John Baxer and Samuel Lopez Barrantes request your attendance at the next Paris Writers Salon - Links and contents provided

John Baxter writes:

Dear Everyone,

We’re happy to announce the next Paris Writers Salon.  Details can be found here.

https://www.johnbaxterparis.com/paris-writers-salon

Hope to see and talk with you from our apartment in the heart of literary Paris.

A bientot,

John

The books are

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014)

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the stories of an imaginatively gifted blind girl in France and a technically precocious young man in Germany intersect in a crucial battle taking place in the Channel coastal city of Saint-Malo. 

Albert Camus’ The Fall (1956)

The Fall was the last completed novel by one of the giants of modern French literature and thought, Albert Camus. (He died in 1960 in an auto accident, aged only 47, three years after winning the Nobel Prize.) Clamence, the Parisian jurist through whose eyes Camus sees the war and its aftermath, struggles with the same sense of futility that motivated Sartre, originally Camus's closest friend (then his rival) to develop existentialism.

John Baxter’s Five Nights in Paris (2015)

John Baxter's Five Nights in Paris explores some of the ways in which Paris after dark becomes a very different city. Using examples ranging from Woody Allen to the surrealist Philippe Soupault, he shows how the certainties of a tourist Paris give way after dark to something more fantastic and dream-like, ruled by the unlikely and improbable.

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John Baxter (above left with Samuel Lopez Barrantes) is an Australian-born writer, scholar, critic and film-maker who has lived in Paris since 1989. The many books he has written include the first ever critical volume devoted to the Australian cinema as well as studies of Ken Russell, Josef von Sternberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, George Lucas, Robert De Niro, Luis Bunuel and a number of studies of Paris. His most recent book is a biography of Charles Boyer: The French Lover  (University of Kentucky Press, 2021)

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

Film Alert 101 notes Angela Allen and draws attention to one of the films she worked on THE MISFITS (John Huston, USA, 1961)

Sydney's adventurous Golden Age Cinema is screening some films to welcome Wes Anderson's Asteroid City. Here's how they explain it. "Set in a small western town in the 1950s, Asteroid City was inspired, directly or indirectly, by a variety of films, many of which are touched upon in the new book DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval, A Portfolio on the Subjects of Mid-century Cinema, the Broadway Stage and the American West. This series, inspired by similar series at the American Cinematheque and the Museum of Moving Image in the U.S.A., brings together a selection of titles featured in the book, which evoke the historical or social or fantastical milieu of Asteroid City."

One of the films is John Huston's The Misfits. You can read the notes and make a booking if you CLICK HERE.

Why am I telling you this? Well because Bologna's recent Il Cinema Ritrovato  screened another Huston film and the person they found to do the introduction was none another than the woman who did the continuity on all of Huston's films from The African Queen in 1951 through to Wise Blood in 1979. Her name is Angela Allen. Today she's 94 and still lively with a mountain of stories about the film industry. She also worked on The Third Man, The Happiest Days of Your Life, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Women in Love, Macbeth (the Polanski version), The Dirty Dozen and Ronin. In 2005 BAFTA honoured her with its Michael Balcon Award.

Here she is having dinner in Bologna with Nick Varley the founder of the distribution company Park Circus.

Streaming on SBS On Demand (with lots of advertisements) - Rod Bishop finds enthralling viewing in THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2022)

Xavier Dolan as Elliot, The Night Logan Woke Up

Last month, there were reports from Europe suggesting Xavier Dolan was retiring as a filmmaker. 

Dolan, the wunderkind of Cannes at 19 years of age and a multihyphenate auteur with eight feature films and one television miniseries all completed by his 34^th birthday, first signaled his retirement in the Journal de Montreal on 20 November 2022: “I don’t really want to do this job anymore. I’m tired”. He talked of building a house in the country, spending time with friends and making commercials.

Early in June this year Dolan told Le Pais in Spain:

“I don’t feel like committing two years to a project that barely anyone sees. I put too much passion into it to have these disappointments. It makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad and I know it’s not”.

In July, he bickered with Spain’s El Mundo and their interview with him titled “Art is useless and dedicating oneself to cinema is a waste of time”. Dolan apparently claimed he was misrepresented. The website World of Reel reported this disagreement between Dolan and El Mundo and it triggered a backlash from their readers:

“Stop giving this nobody crybaby a platform.”

