Tuesday night saw William Friedkin take the floor at the Screen on the Green in Islington, following the first ever Blu-Ray screening of The French Connection to promote the new release on December 1.
The film itself is as gritty as ever: mean, dirty, brutal; but the print was (more or less) pristine. Some of the colours looked a little smudged up on the big screen, and the lighting looked a little over-saturated leading to a loss of detail in some places, but that was small potatoes, and Friedkin professed himself well pleased.
The post-event Q&A was lively. It was hosted by Mark Kermode, who obviously knows ‘Billy’ pretty well after shooting a documentary about The French Connection, and writing what Friedkin called ‘the best book ever’ about The Exorcist. Kermode set the tone for the evening when he used the word ‘apocryphal’, much to Friedkin’s bemusement, and thereafter insisted the director refer to him as ‘Doctor’.
But it was Friedkin’s show – he spoke at length and with customary relish about the technical aspects of the restoration: how they used the same three strip Technicolor process as John Huston on Moby Dick, which involved creating a 70 per cent black and white strip and laying the colour over that. He also talked about the use of electric jazz in the French Connection score, and how he managed to find the sound engineer from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo to use on The Exorcist – a Latin American dude who spoke no English and watched the film once before creating the entire sound track using his own body (the sound of Linda Blair’s head revolving was created by scraping his hands down a wallet).
There were also plenty of anecdotes from the set – how he shot the car chase by goading the stunt driver into doing 90 mph through crowded traffic by telling him he was doing a rubbish job (hence the quote in the standfirst), and how Gene Hackman hated his character so much that he and Friedkin were constantly at each other’s throat (in fact, Hackman was only fourth choice for the role, and even then only got it because they had to start shooting before the new management at Fox canned the project).
The whole night was a reminder of what a truly great director Friedkin was at his peak, and the audience quite rightly lapped it up.
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Below is the interview with William Friedkin that ran in the Man on Wire issue of LWLies.
William Friedkin
This movie brat’s macho swagger symbolised a new wave of grittily authentic cinema. So why is he extolling the virtues of CGI?
“Get the shot,” says William Friedkin, “that was our mindset at the time: nothing matters but the shot.” For a rag-tag band of filmmakers in the 1970s, that quixotic search for the shot would test their courage, their endurance, even their sanity. This was New Hollywood, and if it was inspired more by the European New Wave than the comic extremes of Buster Keaton, it shared his total physical commitment to cinema.
No risk was too reckless. For Friedkin, who would go on to make The Exorcist on a shoot that has passed into legend – deaths, curses, evil in the film reel – the moment of truth came in 1971 in the back of a Pontiac LeMans. Filming a pivotal chase scene in Brooklyn for The French Connection, he knew that there was no way to fake it. “Everything that we did back then had to be done mechanically, you had to get out there and do it,” he explains. “You want a car chase at 90mph? You had to shoot it at 90mph.”
Wrapped in an old mattress for protection, Friedkin operated the camera as a stunt driver took the car through uncontrolled traffic. Other stunt drivers were supposed to create realistic-looking near misses, but with only one take, errors in timing – and the resulting smashes – were all left in the film. Friedkin chose to operate the camera because he was the only one without a wife and kids. “I was very young, I had no concept of death or injury; I just wanted to get on film what I wanted to get on film.”
In 1977, two years before Francis Ford Coppola discovered his own heart of darkness, Friedkin ventured into the jungles of Mexico for the film that turned out to be his greatest folly, Sorcerer. Based on the French classic, The Wages of Fear, it sees Roy Scheider as a remote oil platform operator driving a truckload of volatile chemicals through the jungle. The shoot took Friedkin to Mexico’s parched Oaxaca province, where everything went very, very wrong. Besides delays forced on them when the rivers began to dry up in the heat, leading to crippling budget overruns, 50 people on the crew succumbed to gangrene and had to be medevac’d out. “I feel very lucky that things weren’t worse,” is how Friedkin remembers it today. “Thank God, nobody died. A lot of the stuff that I had done could have injured people badly.”
And yes, there’s regret in this admission. Friedkin might be the macho muse of the ’70s, but ask him if he’d do it all again and the answer is a resounding ‘no’. “The guys like Werner Herzog and myself and Coppola who went out and had to do it all, we only did that because the CGI wasn’t available – it wasn’t even a gleam in someone’s eye,” he says. “If I was doing the same pictures again – and I’m sure this is true of Coppola – we would do it the modern way.”
That’s a major bombshell from somebody whose work is the antithesis of the visual anaemia of computer effects. But Friedkin is unapologetic. The effects are good, he says, and moreover, the audience simply doesn’t care: “It’s like magic; everybody knows that the magician producing the elephant is a trick but when they see it they think it’s great.”
While that may be true in the short term, surely part of the reason that films like The French Connection and Apocalypse Now have remained so popular is because of the mythology that attaches to them. The simple act of ‘being there’ invested these films with a sense of reality, an air of danger, that audiences react to on an almost subconscious level. If we knew, in the back of our minds, that Coppola and Friedkin hadn’t suffered for their films, would we care about them in the same way?
While Friedkin insists that the results would have been just as powerful (“It would have been the same if the story had been the same because I think we would have used these graphics with some restraint”), it’s more a question of evolution. For Friedkin, the age of practical effects is coming to an end. “Nobody’s going to go out and try to do the things that we did,” he says. “Now that you have the technology, why not use it?”
If the old-fashioned approach to filmmaking is to survive, it’s up to a new generation to save it. After all, at 72, Friedkin isn’t going to be climbing into the back of a Pontiac any time soon. “I have since that period contemplated death, and so I appreciate life even more,” he says. “I won’t be running around with cameras at 90mph; I just wouldn’t do it now to get the shot. Yes, all of that stuff was our mindset at the time, but I don’t think that that’s a healthy attitude to life.”
