WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 684 - William Friedkin

Episode Date: February 25, 2016

Director William Friedkin is a consummate storyteller, which explains why he tells such an entertaining story of his own life, rooted in three recurring themes: faith, fate, and film. Within that story, William tells Marc about the making of The French Connection and The Exorcist, the failure and resurgence of his film Sorcerer, and his reasons for never wanting to do a second take. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lock the gate! Alright, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers, what the fuck buddies, what the fucking ears, what the fuckaholics, what's happening? I'm Mark Maron, this is my show, my podcast, WTF, welcome to it. Thank you for joining me. If you are new to the show, or if if you're not you've picked a hell of a day my guest is uh the film director william friedkin who i was ecstatic to talk to i had made this this guy was a mythic being in my head i don't know when you saw the french connection or the exorcist i don't know when you saw either of those movies but when i saw the when i saw the french connection i think i saw when it opened somehow or another maybe my parents took me

to an r-rated movie would they have done that yes i mean i was i was eight years old would they have done that instead of get a babysitter probably i bet you they did because I feel like I saw it when it came out and it scarred my brain. It was one of those sort of portals into a underworld, into a sort of grittiness that I was not supposed to see at eight. I guess if I lived in that neighborhood, if I lived in New York or Queens, maybe that would have been my reality. But no, I think I was an eight-year-old kid living in New Jersey or that point, Alaska, Anchorage. But I saw it and there were certain things that resonated with me that I could never get out of my brain. Gene Hackman being one of them, just Gene Hackman as a force of nature.

Oh my God, changed my brain. Then the exorcist, of course, for some reason, the stuff that stands out in my mind is not the puking. It's not the cussing. It's when she started talking like the priest's mom. That was haunting. Whole goddamn thing was haunting. But he, of course, directed Brink's Job, Cruising, Deal of the Century. I remember seeing, I remember 1985 when I was in college, seeing I remember 1985 when I was in college very excited when uh to live and die in LA came out because me and my buddy Devin were film heads and we were very uh Friedkin oriented and you know more recently he's directed a couple of uh Tracy Letts's plays Bug and Killer Joe which were pretty unruly pretty amazing there's quite a few movies here but the one that always took this sort of

you know mythic presence in my head again I'm gonna throw that word around a bit mythic William Friedkin he was one of the fucking dirty 70s directors man he was like he was had the swagger I just you know I never knew what it'd be like to talk to I never thought I have an opportunity in my life to talk to him. But Sorcerer was always the film you heard about. The film that cost all this money that people said was either self-indulgent or people didn't see it. Well, I saw it recently for the first time and it's a great fucking movie. It's out on Blu-ray now. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, it's a movie based on The Wages of Fear, which is a French film, I believe. I didn't see it.

I know some people are like, well, you know, it's not as good as The Wages of Fear. Fine. I didn't see that. I saw Sorcerer with Roy Scheider, and it was fucking awesome. And that new print is just awesome. And I talked to William Friedkin a lot about that. But, man, the first time I saw the French connection, Jesus, I was nervous. You know, this dude's, you know, he's been around.

He's done a lot of stuff. He never stops working. He directs operas now. But I'm telling you, man, if you're my age, even if you're not my age, if you're not my age if you were obsessed with that crew from the 70s the guys that changed it all that changed american film forever you know i read that that whatever that book is what is uh easy riders and raging bulls i mean whether it's all on on point or not i don't know but i'll give you some historical context to this idea that in the late 60s, the Hollywood infrastructure, the guys who were making movies, they were a lot of old guys that had been in place since the studio system. And they didn't they no longer knew what the hell Americans wanted to see or to watch.

