Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we are really
diving deep, tackling the life and work of William
Friedkin, a filmmaker whose career, well, it
wasn't just peaks and valleys, was it? It was
more like a series of massive explosions and
shockwaves. Absolutely. Friedkin, active from
1935 right up to 2023. He's absolutely central
to that new Hollywood wave in the 70s. Director,
producer, screenwriter. But just calling him
new Hollywood feels, I don't know, incomplete.
It misses that wild, almost contradictory nature
of his career. You called him the agnostic auteur
of extremes. Exactly, because that's the paradox,
isn't it? That's what we want to unpack for you
today. How does one person deliver these world
-changing hits? I mean, films that didn't just
succeed, they rewrote the rules. Think The French
Connection. Think The Exorcist. Right. Absolute
game changers. And then almost immediately. follow
them up with these crushing, deeply personal
failures like Sorcerer. The story behind that
one is just legendary in its failure. And then
the kicker, the really unexpected turn, is how
that whole turbulent ride leads him in the last
part of his life to become a director of all
things high end European opera. It's just it's
a career built on this fierce, uncompromising
vision. Yeah. Where massive success and like.
Total catastrophe. We're just flip sides of the
same coin. Exactly. And that duality, that's
the real hook here. We're talking about a guy
who gets the Oscar for Best Director, Best Picture
for French Connection, gives us The Exorcist,
which, I mean, you could argue is the greatest
horror film ever, period. No question. It's always
in the conversation. And yet decades on, he's
making these really tight, critically loved films
based on stage plays like Bug or Killer Joe.
And his very last film, The Kane Mutiny Court
Martial, which came out just after he passed,
fits right into that. late stage pattern, a return
to that theatrical structure. And his personal
life seemed just as intense. Two sons, Cedric
and Jack, married four times. Jean Moreau, the
iconic actress, was one wife. And Sherry Lansing,
the producer, was his wife when he died in August
2023. Heart failure and pneumonia at 87. Yeah,
he was, by all accounts, engaged and fighting
right up to the very end, just like his films.
Okay, so to really get where that ferocious,
sometimes really unsettling intensity in his
films comes from. We got to go back, back to
his beginnings in Chicago. Born there August
29, 1935. His whole foundation seems built on,
well, survival and displacement. Yeah, the roots
are crucial. His parents were Jewish immigrants.
They came from Ukraine, which was part of the
Russian Empire back then. And it wasn't just
casual integration. His family, grandparents
and parents, they had to flee. There was a really
horrific anti -Jewish pogrom in 1903. Wow. So
that's the backdrop. That experience of being
forced out, of persecution. must seep in. Absolutely.
That's the bedrock. Resilient, born from terrible
adversity. He grew up lower middle class. His
father, Louis, sounds like quite a character
merchant, seaman, semi -pro softball player,
sold men's clothes later on. And his mother,
Rachel, was a nurse. Friedkin apparently called
her a saint. But the relationship with his father
sounds like it was complicated. Oh, very much
so. Complex is the word. You see film historians
pointing this out. Often Friedkin apparently
saw his dad with this mix of like affection,
but also contempt. Contempt because he felt his
father hadn't made more of himself. OK, that's
interesting. You can almost see that mix in his
characters, right? That blend of contradictory
drives. Popeye Doyle, Father Karras. These guys
are taunt. Exactly. Like that internal conflict,
that push -pull, became the engine for so many
of his protagonists. Often anti -heroes, driven
by these raw, messy feelings. Maybe it's that
classic thing, you know, the ambitious son reacting
to what he saw as his father's lack of drive.
Makes sense. Though, academically, he wasn't
exactly setting the world on fire early on. He
was pretty open about not being a great student.
No, he was more into basketball, apparently even
thought about going pro for a bit. But he graduated
super young at 16. 16. He chalked it up to social
promotion, basically. They just pushed him through,
which kind of suggests he moved fast through
systems he didn't entirely buy into. But that
lack of focus, it vanished the second he hit
the working world. Right, because he landed somewhere
immediately. Mailroom at WBKB TV, straight out
of high school. Basic entry level stuff. But
the climb was just meteoric. It's almost unbelievable.
Within two years. So he's like 18 years old.
He's not in the mailroom anymore. He's directing
live TV. He's directing documentaries. 18 directing.
