EYE OF THE HU RRICANE

Combative, outspoken and always entertaining, took no prisoners and pulled no punches. Total Film looks back on a legendary life.

There are times in the movie business when it pays to be thought of as a dangerously psychotic person,’ wrote William Friedkin in his 2013 autobiography. Indeed, when it suited him, the Oscar-winning director could be as unpredictable as a powder-keg on a volcano. Before filming began on The Exorcist in 1972, Friedkin concocted a ruse with screenwriter William Peter Blatty – a fabricated argument about salad dressing – to make sure the Warner Bros. bean counters were wary of upsetting them. Five years later, while meeting executives about 1977’s Sorcerer, he glugged from a bottle of vodka before pretending to pass out. ‘Does this happen often?’ enquired Paramount’s Barry Diller. ‘Every day,’ replied writer Walon Green.

Stories like these, and a hundred others, earned Friedkin the moniker Hurricane Billy, or Wacky Willy for short, and they helped cement his image as an arrogant, hubristic flame-out who flew too close to the sun and came crashing down to earth. ‘I thought I was bulletproof. Nothing was going to stop me,’ he later conceded. ‘When people tell you how great you are, you start to believe it.’ And thanks in part to the portrait author Peter Biskind painted in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he came to embody the egotism of the New Hollywood generation and the folly of giving flamboyant auteurs power over their projects.

Friedkin certainly had no problem playing up to his persona in public appearances and press interviews. ‘I don’t give a flying fuck into a rolling doughnut about…’ was one of his favourite conversational gambits, and he loved telling how he thumbed his nose towards Alfred Hitchcock at the Directors Guild Awards. The master of suspense had taken him to task seven years earlier for not wearing a tie while making one of his Hitchcock Hours. While passing Hitch’s table at that 1972 event, Friedkin snapped his bow tie in front of his face. ‘He didn’t remember his comment, or me,’ he later acquiesced. ‘But I said I’d get that fat bastard one day, and I did.’

Yet the Friedkin who had a car race at 90mph past unsuspecting Brooklynites in The French Connection, and had a wire yank The Exorcist’s Ellen Burstyn so hard it damaged her spine, was more than the maverick provocateur he was characterised as. Born in Chicago in 1935, he was admittedly an indifferent student more interested in basketball than learning, only later coming to develop an autodidact’s passion for literature, painting and music. He surprised himself and others by eventually turning his talents to opera, putting on productions of Richard Strauss’ Salome and Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman.

After graduating from high school, Friedkin landed a job in the mailroom at Chicago’s WGN-TV station without realising he had actually applied to work for one of its rivals. From there he progressed to floor management, earning a valuable lesson in the process from one of its veterans: ‘You’ve got to be a prick, kid,’ he told the young Friedkin. ‘Everyone thinks you are anyway!’

He took that advice to heart, going on to direct a plethora of live shows and documentaries with the bullish, no-nonsense demeanour that would become his trademark. One of the latter, 1962’s The People vs. Paul Crump, caused enough of a furore to get its subject’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Yet Friedkin used unorthodox methods to make Crump retell his story, at one point summoning the emotion he was after by slapping him across the face. (He used the technique again on William O’Malley, the real-life priest who played The Exorcist’s Father Dyer.)

At that time, Friedkin had no interest in making films, but then a friend recommended they go to the cinema to see Citizen Kane. He ended up watching every showing of Orson Welles’ classic that day – and went back to watch it again the next. It was a life-changing moment that opened his eyes to what films could accomplish.

However, his feature debut – 1967’s Good Times, a skit-laden vehicle for Sonny and Cher – hardly set tills ringing, while his 1968 adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party pleased even fewer. The Night They Raided Minsky’s (also 1968) was by his own admission ‘a disaster’ that he would advise viewers to avoid during an appearance on British television. (Years later he did something similar by encouraging Amazon customers who had bought an inferior DVD of Sorcerer to ask for their money back.) And while 1970’s The Boys in the Band earned him a degree of praise, it was also criticised by some queer commentators who found its vision of gay life reductive. The director later expressed regret for excising a scene in which two of his male stars kissed.

Four flops in a row hardly augured well as Friedkin hit 35, though one film he would become attached to had potential. A friend had optioned a book about what was then the largest heroin seizure on US soil. And despite the book itself leaving him unimpressed, its subjects, a couple of colourful New York City detectives called Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, proved irresistible. ‘They were probably the definitive good cop/bad cop duo,’ the director told Total Film in 2019. ‘I was always much more interested in them than I was in the case. I spent a lot of time with those guys and went out with them on various assignments. The way I portrayed them in the film was exactly how they were.’