And the Vietnam War was starting and going on. And during this time, you know, they were at a loss. They were at odds. A transition needed to happen, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. Now, I'm paraphrasing the whole historical idea of this book, and I might be wrong. But it's my understanding that there was a window of opportunity in the late 60s for a lot of young directors to do almost whatever the fuck they wanted because the older executives didn't know what the fuck to do. And that's where you get your George Lucas, your Spielberg, your Coppola, your Hal Ashby,

Scorsese, your Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Bob Raffleson, even some Altman. Yeah, I would even argue that, you know, Peckinpah,ah early Peckinpah when he shifted out of making studio movies that those type of studio movies but I would argue listen to me like like anyone's calling me on this but Friedkin was one of them and I never knew his story and uh it's kind of fascinating how he got a feel for a camera and and these all these movies the ones that I really remember seeing when i was younger because my parents would let me see movies or they take me movie to the movies was five easy pieces or the last detail or shampoo or um easy rider which i didn't love i didn't there

was a part in that movie i liked a lot of it but that commune part i could do without but the french connection man the French connection I watched it again recently twice holds up when you really think about that car chase and that character and the intensity of that character in that car chase based on true story but Roy Scheider's in it and Gene Hackman a young Gene Hackman fucking Gene Hack man. And I talked to Friedkin about that casting choice. I mean, nothing happens like you think it happens. You know, we see these movies, they imprint themselves in our minds. And we think that they, you know, that had to be the guy for the role.

There was no other guy in our mind. It's one. All the stories don't matter because you don't know them. You just see this movie and it's perfect. And you think like that had to happen exactly the way it happened without knowing how it actually happened. So getting the opportunity to talk to William Friedkin about how this stuff happened. I just watched his most recent films, Bug and Killer Joe, which were out there. But Tracy Letts, the playwright, he's out there.

And they're great. But how do you sort of tap into and i've talked to directors i'd like to talk to more directors they're really actually the hardest guests to get on here and i love talking to them because as a film goer like i said you just take in these pieces of art and these these films in their entirety as what they are and you don't really realize the intelligence or struggles or or vision that went into it necessarily and and a lot of times it's not as i said it's not what you think happened or what you would assume would have happened but man talking a freak and what a trip what a treat and a trip so without ado, since this is a long one,

this is me and the master of filmmaking, Mr. William Friedkin, talking right here in this garage. There's no filters here, Mr. Friedkin. I understand. I've heard the podcast. You have? I know there's no filters, other than. Freakin'. I understand. I've heard the podcast. You have? I know there's no filters, other than my own self-imposed. Yes. Well, we all have those, I guess. Oh, yeah.

So, I've been, you know what I did in order, it's very, when I was in high school, I mean, I'm 52, so I missed in real time, I think, as a grown-up, the early movies. But I remember, like, we were all very excited all the time when you were putting out a new movie me and my friend devin who was sort of a film head but uh i watched for the first time a sorcerer the director's cut on the plane i i rented it and i watched it because i'd heard about it uh you know it's it's a legendary movie and i watched it for the first time and i I thought it was a fucking masterpiece. Well, thank you. That's not the best way to see it.

No, of course not. It's the worst way to see it. What are my opportunities? What are my options? There's a beautiful Blu-ray. Oh, yeah? Fantastic. I mean, looks better than any print of the film.

Well, I just wanted to get to, you know, see it the best I can and see it you know compared to like french connection the exorcist and that early that sort of that tone you were getting back then and to feel what uh because i i'd only heard about i think it's one of those movies where initially people didn't respond well and then now people who are smart realize that they fucked up do Do you find that that's the case? It's new people. It's different people. The film came out in 1977. Yeah.

And the zeitgeist was different. And now the zeitgeist has changed radically, but there's still some people who look to discover stuff that was made before the last few years. By the real guys. Well, the real guys were before me, Mark. Who do you consider them to be? Orson Welles.

Yeah. Billy Wilder. George Stevens. Uh-huh. William Wyler. The French New Wave. Yeah. Who were fantastic.

The Italian neorealists. There's nobody around today making movies like that. Like Antonioni or- Fellini. Trifo Goddard, Fellini. All those guys. Yeah, yeah. They really threw the switch.

Uh-huh. And it's a different world today, completely different. Most of the people going to films today don't know who we're talking about. Isn't that, it's a shame, isn't it? No. Why? Things change. Do you really have peace isn't it? No. Things change. Do you really have peace around that idea?