That's insane. It really is. He clearly had this
natural instinct for the camera for capturing
things as they happened. It shows he found his
calling like instantly. And he poured all that
intensity into it. And he had a really significant
early success that kind of foreshadowed his later
style, didn't he? That 1962 documentary, The
People vs. Paul Crump. Yes. That film was fascinating
because it wasn't just, you know, good TV. It
had real teeth. It actually made a difference.
It won a big award at the San Francisco Film
Festival, sure. But the bigger deal was its impact.
It directly helped get Paul Crump's death sentence
commuted to life imprisonment. OK, so right there,
early on, you see the Friedkin signature taking
brutal reality, showing it without flinching
and achieving something high stakes, something
real. Exactly. That success was huge. It gave
him credibility and it landed him a job with
a merger documentary producer, David L. Wolper.
That was the springboard then to Hollywood. That
was the ticket. So 1965, he heads west, documentary
skills honed. ready to tackle feature films.
But first, a little run -in with royalty. Hollywood
royalty, anyway. Alfred Hitchcock, right. He
directed an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
One of the last ones, yeah. Off -season in 65.
And you picture it. Friedkin, the young, scrappy
documentarian, maybe a bit rebellious. And Hitchcock,
the absolute master of control, precision, formality.
Right. And the story goes, Hitchcock basically
chewed him out. Why? Because Friedkin wasn't
wearing a tie on set. No tie. That's the big
crime. For Hitchcock, maybe it was. It's this
perfect little clash of styles, isn't it? The
old guard formalist versus the new wave naturalist.
You can just imagine Friedkin bristling at that,
maybe filing it away. Yeah, filing it under things
I will never do. So his first actual feature
film, not exactly a triumph. No, good times in
1967 with Sonny and Cher. He called it unwatchable
later. It seems like one of those jobs you take
to get your foot in the door, you know? It really
wasn't his style. So he learned from that. Seems
like it. He pivoted pretty quickly back towards
stuff with more substance, often adapted from
the stage, which is interesting given his later
career. He did The Birthday Party in 68, based
on that really unsettling Harold Pinter play.
Then a musical comedy, The Night They Raided
Minsky's. Quite a mix. But the one that really
stands out from that early period, maybe, is
The Boys in the Band in 1970. Yeah, that one
was important. Adapted from Mark Crowley's play
and it's rightly seen as a landmark in queer
cinema. Tackling that subject matter. Gay life
in New York. So frankly back then. It showed
he could bring that documentary immediacy to
really intimate internal stories too. Stories
about communities that hadn't really been seen
that way on screen. So it's this rapid fire start,
right? Documentaries, TV, Hitchcock telling him
off, a pop musical flop, Pinter, a groundbreaking
queer film. It's kind of chaotic. Utterly chaotic.
Yeah. But maybe... The perfect, volatile Knicks
needed for what came next. The explosion was
imminent. Okay, the 70s. New Hollywood. Directors
taking over. And Friedkin doesn't just join the
party. He practically kicks the door down in
1971 with The French Connection. Oh, it was a
thunderclap. Like you said, instantly massive.
Critically, commercially, it hit like a bomb.
And the key was, it didn't feel like a Hollywood
movie. It felt like something raw, something
ripped right off the street. The critics all
picked up on that, right? The documentary style
saying it was almost too real for Hollywood.
And that was deliberate. He talked about how
Costa Gavris' film Z, that political thriller
from 69, showed him the way. He saw that energy,
that feeling of catching things on the fly. And
he wanted that for French Connection. He aimed
for a style where, quote, the Camry didn't know
what was going to happen next. Like it was just
desperately trying to keep up. Which makes the
audience feel like they're right there in the
middle of the chaos. Okay. Especially that car
chase. Oh, the car chase. It's iconic for a reason.
It felt dangerous because... Well, it often was.
They were really doing it, speeding through actual
New York traffic, sometimes without permits,
just capturing the mayhem. That sense of reality
wasn't faked. And it worked, big time. Awards
season was huge for French Connection. Dominated
it. Five Oscars, including Best Picture and,
crucially, Best Director for Friedkin himself.
He also nabbed the Golden Globe, the DGA Award.
