Sunday, November 26th | 2 Films
Prior to the October release of The Exorcist: Believer, director David Gordon Green expressed that he wished he had had the opportunity to share his film with William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist (1973), who died in August.
“My understanding was that he didn’t want involvement in the film production, but he would give us his thoughts after the movie,” Green told A.Frame, a magazine published by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. “I was very curious to see what he would think.”
Um, you sure about that, David? Being politic was not in Friedkin’s nature, neither in interviews nor on the set. In Francesco Zippel’s 2018 documentary Friedkin Uncut, Friedkin reveals that he only enters his films in festivals out of competition. “I don’t want a bunch of shmucks who call themselves judges sitting in a fucking room saying La Dolce Vita is not as good as Batman vs. Superman. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on. And the ship that brought them over here. And the dog that walks behind them. Fuck them all.”
Friedkin Uncut is the first of two films featured on TCM’s second night devoted to the Oscar-winning director of The French Connection (1971) as well as such era-defining films as The Boys in the Band (1970) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), envelope-pushing provocations such as Cruising (1980), and films that are only in recent years getting their full due, such as Sorcerer (1977), his take (not a remake, he insists in Friedkin Uncut) on The Wages of Fear (1953).
Featuring an extended interview with Friedkin, as well as commentary by several he directed (Ellen Burstyn, Willem Dafoe, William Petersen, Matthew McConaughey, Gina Gershon, to name just a few), as well as collaborators and colleagues (Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson), Friedkin Uncut indelibly captures Friedkin’s passion and committed work ethic.
“He becomes part of the atmosphere,” one actor remarks. “He’s passionate and he expects people to give 200 percent because he’s giving 200 percent.” To Friedkin, “rehearsal is for sissies,” and he was wont to limit the actors to one take. “I’m not looking for perfection I’m looking for spontaneity,” he says.
McConaughey, for one, says he was jazzed by the challenge to “just go for it.”
Juno Temple shares that Friedkin removed his own pants to show solidarity with her in advance of her nude scene in Killer Joe (2011).
The temptation is to call Friedkin Uncut a searingly-etched portrait of an artist, but Friedkin himself resisted such labels. “Out of this work there can come art,\" he insists. \"I don't have a perception of myself as an artist. That would be the beginning of the end.\"
Friedkin was among the first generation of the so-called New Hollywood directors that emerged in the 1970s, but unlike them, he is keen to emphasize, he did not attend film school. He grew up poor, albeit happy, in Chicago, to Jewish parents who emigrated from Ukraine. He got an entry level job in the mail room of WGN-TV. He would rise to direct some of the independent station’s most iconic shows, including “Bozo’s Circus” and “Garfield Goose” (Chicagoans of a certain age reading this are no doubt smiling right now).
Two things happened that changed his life. First, he says, he saw Citizen Kane (1941) at a revival house and was blown away by Orson Welles’ use of the film medium. The second was a party he attended where he learned about a man on Death Row who insisted he was innocent. Friedkin made a documentary, The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), which so moved the governor that he commuted Crump’s sentence. Crump was paroled in 1993.
Friedkin Uncut takes full measure of Friedkin’s volatile career, the hits, several misses, and controversies. But he continued to make films up until his death (his last was The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which premiered last September on Showtime).
Friedkin takes palpable delight in “demystifying the bullshit” that surrounds making movies. You need three things, he says, “Ambition, luck and the grace of God.”
Which brings us to the second film in the evening’s Friedkin tribute, The Exorcist (1973). You truly had to be there to fully appreciate the impact this adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestseller had on popular culture. In Friedkin Uncut, director Walter Hill notes that The Exorcist did for horror films what Star Wars (1977) did for sci-fi. Quentin Tarantino recalls that people lined up not to see the next show or the show after that, but the show after that. “People needed to see The Exorcist,” he gushes. “It was like nothing they had ever seen before.”
The Exorcist was a commercial and critical benchmark for Friedkin. It earned just over $233 million at the domestic box office on a budget of $11 million. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director) and went home with two (sound and adapted screenplay). It spawned sequels and propelled Mike Oldfield’s album, Tubular Bells to the top of the U.S. charts when its haunting theme was used in the film. It also spawned endless “devil made me do it jokes,” the equivalent of comedy hell.
Do try to watch Friedkin Uncut first. It contains entertaining anecdotes about the making of the film. Burstyn laughingly remembers that Max von Sydow, one of the great actors of his (or any) generation, got stuck on the now iconic line, “The power of Christ compels you.” “He was an atheist,” Burstyn says. According to her, Friedkin said, “On a list of 100 things that could go wrong, number 100 would be Max von Sydow blowing a line.”
Friedkin also relates how actor Stacy Keach was cast in the role of Father Karras, but was ultimately replaced by playwright Jason Miller (The Championship Season), who insisted to Friedkin that he was “that guy.” Against studio objections Friedkin recast the part.
Others get to the heart of The Exorcist’s undimmed power, and that is the documentary sensibility with which Friedkin presented the story. (Costa-Gavras’s Z [1969] was an influence on Friedkin’s aesthetic, he says). As Hitchcock did with The Birds (1963), Friedkin took the time to painstakingly establish this real cinematic world and get audiences engaged with the characters before unleashing hell.
Audiences, notes Wes Anderson, felt that the events in the film were really happening because it was built on something real.
If he had made the film, confesses Francis Ford Coppola, “I would probably have dealt with evil in terms of metaphor. Billy shows it in the most direct possible way. Friedkin doesn’t mince around. In Billy's film, he doesn't philosophize about evil, he shows you evil.\"
This was a subject that compelled Friedkin. In Friedkin Uncut, he reflects on good vs. evil in a way that if the documentary were released today and Friedkin was still alive, attempts would be made to cancel him on the spot.
“Hitler was evil incarnate, but I know a lot about Hitler that doesn’t add up to that,” he remarks. “There’s good and evil in everybody. It’s a constant struggle to have goodness overcome the dark side.”
