I am feeling a bit gutted by Friedkins passing.
I looked forward to a long interview with him for his Venice-bound Showtime remake of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.
None of that can happen now, and Deadline can only offer condolences to Sherry.
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The whole interview is presented as originally published nearly a decade ago.
We got talking aboutSorcererandhis attachment to direct Don Winslows superb novelThe Winter of Frankie Machine.
What made that era possible that isnt in place today?FRIEDKIN: There were a number of factors.
Studios were run by guys who really loved films, and many of them had been producers.
Probably the biggest factor is, there were no formulas.
A whole movement back then was spurred by the release ofEasy Rider.
This benefited the younger guys of my generation.
The studios just felt that maybe we had some formula.
DEADLINE: Did you?FRIEDKIN: We didnt.
We were mostly influenced by the European films of the 60s.
The French New Wave.
Kurosawa and other Japanese filmmakers.
Every studio turned it down.
Many of them turned it down two or three times over a two year period.
DEADLINE: Why?FRIEDKIN: They didnt get it.
The chase scene was never in a script.
I created that chase scene, with the producer Philip DAntoni.
We just spit-balled ideas.
And he was right.
Thats why we settled on Gene Hackman who was not our first choice.
We walked 55 blocks and came up with a chase.
Nobody ever asked to see a script.
Nobody spent the kind of money they do today.
I cant think of any superhero film that existed in the 70s.
None come to mind.
DEADLINE: Were you aware you were working in a special time for the movie business?
The conversation among us back then was, whose work will survive, Godard or Fellini?
None of us knew the grosses of our pictures.
We all had percentages of profit, but thats not what motivated us.
I was very close and still am to Francis Coppola and others.
Our influences wereTreasure of the Sierra MadreandWhite Heat, films it would be impossible to get made today.
They didnt like the dailies ofThe Godfather; the guys who ran Paramount didnt like the cast.
They didnt want Brando, they didnt want Pacino.
I had the opposite experience.
He was ready for me to actually cast Jimmy Breslin as Jimmy Doyle.
Do you know who Jimmy Breslin is?
Id cast Roy Scheider and Alan Weeks, the young kid who gets chased in the first scene.
Jimmy just couldnt cut it, but he was the prototype for the guy I wanted.
I first offered that role to Jackie Gleason and that was the only time Zanuck ever vetoed me.
Gleason was willing to do the film and he was my idea of the character.
But Zanuck said no.
That was the real guy, Eddie Egan.
Gleason was closest to that, but the studio would have none of it.
So reluctantly we went with Gene.
So I guess the other thing about the 70s was, there was just a ton of pure luck.
DEADLINE: Isnt that the way it is, most times in the movie business?FRIEDKIN: Sometimes.
Do you know that we turned downStar Warsback then?
I had a company at Paramount, with Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, The Directors Company.
Because of Francis relationship with George Lucas, we were offeredStar Wars.
We didnt see it.
But we passed onStar Wars!
Lucas gave it to Francis because everybody else had passed.
Lucas agent, Jeff Berg, finally got Fox to say yes.
Thats how much that studio believed inStar Wars.
Now, the media and everybody else is addicted to the box office grosses.
Its all they care about.
Its hard to wax poetic about the latest super hero movie.
You had films then that attracted audiences and didnt cost so much that they could never make money.
The studios were not out then to out-do themselves with special effects and comic-book characters.
Im not really criticizing, just observing its different.
American cinema is now largely based on comic-book franchises.
Theyre working as a business so you cant criticize it because audiences have become conditioned to expect it.
None of them sold in his lifetime.
Today, youve got to be a billionaire to buy a Van Gogh.
Why wasnt the quality of that work recognized then, like it is now?
What was different 140 years ago?
Van Goghs brother was his art dealer, he sold many impressionist paintings and not one Van Gogh.
I only compare myself with him to suggest that sometimes a work gets recognized out of its time.
DEADLINE: What did it take to get that reconsideration?FRIEDKIN: It was a long struggle.
I had to go to court, just to find out who owned it.
DEADLINE: Star Wars, the movie you passed on, came out right alongside your film.
It seemed like everything changed right there.FRIEDKIN:Star Warstook all the theaters, and the audience.