I mean, he was suddenly the guy. An absolute
powerhouse. So how do you top that? Apparently
by completely changing gears and revolutionizing
another genre entirely. Two years later, 1973,
The Exorcist. Yeah, from gritty street crime
to supernatural horror based on William Peter
Blatty's bestseller. And it's still, I mean,
constantly cited as one of the greatest, if not
the greatest horror film ever. What made it so
effective, do you think? Was it applying that
same documentary approach? I think that was a
huge part of it. Yeah. He grounds it so much
in the mundane first, the doctors, the tests,
the quiet desperation in the house. It all feels
incredibly real. So when the demonic stuff starts.
It feels even more shocking because the foundation
is so solid. Exactly. It feels like an intrusion
into our world. It was labeled a religious horror
thriller, and it famously got an X rating initially.
An X rating for a major studio picture? That's
wild. It shows you how intense, how visceral
it was for audiences at the time. Unprecedented,
really. But the establishment had to take notice.
Ten Oscar nominations, including Best Director
again for Friedkin. It won for screenplay and
sound. So he proved he could bring artistic weight,
critical acclaim, to even the most controversial
genre material. Absolutely. He was on top of
the world. He had all the power, all the creative
freedom. Which, as we know, can be a dangerous
thing for an auteur's. What's the classic mistake
when you have that kind of blank check? You chase
the dream project. The personal obsession. Interestingly,
he, Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich actually tried
to institutionalize their power around that.
They formed the director's company at Paramount
in 73. Right. I remember hearing about that.
What happened? Well, Coppola made the conversation.
Bogdanovich did Daisy Miller. But Friedkin, he
clashed with the others, apparently felt constrained,
and just walked away. Abruptly. Huh. So much
for collaboration. Yeah, kind of killed the company.
It really underscores how much he valued his
own singular vision above all else. Which leads
us directly to... The crash. The fall after the
peak. Sorcerer, 1977. This was the film for him,
his passion project. He wanted to remake Henri
-Georges Clouseau's 1953 masterpiece, The Wages
of Fear. He sighed as this perfect existential
thriller. And he went all in, no compromise,
total realism, which meant a hellish production.
Mostly shot in the Dominican Republic jungles.
The stories are insane disease, terrible weather,
trucks falling apart, bridges collapsing, just
logistical nightmares constantly. He pushed everyone,
including himself, to the absolute limit. And
the budget showed it, right? Ballooned like crazy.
Ended up around $22 million. Now, you have to
remember, for 1977, that's a fortune. Like, Close
Encounters cost about $20 million that year.
This was a gargantuan gamble. That timing. Oh,
the timing. Could not have been worse. Sorcerer
opens exactly one week after a little film called
Star Wars. Ouch. Yeah. Lucas' film just changed
everything overnight. Suddenly everyone wanted
upbeat escapist fantasy. And here comes Friedkin
with his gritty, dark, sweaty existential nightmare
about desperate men driving nitroglycerin through
hell. Audiences just weren't having it. Not at
all. It got completely buried, ignored. It was
a massive financial disaster. But for Friedkin,
it was more than that. It was personal, right?
He considered it his best. He called it his finest
film. To pour everything into that, to believe
it's your masterpiece and then have it just evaporate.
Critically and commercially swallowed by this
pop culture phenomenon. It must have been utterly
devastating. Yeah. A soul crushing blow, you
imagine. And it hurt his career badly. Big time.
Damaged his reputation, his bankability. He tried
to bounce back quickly with the Brinks job in
78. Kind of a crime comedy. Didn't work either.
Nope. Another commercial disappointment. The
golden boy of the early 70s had definitely hit
a rough patch. A very public, very painful stumble.
So heading into the 80s, Friedkin still got that
reputation right. Uncompromising. Tenth tense.
And he dives right back into controversy with
cruising in 1980. Oh, cruising. Yeah, that was
that was something else. Based on a Gerald Walker
crime novel, stars Al Pacino as a cop going undercover
in New York's gay S &M scene to catch a killer.
The subject matter alone was just. Incendiary
for the time. And the reaction was immediate,
wasn't it? Even during filming. Huge protests,
mostly from gay rights activists who were really
concerned, understandably, that the film would
just reinforce negative stereotypes, link the
community with violence. It was incredibly contentious.