Oh, absolutely. Things change. As you get older, you watch them slowly change and manifest into something else. But I still think change is a diplomatic word when you look at the quality of some things that are happening. I mean, can you really name a dozen movies, as a guy who's still on the pulse, that compare to the movies of the people that you just spoke of? I can't. But some people may.

I mean, no, I still watch the same stuff I always loved. It's like listening to a piece of music. You know, you seldom tire of a piece of music, whether it's pop or classical or rock, whatever, that you once loved. Right. You find different things in it. So I tend to watch the films that influenced and inspired me, and I get more out of them. The way I continue to listen to one particular recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Right.

to one particular recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Right. Conducted by a guy named Carlos Kleiber. Must have been made in the 70s or 80s with the Vienna Philharmonic. And I can listen to that recording. I've listened to it hundreds of times. And I hear different things in it every time I listen. Yeah.

That's what happens when I see a film like Citizen Kane. Right. Or The Verdict. I'm compulsive about The Verdict. Verdict is one of the great. Oh, my God. That's a masterpiece. That's an insane movie.

Yeah, it's the greatest. And to find new things in something so subtle. Oh, yeah. Little moments. Uh-huh. Little ticks. Little things on the subtle. Oh, yeah. Little moments. Uh-huh. Little ticks. Little things on the soundtrack. Oh, yeah. A moment that Paul Newman takes or James Mason.

Yeah. Which it's a legendary film and I just love it. But there's such an intelligence to it. Like in something like Sorcerer, I mean, that obviously was a personal journey, not only as a director, but I imagine in your heart and in your mind and whatever the hell you were dealing with that as a person that you were going to move through these characters that that, you know why did they all end up there there are things that you know were obviously poetic and metaphorical i think but uh but it assumed that that the audience was there to see a piece of art in a way i mean it was not a uh you know it wasn't something that you weren't on some level worried about like you know well there's a narrative hole here no that's correct i wasn't trying to make art, ever. I was just trying to tell stories on film.

Uh-huh. I love the medium. Uh-huh. And what got me into it was when I first saw Citizen Kane. Well, wait, where'd you grow up? Chicago. Really? I lived in Chicago for the first 20-odd years of my life.

Jewish family? Jewish family. Religious? Yes, they were. I was bar mitzvah, but I don't come away feeling close to the Jewish faith like in a synagogue or something like that. I'm much more drawn and have been for years

to the teachings of Jesus. Yeah. Not through the Catholic Church, yeah not through the catholic church yeah but just through the new testament which i also continue to read it's a simpler poetry in a way it's beautiful yeah words to live by yeah you know the old testament so why fragmented not not a straight narrative it's difficult to read a lot of stories some of the new testament yeah reads like journalism yeah yeah book of mark when he describes the crucifixion, it's like you are there. You can experience it through whoever wrote the Book of Mark.

Did you ever think about telling that story on film? No, it's been done. Yeah, I know. Not too badly. By? But, well, Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, was a powerful experience. Yeah, it was. But there's more to just Christ than the crucifixion.

I've seen The Shroud of Turin. I've been to Turin many times, and I just finished directing an opera there. I just did Aida at the Teatro Reggio in Torino. How many, have you been doing a lot of operas? I've done about 15 operas since 1998. You understand Italian? I have to understand whatever language I'm doing the opera in, the libretto. I have to completely understand the libretto while I might not be able to order a ham sandwich in the language you know yeah but uh uh you do have to learn the libretti and i for the story i yeah i study them and i get my inspiration for the

productions that i set up through directly from the music and the libretto you know it's not something i make up right like a film is generally sometimes there's a script sometimes not but when you're filming it you're making it up and and you got shot by shot right and and each shot is different in a way like with an opera i guess each performance is different but once you set you know once you get everything set in motion you're hoping that outside of perhaps an amazing performance by the performers that shit holds together and they oh yeah it's pretty well um planned and rehearsed yeah whereas i don't rehearse a film well that's why you get that raw feeling i'm interested in cinema in um spontaneity

and spontaneity comes from working with the actors before you ever get to the set. You become, in the way I work, sort of like I guess what a psychologist does. Sure. And you will talk to the actor. You'll find out what it is that moves he or she, him or her emotionally. Yeah. From their past. Do you do that?

