William friedkin

The ever-candid auteur takes TF on a cruise through his biggest hits.

As one of the most controversial auteurs of the New Hollywood era, William Friedkin rewrote the rulebook with films such as The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer. Now returning with a new homeentertainment release for his most divisive film, Cruising, cinema’s great outsider talks TF through his career.

Cruising 1980

Al Pacino is a cop on the hunt for a serial killer who is targeting gay men…

“Cruising was… challenging. The world of S&M hadn’t been portrayed in a mainstream movie before – but I don’t think even then people were aware of how far I was prepared to take it. In the end though, I didn’t cut anything from that film that I didn’t want to. I shot about 40 minutes of footage in the leather clubs that I knew the ratings board was going to cut. I knew if I’d left that stuff in they’d have ripped through the entire picture.

“Pacino was not my first choice – I wanted Richard Gere. But Pacino read my script, because he had the same agent, and he really wanted to do it. At the time, Pacino was one of the biggest stars around, so I went with him and I guess it turned out OK.

“I’m currently in the middle of re-grading the colour for the new release. The digital process is so much more accurate now – I’m seeing the picture the way I always wanted to for the first time. I’d shoot everything in digital now if I could. For me, 35mm was always just a step along the way.”

The Boys In The Band 1970

Friedkin adapts a stageplay in which a group of gay men meet for a birthday party, and truths are unearthed…

“Great scripts don’t come along very often.

The Boys In The Band was just a terrific love story with this vein of really dark humour. So it was this rare and wonderful thing of being touching and funny and brilliant at the same time, and that’s a hard thing to pull off in any script.

“It was a fun film to make. It was an extraordinarily great experience actually.

I’ve always been interested in claustrophobic settings – it’s something that I’ve returned to several times throughout my career – and it’s a terrific challenge in any drama when you don’t give your characters an exit, and when you have to find a way to try and make that cinematic.

“The film was made right after the Stonewall Riots and I guess homosexuality was still a controversial topic in mainstream film at the time, but I didn’t face any opposition at all. In fact, the script was so good that I didn’t worry about anything on that one – certainly not about what people’s reactions were going to be. To be honest, I’ve never really worried about that.”

The French Connection 1971

Gene Hackman is detective ‘Popeye’ doyle in one of the definitive thrillers of the ’70s…

“I wanted to make that film as soon as I met [real NYPD

detectives] Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. When I think back on it now, they were probably the definitive good cop/ bad cop duo. I spent a lot of time with those guys and went out with them on various assignments they had at the time, talking to them about the real French Connection case, but I was always much more interested in them than I was in the case itself. It was the characters of these two guys, the way they spoke, the way they moved. In those days, the cops called themselves the princes of the city, and they held court on the streets. If they behaved that way now it would be a major scandal, but the way I portrayed them in the film was exactly how they were.

“There was no fantasy involved, that’s the way it was.

In all the films I’ve made I’ve been determined to tell these stories the way they occurred. Today you rarely see a realistic film about police work – it’s all superheroes now, all Batman and Superman stuff. I’ve never had any interest in that at all.

“I knew I had to put a car chase in because I didn’t want the film to be a pure documentary – frankly, there is

nothing more boring than watching actual police surveillance. I pretty much improvised the whole thing. I didn’t have it storyboarded at all. I lived in New York at the time and went around with a guy who was… in the criminal underworld, and he knew those streets better than anybody. We found all these incredible locations and they were my only inspiration. I only really knew that I wanted to do something different to whatever Bullitt had done a few years earlier.”

The Exorcist 1973

A young girl is possessed by a demon in the incomparably influential horror film…

“I was offered everything after The French Connection.

I was even offered a Bond film, which I actually wanted to do, until [producer] Cubby Broccoli told me that they used a second unit for all the action scenes and I’d just be left shooting someone drinking a martini. I went for The Exorcist purely because it was a great story. When [writer] Bill Blatty sent me the book I thought it was terrifying, but I also thought it was one of the most profoundly religious things I’d ever read. I know it’s hard to believe, but we never set out to shock anyone with The Exorcist.

We never even wanted to make a horror film.

We set out to make a film about the mystery of faith, whatever that might mean.

“Whether you believe in a given religion or not, everybody is curious about the eternal mysteries, about the afterlife, and about God. The ideas in The Exorcist certainly weren’t accepted by everyone who saw it – but those same ideas are part of what I think made it work at the time, and what makes it continue to fascinate people today. Nobody knows the answers, but The Exorcist at least asks the questions.”