And it still is, right? People still debate that
film fiercely, how it portrays that world, its
use of identity in a thriller context. Absolutely.
It remains a really complex, debated film. Critically,
it got hammered at the time. Commercially, it
did. Moderate box office. But the critical reception
was brutal. Which brings us back to that amazing
Friedkin duality. Extremes again. Exactly. Here's
the guy with the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and
for Cruising, he gets Razzie nominations. Worst
director and worst screenplay. That's incredible.
The Razzies. How many directors can claim both?
Best director, Oscar, and worst director, Razzy
Nom. Not many. It's like the perfect symbol of
his career, isn't it? Right. Willing to go there,
to make the film he wanted to make, regardless
of whether the reaction was acclaim or, you know,
raspberries. Right after that whole firestorm,
though, things got serious on a personal level.
His health? Yeah, the intensity might have finally
caught up. He had a major heart attack, March
6, 1981. Turns out it was due to a genetic defect.
It laid him up for months, required serious rehab,
a real wake -up call physically. Must have been
terrifying. After surviving that, did his work
change? Well, his next film was kind of different
tonally. Deal of the Century in 1983. It was
a satire about arms dealing, Chevy Chase and
Sigourney Weaver. Trying for dark comedy, maybe.
Didn't quite land with audiences used to his
thrillers. And then he did something really unexpected
for an Oscar -winning director back then. music
videos. Totally unexpected. It's wild to think
about now. A major filmmaker like him jumping
into MTV right when it was exploding. He was
actually one of the first really high profile
film directors to do it. Which ones did he do?
Laura Branigan's Self Control in 1984. That video
is super moody, very atmospheric, very 80s. And
then he did Barbra Streisand's version of Somewhere
from West Side Story in 85. It shows adaptability,
I guess, applying his visual style to this totally
different commercial format. Definitely. But
he didn't stay away from his signature genre
for long. He came roaring back with a really
strong crime thriller in 85, To Live and Die
in L .A. Ah, yes. William Peterson, Willem Dafoe.
That one got great reviews. Huge critical favorite.
People saw it as a major return to form. Lots
of comparisons to The French Connection, especially
because of another. Absolutely insane car chase
sequence. The one on the freeway going the wrong
way. That's the one shot against traffic on the
L .A. freeway. Yeah. Just pure Friedkin adrenaline.
That raw, chaotic energy was back in full force.
So the late. 80s into the 90s, he stuck with
thrillers and horror mostly. Pretty much. He
did a courtroom thriller called Rampage in 87,
which Roger Ebert actually gave a thumbs up to.
Friedkin wrote and produced that one too. Okay.
Then there was a supernatural horror film, The
Guardian, in 1990, which has kind of become a
cult thing. But maybe the most revealing film
from this period, in terms of his mindset, was
Jade in 1995. The erotic thriller with David
Caruso and Linda Fiorentino, that one didn't
do well, did it? Critically savaged. Audiences
hated it. A definite dud. But here's the thing.
Friedkin himself later said Jade was one of his
favorite films that he directed. Seriously. After
Fresh Connection and Exorcist, he picks Jade.
It tells you everything, doesn't it? It shows
that the... absolute disaster of Sorcerer, that
critical and commercial rejection, it never broke
his own internal measure of success. If he felt
he'd achieved what he set out to do, if it was
true to his vision, then the external reaction,
positive or negative, just didn't matter in the
same way. He kept following his own beat. Okay,
so moving into the 2000s, the century turns and
Friedkin gets a nice reminder of his own legacy,
right? Yeah, The Exorcist gets re -released in
2000, the version you've never seen, the director's
cut with extra foot. Okay. And it's a hit all
over again. It makes like $40 million just in
the U .S., shows the staying power. And this
period also marks a really interesting return
for him stylistically. Back to adapting stage
plays, kind of a full circle from Birthday Party
and Boys in the Band. Exactly. And he found a
perfect collaborator in the playwright, Tracy
Letts. He directed three films based on Letts'
work. And they were all really well received
critically. A definite late career resurgence.
First one was Bug in 2006 with Ashley Judd and
Michael Shannon. Right. He saw the play in 2004
and apparently felt this immediate connection,
said he felt metaphorically on the same page
as Letts. He was drawn to that claustrophobic,
intense, dialogue -heavy story. And it paid off.