“Xavier Dolan thinks anyone gives a shit he’s retiring, who does he think he is?”

“He is a clown.”

“God, he’s insufferable both with his films, and his whole demeanor outside of them…”

“…a classic narcissist…”

“…full of himself…”

“…precious little bitch…”

“Is there a more stereotypical insufferable queer in existence than him?”

All reminiscent of the vitriol from some in the Cannes Press Room in 2016 when Dolan’s It’s Only The End of the World won the Grand Prix.

For their part, on 8 July, El Mundo then released audio of 4 minutes of their reporter’s interview with Dolan. He talks eloquently about climate change; widespread political and social intolerance; and meaningless filmmaking. An excerpt:

“What am I exactly? Am I an employee? A servant? Am I someone who dances in front of the King? To distract them from what’s happening outside their window?”

The full text of the 4 minutes is available if you click here and is transcribed below. 

Some believe Dolan will not retire and call his current mood “just part of the show”. They think this depressed Millennial auteur will get over the poor reception of his last two films and he will soon be in pre-production once again. 

An adaptation of a play, the premise of his 2016 drama It’s Only The End of the World, is a 34-year-old gay playwright who returns home to his family after an absence of 12 years to tell them he is dying, presumably of AIDS. But the emotional dysfunctionality of the family members, their neuroses and their angry shouting is so consuming and insistent, the playwright eventually leaves not having found the right moment to tell them of his prognosis.

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Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), Denis (Éric Bruneau),
Maddy (Anne Dorval) and Elliot (Xavier Dolan). 

This five-part television series, The Night Logan Woke Up - also from a play - has many similarities to his Grand Prix winner at Cannes. Set in 1991 and 2019, Elliot (Xavier Dolan) is let out of rehab to join his siblings Denis (Éric Bruneau) and Julian (Patrick Hivon) and Julian’s wife Chantal (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau). They are in vigil at the bedside of their dying mother Madeleine (Anne Dorval). 

When her body is transferred to a mortuary, a sister Mireille (Julie LeBreton) re-appears after an absence of 25 years, intent on embalming their mother. The series then explores the traumatic past and present of the children, their chronic dysfunctionality, their shouting exchanges and the mysterious role of childhood friend Logan Goodyear in their frequently explosive family squabbles.

Mireille (Julie Le Breton)

There’s one riotous family dinner. Although shorter than the one in the second series of The Bear, it does share the same sensibilities. People locked together around a table (unable to escape because this is “Family” and family is to be valued above all else), but in the end resorting to insults, ridicule, sarcasm, contempt and derision.

Dolan’s direction is as tight and occasionally flamboyant as ever, but here, across nearly five hours he can almost leisurely unpeel even more layers to his characters than available in the feature film format.

If you’re not an admirer of his work, The Night Logan Woke Up is most unlikely to change your opinion. But for those transfixed by this director’s grip and his penetrating insights into all the damage inflicted by families, and in particular by parents who fix their children at a certain age and treat them that way no matter who they have grown up to be, then this is enthralling viewing.

If nothing else you can look at the wallpaper. Québécois must have the world’s worst taste in wallpaper. 

 

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Transcript of four minutes of Dolan’s interview with El Mundo on 3 July 2023. He spoke in English.

“When I look at the world, suddenly making films is unimportant. It’s very, very small. I guess a little bit meaningless. Like I told you before, it’s making me feel like it’s irrelevant. It is a very privileged thing to be working right now in this industry and not realise that the world is burning while we’re still making stories about the world burning. But not really doing anything about it.

I think our problem is inaction. We’re an individualistic society and we just really don’t care. In a world that’s supposed to have literacy and education, but people are mis-educated and misinformed and you have all these anti-vaccines, anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ+, people who inflate their intolerance in the same bigger, more vast, larger intolerance of anything different. And so, it’s funny to see all these people converge towards the same mass of anti-everything. 

So, it’s just us against them and I find that to be worrying because what that means to me is insurrection and civil wars…that’s why amazing films seem so disconnected. 