Sorcerer 1977

Explosive cargo is transported through South America in Friedkin’s sweaty-palmed remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear…

“Sorcerer is the film that came closest to the vision I had for it. It’s one of the few films I made that I can still be amazed by. I look at it now and I don’t know how we were able to fight through all of those obstacles and problems and achieve that film – a film that seems almost seamless.

“The two studios that financed it didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and it opened as a critical and commercial failure. Over the past 40-something years, somehow, it’s become one of the most appreciated films that I’ve made, and I’m still very proud of it.

“The reality of the shoot was even worse than whatever you’ve heard. We all got sick. I managed to make it through on set, but right after I came home I contracted malaria. My doctor misdiagnosed it and I suffered with that for six months. And then when the film failed at the box office, it took a really heavy toll on me. I thought, at the time, that I had made my masterpiece. I wasn’t myself for years after making Sorcerer.

“I don’t know how much Star Wars had to do with it… I do know that Star Wars captured the zeitgeist in 1977, and Sorcerer wasn’t a part of that. When a film like Star Wars comes out, it certainly makes it difficult for the competition. I wouldn’t want to have a film out today competing with Avengers: Endgame. It’s what we call ‘a vacuum cleaner’ movie… it pulls in everything else.”

To Live And Die In LA 1985

William Petersen is a maverick Secret Service agent on the hunt for a counterfeiter in an authentically ’80s thriller…

“That was probably the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had making a movie. Orson Welles once said that making a film was like playing with the biggest electric train set that a child could ever dream of, and To Live And Die In LA was my train set. I got to control an entire freeway in los Angeles for five weekends, seven hours a day. All to try and create the best chase scene I could come up with – even if it did forever get compared to one I did in The French Connection.

“I worked on that movie with a guy who had been a Secret Service agent for 19 years. A lot of the stories in the film came from real things that had happened to him. He actually got us a counterfeiter who he had arrested, and put in jail, and he got this guy out of prison so he could come on set and show us how to make fake money. “There’s a line in the film where Chance

[William Petersen] says, ‘I can do whatever I want,’ and they really could. These Secret Service guys had complete carte blanche to do anything they wanted – and the world of counterfeiting was probably as rare a subject as the S&M clubs were in Cruising at the time – so the whole thing was just irresistible. These characters were leading such dangerous lives, and they were on such a collision course, that I knew it had to almost be a suicide story to make sense.”

Bug 2006

Michael Shannon is a deranged veteran convinced that he has a pest problem…

“I saw the play on stage and I fell in love with Bug. It was beautifully written by Tracy letts – who I think is one of the most important playwrights in America – but it was this challenge again of telling a story in a really claustrophobic place that most appealed to me.

“I knew of relationships like that. That idea of being so in love with someone that you can’t see their faults – and the idea that you can absorb the paranoia of the person that you’re closest to. It’s still really fascinating I think. It even maybe explains a lot of acts of terrorism carried out by people under the sway of others.

“I understand why they sold it as a horror, but I don’t think it did it any favours. Bug has elements of horror, but I think the idea of that genre has changed so much. It’s so hard now to conceive a horror movie in realistic circumstances.”

Killer Joe 2011

Matthew McConaughey is a ruthless detective/ contract killer drawn into a dysfunctional family unit…

“I knew I needed to make Killer Joe as soon as

I read it. Again, I thought it was just an exceptional piece of writing, but the basic dark, funny, absurd concept just appealed to my quirky nature.

“This was easily one of the best casts

I’ve ever worked with, too – from Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch to Juno Temple and Gina Gershon – they were all just exceptional.

“The ratings board gave the film an X and there was nothing we could do except mutilate the whole thing to get an R. Frankly, it wasn’t even frustrating any more. I’d been through it so many times before that I had absolutely no respect left for the censors. I remember seeing an interview with the guy who banned The Exorcist from home video. The guy said, ‘I’m not banning the film because it’s bad, in fact I think it’s great – but it has the power to influence children.’ Do you know what that does to me? My films have never been meant for children but that’s up to the parents, not the government! The board has destroyed plenty of films over the years and that’s exactly what they wanted to do to Killer Joe. Thank God we didn’t let them get away with it.”

CRUISING IS OUT ON BLU-RAY ON 19 AUGUST.