‘I Thought I Was Bulletproof’: William Friedkin Looks Back on the ’70s

BAMcinématek/Photofest Gene Hackman, Eddie Egan and William Friedkin during the making of “The French Connection.”

No one had a decade of moviemaking quite like William Friedkin did in the 1970s. Starting with his 1970 film adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play “The Boys in the Band,” Mr. Friedkin, the Chicago-born and bred director, went on to make the 1971 crime drama “The French Connection,” which won the Academy Award for best picture and earned Mr. Friedkin the Oscar for best director; and the smash horror hit “The Exorcist,” which brought in nearly $200 million in its original 1973 release, and turned a generation of moviegoers off pea soup. But Mr. Friedkin finished out the decade with misfires and cinematic oddities, like “Sorcerer,” his 1977 remake of Clouzot’s “Wages of Fear”; his comic 1978 crime caper ; and the thriller “Cruising,” released in 1980, which starred Al Pacino as an undercover police officer investigating murders in Manhattan’s gay S&M clubs.

“I thought I was bulletproof,” Mr. Friedkin, 77, said of this era. “And I wasn’t. But I thought I was.”

BAMcinématek/Photofest William Friedkin during the making of “Bug” in 2006.

All  of these movies will be shown at a  retrospective  “Friedkin 70s,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning Thursday and ending May 7. Mr. Friedkin, who will appear for Thursday’s screening of “Sorcerer” and Friday’s screening of “Cruising,” spoke recently to ArtsBeat about this period of his career. In these edited excerpts from that conversation, he discusses the ups, the downs and the devil-worshipers he met on the Iraqi set of “The Exorcist.”

Q.

Do you see any themes or common threads that connect the movies in this retrospective?

A.

In almost 50 years of directing films, I’ve made only 19. If you look at the films of the directors who worked at the Hollywood studios in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, those guys made four or five films a year. Michael Curtiz, who directed “Casablanca,” he did a couple films every year. And some of them are good and some of them are terrible and forgettable, and maybe one or two is a masterpiece.  I would be a better director if I had been in that system. Most people say it was a kind of slavery contract. You had to do what the studios told you to do. Well, whoever the hell was at the studios telling them to do it, they were geniuses.

Q.

The films that bookend this period of your career, “The Boys in the Band” and “Cruising,” were each controversial in their day, for different reasons. With all the time that has since gone by, do you find those controversies to be petty now?

A.

No, they don’t seem petty at all. I understand how and why they came about. When we released “Boys in the Band,” the guys in the film were still, for the most part, in the closet with their friends, or in the workplace. The gay liberation movement, which had started about a year before with the Stonewall riots, they were not looking to see films about guys who are in the closet.

“Cruising,” was set in the clubs - not the gay clubs, but the S&M clubs, which many gay people had never seen - which to me was just an exotic background. By the time it came out, the gay liberation movement was very strong. And this sort of subject matter was not the best foot forward at that time. So I understood the protests, I really did. But I was not thinking, when I made the film, about how this would affect gay liberation or not. When you’re making a film, you don’t start to think of the social consequences, or whether there will be any. Now, that might have been nearsighted on my part. But that’s the way I felt.

Q.

Were you stunned when “The French Connection” was as successful as it was, given the hardships you had to endure to make it?

A.

I didn’t think of it that way, honestly. I thought of it as golden opportunities that were coming my way for no apparent reason. There are people in this life that have hardships. If you’re a guy who has even a shot at directing a film, you can’t be thinking about hardships. I never really thought in terms of success or failure, other than how far I missed my expectations.

Q.

How so?

A.

I had a whole different idea of casting. I cast a guy to play Frog 1, the drug dealer - he wasn’t the guy I intended! My casting director cast Fernando Rey by mistake. Gene Hackman wasn’t even on my list of choices. But I had to make the film with him because he was the last man standing. Everyone else either turned it down or, as when I auditioned Jimmy Breslin, he couldn’t do it. I had to struggle with Hackman, and it was only after I had finished the editing and saw that it was working, he obviously is the force that ignites that picture.

Q.

Was it hard to keep your perspective when you won the Oscar for best director, and the film won  best picture?

A.

I had no perspective back then. After I won the Oscar, I thought I was bulletproof. And I wasn’t. But I thought I was. You often pay dearly when hubris sets in. I thought, well, I have the formula now. I really know how to reach audiences.

Q.

I’m almost afraid to ask about “The Exorcist.” I feel like you must be sick of talking about it.

A.

I know what you mean. I’d rather now that people talk about my latest films. But I can see that films like “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” and even “To Live and Die in L.A.” are still very much with audiences. I’m very pleased about that. Who wouldn’t be?

Q.

I thought I’d heard every story there was to be told about “The Exorcist,” until I read your account in your memoir, “The Friedkin Connection,” about meeting that group of devil-worshipers when you were filming in Iraq.

A.

They’re a Muslim sect, and their basic belief is that God rules everything in heaven, but the devil rules on earth. So they worship the devil. They had no idea what the hell I was doing there. They had heard that this crazy American was taking raw meat to the statue of the demon Pazuzu. And when I told them it was for a movie, and we had hoped to attract wild dogs and vultures, they were disappointed. And the people from the Baathist party, my handlers, said, “Don’t go.  It’s dangerous. We have no control over that.” I had this wonderful translator who was also my guide, and he took me there. It was a great experience.

Q.

How do you feel about “Sorcerer” today?

A.

It has been extremely difficult and troublesome. I didn’t expect the initial reception that it got, and I didn’t expect that I’d have to fight for it. There is no legal problem anymore, but I had to sue because the two studios, Universal and Paramount, couldn’t find the legal documents of who actually owned it. Both studios had been sold two or three times since I made “Sorcerer.” And what happens then is all the documents disappear. It has been a kind of a burden that I’ve carried with me for 35 years. I guess it’s just stubbornness that keeps me making sure that it comes back for people to see.

Q.

Are you able to see the movie on its own merits, without thinking about how it did at the box office, or how it was received by critics?

A.

Certainly I regret that it wasn’t a critical or a commercial success. The zeitgeist was changing. It came out a week after “Star Wars,” and “Star Wars” really changed the way people think about, What is a movie? Right to this day, and beyond. All these films about the Avengers and the Transformers, video games and comic books, that’s what, for the most part, Hollywood cinema has become. That just automatically opened the floodgates to people wanting pure entertainment that could be seen by people of all ages, basically. Would my film have worked if there was no “Star Wars”? I don’t know. But without “Star Wars,” I think American film would be different today.