The film won the Fipressi Prize at the Cannes
Film Festival. Fipressi. That's the International
Film Critics Award. Yep. A big deal, especially
at Cannes. It signaled that the serious film
world was recognizing this as a significant comeback
artistically. Then came Killer Joe in 2011. Also
Letts. That one starred Matthew McConaughey in
a really startling role. Oh, yeah. The McConaissance
was partly fueled by roles like that. It's a
super dark comedy. Very shocking. Premiered at
Venice. It got great reviews again. Critics loved
it. Commercially. Not so much. Why not? If the
reviews were good. It got slapped with an NC
-17 rating. Mostly for violence and some pretty
graphic sexual content. And, you know, an NC
-17 is basically the kiss of death commercially.
Limits advertising. Limits where it can play.
So, classic Friedkin again. Uncompromising vision,
even if it hurts the box office. Textbook. He
clearly wasn't going to soften the material to
get an R rating. artistic integrity over commercial
prospects. Even with great reviews, it just couldn't
find a wide audience. And the final film in that
Letts trilogy and his last film overall was The
Kane Mutiny Court Martial, finished just before
he died, debuted posthumously at Venice in 2023.
A fitting end to that cycle. Yeah. But it wasn't
just movies in this late period. He also went
back to TV, interestingly. Right. He directed
a couple episodes of CSI. Yeah, the original
CSI, Crime Scene Investigation. He did one called
Cockroaches. directed their big 200th episode,
Mascara, which is cool because it reunited him
with William Peterson. The star of To Live and
Die in L .A. Exactly. So you see him comfortable
revisiting collaborators, revisiting formats
like TV where he started, applying that intense
focus style to episodic storytelling. And he
even went back to documentaries, didn't he? But
with a very freaking twist. He did. In 2017,
he released The Devil and Father Amorth. Which
is just wild when you think about it. How so?
Well, it's a documentary about Father Gabriel
Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist, performing
the ninth exorcism on a particular woman in Italy.
So he's taking the subject matter of his most
famous movie, The Exorcist. And tackling it for
real as a documentary. Exactly. Like he did with
Paul Crump way back when. Applying that objective,
observational camera to this incredibly charged,
supernatural subject. Seeking truth in the mystery.
It's the perfect synthesis of his career extremes.
But the biggest surprise, the thing nobody saw
coming, was the opera. He's becoming a major
opera director. It's genuinely astonishing. And
this wasn't just like a little side project.
He directed opera professionally internationally
from 1998 right up until near the end of his
life. It was a serious second career. What's
so surprising about it, though? He worked with
actors. He understood drama. But think about
the control. Friedkin's film signature was often
about capturing chaos, right? That documentary
feel, unpredictable locations, the camera struggling
to keep up. Opera is the polar opposite. How
do you mean? It's total structure. The music
is set. The libretto is fixed. The timing is
incredibly precise. There's very little room
for improvisation in the way he worked on film.
It's all about interpretation with an incredibly
rigid constraints. So maybe he found that structure
freeing. After decades of battling chaos on film
sets. That's a great way to put it. Maybe he
needed that discipline, that formality. Yeah.
And the scale of his opera work shows how serious
he was. He did Berg's Wuzik in Florence in 98,
double bill of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle
and Puccini's Gianni Scicchi for the L .A. Opera
in 2002. Strauss's Salome in Munich in 2006.
Wow. These are major works, major houses. Absolutely.
And it continued late Verdi's Rigoletto back
in Florence in 2015. This wasn't dabbling. It
was a deep dive into a completely different artistic
world, one defined by tradition and structure,
standing in stark contrast to the raw energy
of French connection. It just shows his constant
need to explore. Different ways of expressing
himself, I guess. Capturing the moment or interpreting
the score. Constantly pushing, constantly exploring.
And alongside all this, he managed to write his
memoir, The Friedkin Connection, published in
2013, getting his own story down before that
final film, K -Mutiny, came out after he was
gone. So to really understand the guy who could
make The Exorcist and then direct Salome at the
opera, we need to touch on his own beliefs, right?
