William Friedkin and French actress Jeanne Moreau on their wedding day in Paris, February 8, 1977. Photo: AFP
This interview was first published in 2013 and was reissued after the death of 87-year-old William Friedkin.
William Friedkin, Hollywood's most explosive director, has only tried therapy once. The session took place on April 11, 1972, the day after he won the Oscar for Best Director for The French Connection. He was 37 years old and a Hollywood star, but he woke up so depressed that he couldn't get out of bed. His business manager sent him to a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who took notes while Friedkin sat and talked for an hour. “I was thinking of something. Complete lie. The guy was a complete stranger. Why should I tell him what's really happening to me?”
Fridkin left, never to return, even after suffering a stressful heart attack in his early forties. “I read Freud a lot. A lot of his stuff is insightful but overzealous. I don't need to know more about myself. I know what's wrong with me.”
The tantrums and explosions of Hurricane Billy are, of course, legendary. His «take no prisoners» antics during the making of classic films like The French Connection and The Exorcist put even arrogant rivals like Peter Bogdanovich and Michael Cimino to shame. When Friedkin wasn't visiting prostitutes or firing people (70 people in one film alone), he would spank the actors to provoke a reaction or fire real shotguns to get the right sound effect. No doubt he was a seventies movie savage and it was a very crowded field.
William Friedkin in Venice, 2011 Credit & Copyright: AP
Forty years later, and several setbacks, he has once again resumed the process of digging deep into his personal history. The result is a stunning 475-page memoir, The Friedkin Connection, that is as raw, outrageous, and unpredictable as the man himself.
He admits he didn't believe in Gene Hackman when they filmed The French Connection. He wanted Jackie Gleason to play the lead, and the pair fought constantly: «His outbursts [on screen] were aimed right at me… more than drug smugglers.» And after auditioning 1,000 girls for The Exorcist, Friedkin chose the «normal, happy» Linda Blair because she understood the concept of masturbation. — Have you ever done this? Friedkin asked a 12-year-old girl sitting next to her mother. “Of course,” she retorted. «Isn't it?»
We meet at his home in Bel Air, where he lives with his 21-year-old wife, former Paramount head Sherry Lansing. It is located in a green canyon with a rich history of cinema. Delores Del Rio lived down the street, as did Sidney Poitier and Judy Garland. Friedkin lives right on top of the hill in an imposing Italian-style villa the size of Xanadu outside a gate.
He comes out to greet me, looking tanned and hair-do in his signature tinted glasses. In his striped shirt and gaberdine trousers, he could easily pass for a Colombian drug lord; only his big spongy sneakers say otherwise.
As fans of his DVD commentaries or Q&A know, Friedkin has a remarkably pompous manner. He's foul-mouthed, outrageous, funny, and surprisingly passionate, even at 77. He's also pretty much the same guy, whether he's addressing the high-end New York audience or the lecture hall of film students. “Do you know who Billy Wilder is? Get the hell out of here!”
At the mention of the Twilight movies, he shakes his head in disgust. — F*** Twilight. “We want to act in films because we saw New Moon!” We go into the living room and sit by the flickering fireplace. He initially personifies noble politeness, but at the first mention of modern cinema, his familiar declamatory manner boils.
“There were some really good films in the seventies, like Parallax View, which dealt with the human condition and moral complexity. It's gone. Now it's all about guys in spandex suits flying around saving the world. Today there are many good films. (Pause.) I can't name them… But it's not for me anymore, I'll tell you that. He presses the electronic clicker and a servant in a Union Jack T-shirt and silver shorts appears to take orders for coffee and croissants.
Gene Hackman in The French Connection
“For me, the golden era of cinema was the forties and fifties. MGM musicals form the backbone of American cinema. Nothing made in the seventies, with the exception of the Godfather movies, compares to what was made in the forties. There is no All About Eve, Citizen Kane, or Treasures of the Sierra Madre.
“If there’s one thing I regret, it’s that I didn’t get into the studio system where a director could do three or four. films per year. Like Michael Curtis. Some were good, some were bad, one or two were masterpieces like Casablanca. I haven't made 20 films in 50 years. And I didn’t take a vacation either.”