John Cassavetes was the truest of the American independent filmmakers.
He didnt have anybody back him.
But that didnt bother anybody.
But what audience he did have appreciated his films and that was enough for some studio to release them.
Why didnt you wind up withSteve McQueen, the biggest star of the day?
I love this picture.
Then, he said, there are a couple of things I need you to do for me.
Can you write a part in there for her so she can be with me when Im shooting this?
I said Steve, you just told me it was the best script you ever read.
Theres no major role for a woman in there.
He said, okay, I get it.
Then why dont you make her a co-producer?
And he then said okay I understand that, then lets make it all in America.
I said, Steve Ive found the locations and Im committed to them.
I dont want to do it in America.
Because of those three reasons, he decided to pass.
DEADLINE: How did that work out for you?FRIEDKIN: Ill admit something.
If that came up today, I would have done anything he wanted.
I was so arrogant at that time.
I thought I was the star of that film.
So I didnt think that a close-up of Steve McQueen was worth a shot of the most beautiful landscape.
A close-up of McQueen was worth more.
Only my arrogance cost me that cast.
The concepts are the stars.
I dont think the star system exists now.
DEADLINE: Why did the star system die?FRIEDKIN: Studios dont nurture them anymore.
Again, luck played a part.
Humphrey Bogart only gotThe Treasure of Sierra Madrebecause George Raft turned it down.
Its one of the greatest American films ever.
How do you remember it.FRIEDKIN:Sorcererremains a metaphor for life.
That might be a reason people relate to it now.
They dont like each other but if they dont cooperate, theyll blow up, literally.
I think were on the edge of that disaster now, skirting it every day.
All these countries are riding on truckloads of volatile dynamite.
Thats the style that I adopted for the film.
That was life threatening.
When the film was over, I got malaria and had it four or five months.
Many of the guys who worked on that film came back with gangrene and other diseases.
Its not something I would do today.
DEADLINE: I wonder if you feel the same way about a couple of your other movies.
I re-watched The Exorcist, and those are shocking scenes for a young girl to play.
Also watched The French Connection, and that high speed car chase scene under the subway trestle.
There was always the risk on my films, where someone could have gotten hurt or worse.
It was only by the grace of God that nobody was injured or killed on those pictures.
I would not do that today.
I would not make a film today that could cause a squirrel to get a twisted ankle.
It was wrong.The French Connectionwas life-threatening in many ways.The Exorcistwas threatening to the sanity of that wonderful twelve-year-old girl.
We auditioned thousands of girls across the country, many on videotape.
She came to me on nobodys recommendation.
Her mother brought her in when I was looking at 16 year old girls who could play younger.
I could find nobody who could even withstand the psychological pressure of playing a role like that.
Linda had no acting experience.
She had only done some modeling but she was a straight-A student in Westport, Connecticut.
She was extremely knowledgeable and bright and together.
Her mother and father were separated at the time.
Her mother was on the set every day and appears in one small scene.
I actually loved that child like she was my own, and I treated her that way.
DEADLINE: What happened when there was a possession scene?FRIEDKIN: I made it all a game.
It was done in that way you would treat a child.
Again, its a miracle that she was not damaged.
Shes a fine woman in her fifties now.
She went through some problems that most teenagers go through, but came out fine.
We could not have made that film unless she was who she was.
It was only by the grace of God that it didnt.
While I had many people on the set concerned about safety, we defied all the laws of safety.
I had no permission to shoot that chase, except from the elevated train.
They let me shoot on the elevated train for about three or four hours a day.
That we had to get permission for.
But if they didnt give me permission, I was prepared to steal that stuff.
Just take my actors on a different elevated train every day and keep shooting until they threw us off.
I was surrounded by people who went along with me.
I had guys who were more than willing to take those risks with me.
I did have that.
I had a police siren turned up all the way, and that was it.
To get the most of the danger shots inThe French Connection, it was 90 miles an hour.
Basically one take with three cameras, from which I selected the shots.
The detective, named Randy Jurgenson, is still around and remembers those days very well.
I caused the traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge for one scene.
No permission to do it.
This gives you an idea of what was happening at the studios back then.