The French Connection is a grittily authentic policier that broke new ground with its documentary-style realism, morally ambiguous anti-hero and bravely downbeat ending, yet its path to classic status was anything but assured. Friedkin had no faith in star Gene Hackman and clashed with him continually. (The first day saw the filming of an interrogation scene run to 35 takes.) A mix-up, meanwhile, saw the wrong Spaniard hired to play the villain after casting director Robert Weiner confused Francisco Rabal with compatriot Fernando Rey. ‘It’s The French Connection you schmuck, not The Spanish Connection!’ Friedkin fumed, having incorrectly assumed Francisco was as Gallic as a crêpe.

If Fox’s marketing chief had prevailed, however, the film might have been titled Popeye after its protagonist’s cartoony nickname.

On 10 April 1972, The French Connection won five Academy Awards, including one for best director. Friedkin, though, nearly missed the ceremony, a broken-down motor obliging him to beg a stranger for a lift. ‘Winning the award isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,’ he would subsequently assert. ‘It’s as important to me as being president.’ But beneath the outward displays of confidence – including stamping his director’s chair on The Exorcist with the words ‘An Oscar for The French Connection’ – Friedkin couldn’t help feeling that he had peaked too early. ‘The bar had been raised too high, too soon,’ he would later rue. ‘I didn’t think I was skilled enough to sustain it with consistency.’

The phenomenal success of The Exorcist [see page 56] allayed many of those fears, yet a comeuppance was imminent in the form of Sorcerer, his remake of the French thriller The Wages of Fear. The problem was Friedkin’s obstinate insistence on making the project his way. His biggest error, he later admitted, was refusing to find a compromise that would allow him to cast Steve McQueen, who was the top choice for the film’s lead. Despite McQueen wanting to appear in the film, Friedkin refused to write a part for the actor’s new wife, Ali MacGraw. McQueen then came back with two alternatives: offer MacGraw an executive producer credit so that she could be on set, or move the filming to the US. Friedkin denied both and Roy Scheider was cast instead.

'I NEVER PLAYED BY THE RULES, OFTEN TO MY OWN DETRIMENT'

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN

A self-destructive tone was set – and it continued into the shoot. Friedkin gave other roles to virtual unknowns, while filming in the Dominican Republic saw the budget balloon to $22m, a tenth of that going towards a suspension bridge that had to be rebuilt in Mexico when the waters beneath it evaporated. ‘The two studios that financed it didn’t know what the hell I was doing and it opened as a critical and commercial failure,’ he told this magazine. ‘We all got sick and after I came home, I contracted malaria. When the film failed at the box office it took a heavy toll. I thought I had made my masterpiece and I wasn’t myself for years.’

Crime caper The Brink’s Job (1978) came and went with nary a ripple, while 1980’s Cruising served as a lightning rod for controversy. ‘The world of S&M hadn’t been portrayed in a mainstream movie before,’ said the director of his lurid thriller, starring Al Pacino, that had New York’s gay community angrily picketing its set. ‘But I don’t think people were aware of how far I was prepared to take it.’ Having visited clubs in a jockstrap as part of his research (‘Nobody hit on me... I was the ugliest guy in the room’), Friedkin shot 40 minutes of leatherbar hardcore knowing full well the ratings board would cut it. Another snip – the one Pacino suffered at the hands of a West Village barber – stopped cameras turning for six weeks; the length of time it took for his Samson-like tresses to grow back.

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) marked a partial return to form and gave Friedkin the opportunity to film another pulse-pounding French Connection-style car chase. In truth, though, he was now a largely spent force, the likes of supernatural horror The Guardian (1990), sports movie Blue Chips (1994) and erotic thriller

Jade (1995) doing nothing to resuscitate his flagging career. A new century brought more controversy, his courtroom drama Rules of Engagement (2000) prompting accusations of jingoism, yet it also saw him rediscover his flair for stage-to-screen transfers through a pair of Tracy Letts’ adaptations, 2006’s Bug and 2011’s Killer Joe. A film of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial was completed shortly before his death.

‘I never played by the rules, often to my own detriment,’ Friedkin once observed. ‘But I never dragged my tail and said, “Aw, shucks,” when things went bad. I managed to hang on out of ambition, luck and the grace of God. Notice I didn’t mention talent.’

And though Friedkin may have not acknowledged his own skill for filmmaking, Ellen Burstyn did in her tribute following his passing, remembering her ‘friend’ as ‘cultured, fearless and wildly talented’.

‘He had a big, wonderful life,’ agreed Sherry Lansing, his wife for 32 years. ‘There was no dream unfulfilled…’

THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL PREMIERED AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL IN SEPTEMBER.