One theme that comes up in his book is how difficult it is to make a film, even in the so-called golden era of filmmaking. “As you can imagine, Sean, that was the main reaction to my book – how difficult it was. It wasn't difficult at all! Frankly, the problems of a filmmaker maintaining his career are of little consequence to the grand scheme of life. A job that has to be worked every morning is hard.”
He spreads out his napkin and takes a bite of a croissant. “Whatever so-called struggle I write about is nothing compared to what Vincent van Gogh went through. He made more than 3,500 works — drawings, sketches, watercolors, oils — and could not sell a single painting. He produced all this work and didn't get credit.» He looks shocked at the thought that any trace of self-pity could seep into his book. «I hope my book doesn't sound like Mein Kampf.»
There's no danger in that, unless I skipped the chapter in which Adolf Hitler goes looking for seats in New York's S&M gay bars wearing nothing but a bandage. Friedkin did just that when researching the 1980 thriller Cruise. “Honestly, it didn’t bother me much,” he told biographer Nat Segaloff in 1990. — If I were John Travolta, I might have some problems. But I was just another fat Jew in a tracksuit.”
Friedkin grew up poor on the North Side of Chicago and was the only son of immigrants from Russia. “We had a one-room apartment, but I did not know that we were poor until I finished school. Television has been a miracle in our homes.» He remembers that his parents had a very warm relationship, but the most important incident in his book is a violent one.
After a year of bullying by a child at a Jewish school, Friedkin finally snapped and attacked him in retaliation. “Something has entered my mind that I'm not going to take it anymore. I headlocked him like I've seen wrestling on TV and hit his head on the pavement. I remember a distinct feeling of wanting to kill this guy. I don't know what stopped me.»
William Friedkin and Linda Blair on the set of The Exorcist
He says all this with an air of complete equanimity. You can understand why director Michael Mann asked him to play Hannibal Lecter in his 1986 thriller Manhunter. “I thought he was playing a prank on me,” says Friedkin. «I said, 'Do you see Hannibal Lecter in me?' He said, “I see exactly Hannibal Lecter in you. You don't look psychotic, but you are.
Friedkin's memoir sheds new light on many of the great scenes of bullying and intimidation in Friedkin's work, such as the illogical interrogation of Gene Hackman in The French Connection: “When was the last time you picked your feet? Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie? You were there, right? … You took off your shoes, put your toes between your toes and poked around with your feet, didn't you? Now say it!”
Friedkin dropped out of high school without graduating and took a job as a mailman at a local television station. Colleagues remember him as a daring boy, with a hint of a swindler. His father may have been a modest man (he worked as a clothing salesman), but many of Friedkin's uncles were volcanic scoundrels. One of them was a police officer who shot one of Al Capone's henchmen in cold blood and then shot himself through the arm to make it look like self-defense.
On television, young Billy rose to the rank of studio manager before making a documentary about a man on death row. It proved to be his ticket to Hollywood, where he paid his dues by making a Sonny and Cher movie and adapting theatrical productions such as The Boys in the Band. He's justifiably proud of his adaptation of Harold Pinter's 1968 novel The Birthday, but the performances are full of fully realized menace. Tellingly, it is full of bullying and intimidation, which can be fully traced in his latest films, The Beetle and Killer Joe.
Leslie-Anne Down and William Friedkin in 1981. Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage
The dangerous tension between good and evil that so fascinated Friedkin found its most famous expression in The Exorcist. Everyone remembers the dizzying and vomit-spewing action, but this is also a film of great skill. Take the scene where Linda Blair comes to a party and urinates on the carpet. It's not the urination that makes the scene as powerful as the subtle shots of shocked guests' reactions.
Armed with memoirs, it is impossible not to note that it is the psychiatrist of the film that is demonically grabbed by the balls. But any attempt to psychologically link these elements together falls short of a business bark. “When I wrote this book, I did not seek introspection. We have all been given these two great gifts of life and love. And they are both ephemeral. There is nothing you can do about it.
