a still photograph. It can only be done in film, or in reality. 

A lot of early cinema was just recordings of recording productions. But two people talking in a room is not pure cinema.

David Caruso, Jade

I find car chases a big challenge to put in a film and I’ve actually only done three of them – in The French Connection, To Live and Die in LA and Jade. But I’d like to do more. Now, of course, they can do them with digital photography and there’s not even any action going on. But I enjoy shooting them because I love cinema and that’s about as pure as it gets. 

Scenes like them and the one on the bridge in Sorcerer are, to me, pure cinema. No-one’s saying anything: it’s just stuff happening in front of the camera. You’re not gonna see that on the stage, except maybe in a Baz Luhrmann show.

 

What’re your feelings about cinemas like the one we’re standing in [the Astor]?

 

There is hope. For the most part, films have become the products of giant corporations. When I started making films, they were owned by individuals, men and women who loved movies. Now they’re owned by people who love profits more. But a cinema like this, and a few others in the world, they’re what keep the dream alive.

 

Vale William Friedkin - Tom Ryan pays tribute to the great American director - PART TWO – On Characters Engulfed by the Dark Side - CRUISING (USA, 1980) & THE EXORCIST (USA, 1973)

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.

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?’ 

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.

 

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.’ 

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.

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.

 

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. 

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

Vale William Friedkin - Tom Ryan pays tribute to the great American director revisiting an interview with him recorded in 2002 - Part One on SORCERER (USA, 1977/2002)

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)