His philosophy. Yeah, it's pretty key. He was
raised Jewish, but later in life he described
himself as an agnostic. Agnostic, meaning unsure
about God's existence. Essentially, yes. But
it wasn't a simple dismissive agnosticism. He
actually clarified it. He said he strongly believed
in the teachings of Jesus Christ. And he felt
that while things like God and the soul were
ultimately unknowable mysteries, anyone who outright
denied God was being dishonest about what he
called the mystery of fate. The mystery of fate.
That feels very relevant to his films. Hugely
relevant. That sense that life can just be upended
by random chance, by forces beyond our control.
That's everywhere in his work. Think about the
sheer arbitrary cruelty and French connection,
the random horror of possession in The Exorcist,
the absolutely doomed nature of The Mission and
Sorcerer. His characters are always battling
fate, battling this indifferent, mysterious universe.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. What about his
film influences? Who shaped him? Sounds like
it wasn't just Hollywood. Definitely not just
Hollywood, especially early on. He always pointed
to the great European directors and Kurosawa.
Jean -Luc Godard, Fellini, Truffaut. Those are
the names you mentioned. The giants of world
cinema. Any specific films that were touchstones
for him? He talked a lot about Henri -Georges
Clouseau. Not just Wages of Fear, which obviously
obsessed him enough to remake it as Sorcerer,
but also Clouseau's other masterpiece, the psychological
thriller Le Diabolique. That one clearly left
a mark. And Hitchcock. Besides the Thai incident.
Oh, Psycho. He said he watched Psycho over and
over again. studied its construction, its suspense,
and that documentary influence never faded either.
He cited Harvest of Shame, that 1960 TV doc about
migrant workers, as being really fundamental
to his understanding of how powerful raw, observed
reality could be on camera. What about Citizen
Kane? Isn't that the film everyone says inspired
him as a kid? That's the common story, the myth
almost. But Friedkin himself actually corrected
that. He said, no, he didn't see Citizen Kane
until 1960, when he was already 25. And that's
when it hit him. That's when he really became
a serious student of film, a true cineast. Interesting.
So the conversion came later than people thought.
And just to circle back on his style, that breakthrough
with French Connection, it really came down to
seeing Z. That seems to be the catalyst, yeah.
Caustic Everest's films showed him how to merge
that documentary energy, that feeling of immediacy
with a fictional narrative. That documentary
-like realism wasn't just style, it was technique.
It was a conscious choice. He wanted the camera
to feel like it just stumbled onto the scene,
you know, capturing things as they happened,
injecting that feeling of unpredictability, almost
danger, which he pulled off perfectly in French
Connection. So when you look at his whole career,
all the awards, it's just such a story of contrasts.
Incredible contrast. He got huge honors later
in life. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement
at Venice in 2013. Other big awards in Munich,
Saturn Awards. recognition from the industry
that he was a major figure, a lasting influence.
But you always have to mention the other side.
You have to, because how many filmmakers win
the Oscar, win Golden Globes, and also get nominated
for a Razzie for Worst Director? It's almost
unheard of. He was just completely unwilling
to bend his vision, whether that led to glory
or disaster. Okay, so wrapping this all up, what's
the takeaway on William Friedkin? I think his
career is just uniquely defined by these incredibly
sharp turns, these extremes, right? And this
absolute unwavering commitment to whatever he
saw as artistic truth. He mastered that blend
of documentary grit and narrative punch, creating
films that shook the industry. But that same
intensity, that refusal to compromise. Led to
some spectacular flameouts. especially Sorcerer,
the film he loved most, which became this symbol
of noble failure. He was this agnostic auteur,
always digging for something raw, something true,
whether it was on the streets, in a demonic possession,
in a tightly wound stage play, or even within
the rigid structure of grand opera, always searching.
Which brings us back to that shadow, doesn't
it? The shadow of Sorcerer. When you have these
monumental early hits, French Connection, The
Exorcist films that changed the world, how does
a failure, that personal, that catastrophic,
especially for a film you believe is your masterpiece,
how does that haunt you? How does it shape every
choice you make for the next, what, 40 years?
Does it make you play it safer? Or does it just
make you double down, become even more defiant,
pushing towards the next risk, the next controversy,
or maybe seeking refuge in the absolute control
of something like opera? that's the question
he leaves us with isn't it the ultimate mystery
of fate in his own tumultuous brilliant and utterly
uncompromising career