“You meet someone and you fall in love with them. I could meet the same person and have no interest in ever seeing him again. Love is a mystery, like all life. I'm not kidding myself. If you can translate it into introspection, great.”
He certainly does not shy away from admitting his professional mistakes. The most important moment was the moment when he turned down Steve McQueen's proposed remake of «Revenge for Fear», released in 1977 under the title «The Wizard». McQueen liked the script but wanted to shoot closer to Los Angeles so he could be close to new love Ali McGraw.
Friedkin, capitalizing on the success of The Exorcist, was determined to make the film in South America, so he ended up making the film with Roy Scheider. The result is something like a lost masterpiece, but it has deteriorated horribly. «The most beautiful landscape in the world,» says Friedkin, «doesn't mean shit compared to a close-up shot of Steve McQueen.»
To be fair, The Wizard was released in the United States a week after the opening of Star Wars, which brought American cinema back to comforting fantasy. It was the cruel irony of Friedkin's dark epic about four scoundrels carrying nitroglycerin through the jungle; the evil wizard of the film's title is fate, a particularly violent version.
«It's something that's haunted me ever since I was smart enough to contemplate it, the fact that you can get out of front door and you could be blown away by a hurricane, or an earthquake, or something falling through the roof. It's the idea that we really can't control our destiny, neither our birth nor our death.»
For all his frankness, the only glaring omission in Friedkin's book is any mention of his sexual exploits or ex-wives. “In the context of this story, they are secondary,” he says. I contend that sexuality is a big part of his films — any exploits will be illuminated. “I really don't think, Shawn, that you need to know about my various sexual affairs. Or that someone else needs it.”
It's a strange dead end moment; he is not a prude, just thematically determined. “I wrote about them. I filled a hundred pages of Moleskine notebooks with my one-night stands, my business. But I decided that they had no place in professional memoirs. First, these are the real people we are talking about. Many of them were pleasant. Some of them were complete failures.”
Which makes it even more interesting, doesn't it? He shrugs in agreement. “My wife said to me as she read the pages, ‘Why is this in a memoir? What is the purpose of that, other than to tickle?»
William Friedkin with wife Sherry Lansing (left) and exorcist star Linda Blair, 1999. Photo: AFP
The great thing about all this is that he doesn't seem even remotely offended by my lewdness. “If I were to write about my other three marriages,” he explains, “all of which failed, it would only be from my point of view. I wasn't going to go to these women and get their point of view. I still communicate with Jeanne [Moro, his second wife]. The thing is, I never see them. It's because I have nothing in common with them, to be honest. And probably not at the time. I could not give a reasonable reason why I married these women.
I look bewildered by this last statement. Moreau was the sad-eyed beauty of French cinema. Leslie-Anne Down, his third wife, was the British bombshell from Upstairs, Downstairs. Both seriously attractive women. “Yes, but it’s superficial,” he says. “The thing is, with my marriages, it takes two people to ruin a marriage. These women are not only to blame for the fact that I lost interest in them and realized that this was a minor relationship. That's how I look at them right now — like they're worthless.»
This is pretty harsh. «It's true. I see them as highlights.» Moreau at least introduced him to Proust, who occupies two shelves in his crowded office. «Like many others, I celebrate my life both before Proust and after Proust. You will find Proust has parallels with all sorts of ideas and themes in your life, if you are willing to give yourself to him.»
Then he concedes and tells me a cheeky story cut from the manuscript. . This was during the Wizard's reconnaissance location in the Dominican Republic, where he ended up on the beach at night having sex with the mistress of a local colonel (a colonel, by the way, who recently shot a man in a restaurant for being a communist.)
“She was very persuasive,” he says «After a few minutes of bliss… well, more than a few minutes, I hear rifle bolts clicking and shouting in Spanish. I open my eyes and see six rifles pointed at my head. I thought, 'It's all over. They'll say I'm a communist.' and kill me on the fucking beach.” Then the woman stood up, still naked, and yelled at them. Words like «Get out of here or the Colonel will rip your heart out!»
He takes a sip. your coffee. “Of course, I continued to see her. Just not on the beach.”
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