What am I exactly? Am I an employee? A servant? Am I someone who dances in front of the King? To distract them from what’s happening outside their window. I’m sure people need stories more than ever to find [inaudible] from reality. But making stories costs money. It takes time. And I don’t have that money and that time anymore. You know I’m re-injecting my [salaries?] in these films forever. 

And some people keep telling me: ‘You need to make something small. Something that doesn’t cost anything, so that people will understand you’re still able to make something for nothing.’ Why would I make something for nothing? Why wouldn’t we make something with great sets where people are actually paid to do their work. Why wouldn’t I write a story with wind and rain and snow so that it’s visually attractive? Why wouldn’t I dress people with textured costumes and looks? Why wouldn’t I write something with detail and detail means money and needs time and research? Why would I write something for nothing to prove what? That I can still make something for nothing? That I’m cheap labour? 

I don’t think we have time. If you think we have time, you are misreading the situation we are in right now in the world. You think we’re in a good place right now? You think we have time? I don’t think we have time…I wish I had time. I feel very young, but I don’t think I have time.”

The Current Cinema - Highly recommended - BLACKBERRY (Matt Johnson, Canada, 2023)

OK.  So here’s the first shock. The first thing you see when Blackberry starts is the logo for Republic Pictures. What is this. Have the ghosts of Herbert  J Yates and Vera Hruba Ralston been re-incarnated. No. Much more prosaic. Republic Pictures never in fact left us even though it has long ceased to actually make pictures. The name and presumably the library* and the attached rights have been bought and sold over again for decades it seems. Most recently, so Wikipedia tells us, around the year 2000 Viacom bought the portion of Spelling it did not own previously; thus, Republic became a wholly owned division of Paramount Pictures. 

And now…so we’re told, on March 24, 2023, Paramount Global announced it would revive the Republic Pictures brand, with the intention of it serving as the company's acquisitions label, releasing titles acquired by Paramount Global Content Distribution, similar to the distribution model of, amongst other companies, Stage 6 Films or American International Pictures. 

So when you sit down to watch Blackberry you see in all its glory that famous Eagle, a staple of Saturday matinees at the Hoyts Padua in Brunswick, the greatest temple of them all....pardon my digression. Paramount/Republic have picked up a little Canadian picture  and thrust it into the international limelight. The film is so modest it only lists twelve producers and executive producers.

 

Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson)

Blackberry  starts off as if the characters are being caught performing some illicit act. The camerawork - quick cuts, hand held, telephoto lens, disorderly images - looks like an homage to the work of DA Pennebaker or Richard Leacock. It stays true to the form throughout. Disconcerting.  But very quickly characters are established. Well three characters to be precise. Two of them are nerds working on technology that will allow a phone to receive emails. They owe the bank a million and a half. Simple as that sounds it apparently wasn’t easy and wasn’t an easy sell. The two nerds are the diffident Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and the loud and extroverted Doug Fregin (played by Matt Johnson who also co-wrote and directed the movie). Doug seems to model himself on John McEnroe, right down to the coloured headband. 

Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton)

Their efforts to sell their idea are abysmal, as are the work practices in their all-male office, a place where doing anything productive or of value seems more like a bonus than a requirement. Enter Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), recently sacked from a big corporate for disobeying his boss. Jim is sneaky and devious beyond belief but smart and he puts his own money up to rescue the nerds and becomes the CEO. From there it’s the rollercoaster ride to corporate success with every supersmart lie, deception, outright criminal activity and failure catalogued with a degree of edge. 

 

In the process Doug cant change and exits the company (with a small fortune). Mike turns from diffident nerd to corporate backstabber (a change denoted by his varying hairstyles and his suits) and Jim takes his eye off the ball in search of becoming a bignoter by buying up ice hockey teams and venues. Such is life and the movie follows the trail to inevitable doom with a lot of glee. I’m hardly giving away the ending by saying that. After all who owns a Blackberry these days…

 

….and we get the movie version at least of how they came to name it Blackberry.. The movie is very smart and additionally very good fun. If it’s the sort of movie that Paramount Global is going to acquire and give the Republic badge to, well good luck.

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*Republic Pictures' holdings consist of a catalog of 3,000 films and TV series, including the original Republic library (except for the Roy Rogers and Gene Autry catalogs, owned by their respective estates) and inherited properties from NTA and Aaron Spelling. Now, thanks to Wikipedia, you know.

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)