They knew what I was doing but they never tried to stop me.
I didnt have anybody come down and read me safety regulations.
I have to say that.
I cant bullshit it.
DEADLINE: You provided a taste of this blockbuster fever were in now, with The Exorcist.
I remember the lines around the blocks in Manhattan when it opened.
People were breaking down the doors.
They actually thought they were going to get busted over the rating.
I got an R-rating on that film, with no cuts.
He came up with all that stuff R, X, M, PG.
He was new in the job whenThe Exorcistwent to the Board.
He called me after he saw the film with his Board.
Were going to give it an R-rating with no cuts.
We all thought we were going to get an X for sure, and get busted.
Some cities played it with an X in spite of the fact that it had an R-rating.
It was an X in Washington where I shot it and it was an X in Boston.
In spite of what the ratings board tells you, they operate as censors.
Its a trade-off to get a certain rating.
With Aaron Stern, you had to do none of that.
He didnt see it as trying to purify the populus.
Now look, a lot of people sawThe Exorcistwho probably should not have.
But the X-rating was not going to stop them anyway.
When I was a kid, I grew up in Chicago and we didnt have ratings on pictures.
There was some pictures in Chicago that Mayor Daleys office just banned.
They couldnt come in, or if they could, they were Adults Only.
I managed to sneak in and see those pictures along with by buddy when we were in grammar school.
A film like Alfred Hitchcocks Rope, which was loosely based on the Loeb and Leopold murders.
James Stewart played a college professor and two young kids who had taken his Nietzschian philosophy to heart.
There were only twelve shots in the whole film.
The camera moves but only to follow actors.
But it is a movie about two kids getting away with a murder.
It was Adults Only in Chicago but it didnt stop me or my friend.
DEADLINE: Dustin Hoffman said recently that movies today are terrible and all the quality is on television.
Theyre different because of the new digital technology and they probably shouldnt even be called films anymore.
Im talking about series that develop character and story over eight or ten episodes.
These are the things I find myself watching more than cinema.
But I just sawMr.
Holmesand my wife and I were in tears.
God willing, Ill direct all the episodes and make a run at capture the vibe of the movie.
Im much interested in long-form television both as a director and as a viewer.
Some of these artists get chewed up and spat out.
We got access to better material and sometimes we got lucky.
Some studio guy sees some talent there.
And he came up with arguably the best ever American film, followed by a precipitous fall.
These young guys have a greater opportunity than my generation ever had.
We had to work our way up to the ranks.
My first job was the mail room for a television station in Chicago.
There were no schools teaching technique then.
You came up through the ranks and you learned by watching the guys before you do it.
If you had talent, it would come to the fore.
The greatest television Ive ever seen was done live onPlayhouse 90by John Frankenheimer.
Theres never been anything to equal it.
There were no tapes of those shows.
They existed in the minds of people like myself who were influenced by them.
Given the uptick in tolerance, how does it hold up?
There was perception back then that the movie depicted an abhorrent lifestyle.FRIEDKIN: That certainly wasnt our intention.
The film did not intend to make an overall comment about gay life at all.
So thats one of the few films that I couldnt even make today.
I shot in those clubs with the people who were all members of those clubs and participated freely.
A lot of people perceived it as a commentary on all of gay life, which it was not.
DEADLINE: Give your vision for turning The Winter Of Frankie Machine into a film.
I see this thing as a very tight little thriller with a great character.
Not a big budget picture.
It has all of the power of like a short Hemingway novel, very compact and complete.
Its got to be written for somebody who can pull that off without seeming like hes acting.
Were at the earliest stage.
I got the call about two weeks ago from Shane Salerno with a note from Don Winslow asking me.
DEADLINE: You know whod really nail that lead role of the retired hitman?FRIEDKIN: Whos that?
DEADLINE: Steve McQueen.FRIEDKIN: [Laughs].
Paul Newman, the one fromThe Verdict.
There are some others, not necessarily movie stars but actors.
Walton Goggins is a guy you could believe in that role.
He may not be 60; but hes got some mileage on him, it shows in his face.
McConaughey, who went to a different place inKiller Joe, he could do it.
If he wanted to do it Id say yes in a second.