Oh, yeah. How would something like that go? Like say because you got a hell of- I'll give you an example. Okay. How about Ashley Judd? Because you got a hell of a performance out of her in Bug. Hell of a performance.

It's more graphic if I tell you how I worked with Hackman. Well, Hackman was young, right? Younger. The French connection. Yep. right which younger the french connection yep and in talking to gene i found out from him and you have to give up a lot of your own information when you do this but i found out that he grew up in a town called dundee illinois which was near the indiana border and there were ku Klux Klan guys around. And it was an extremely right-wing conservative area. And his father left the family when Gene was young.

So consequently, he wanted to fight this prejudice that he grew up with, and he hated his father. He hated his father. He hated his father. Once I realized that, I knew that I could get to his anger by becoming his father. Even though I was 10 years younger than Gene, I was the authority figure on the French Connection. And Gene did not want to go to the dark places of that character he he fought that most through most of his youth and all of his adult life not go back to that mouse inside the elephant yeah and i realized that he had to show this anger and the cop he was playing was performing the role of a racist cop in New York in order to survive. These guys were guys who made their living among the dead.

Yeah. And in order to survive, they had to be tough guys and, in fact, come off like racists. And Gene did not want to go there. He was not my first choice for that part. Who was? Jackie Gleason. Really? The studio would not go with Gleason.

And then I wanted Peter Boyle, who had just made a film called Joe. Yeah. I wanted Peter Boyle, who had just made a film called Joe. And I found out that by treating Gene harshly, in fact, cruelly on the set, I could get to his anger. And a lot of what motivated that character was the appearance of anger. He had to appear to be very angry. In fact, the guy was not really a tough guy, Eddie Egan, the character that Gene was. Who's also in the film. He's in the film, but he was very vulnerable. But to survive and to make these busts and not get killed, he had to be a tough guy. And that meant push people around and use the N-word all the time. And Gene didn't want to do that yeah the first day of shooting i

shot the interrogation of the young black kid who these two cops pick up in a bar chase uh they sort of rough him up good cop bad cop it's probably one of the first times that you saw that yeah and they ask him questions that are unanswerable. Yeah. So he tends to answer the questions he knows he's more comfortable with. Yeah. Like, did you pass that nickel bag to that guy in there? Or did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie? You know, and we did 37 takes of that. Holy shit.

Gene couldn't get to it. Yeah. And then I realized and I used what i had learned in discussions with him that he absolutely hated authority yeah and he didn't like acting that much although he became one of the greatest uh film actors ever believable yeah but we had a lot of problems on that that worked themselves out on the set because we were on the same page in understanding each other. Now, if he were to tell the same story, would he say, well, what Bill was doing was he was putting me in a position to be angry at him,

or would he have said, like, you know, he was a pain in the ass to work with. He drove me nuts. I got pissed off at him. Here's what he has said, and you can look it up. It's on the Blu-ray of the French Connection. One edition of it. There's interviews with everybody, and Gene says after the first day of shooting

I wanted to quit. Yeah. Because I wasn't getting it. And Bill Friedkin didn't let me quit. He held me in there. He kept me in there. I'm forever grateful to him. Now, do you watch that film occasionally? Only rarely, like if I go to a screening of it, and I haven't seen it for a while, and I have to talk about it.

And what do you feel when you watch it? Does it take you anywhere? Do you? I think it's pretty well made. Yeah. It's not bad. I can't say that about everything but i've seen a few of my films and i honestly think where the hell did that come from in a bad way or a good way good way yeah uh i don't i tend not to watch the films where i know i'm gonna see bad stuff and which ones are those? Oh, if I name them, I'll be putting down some actors.

But all of my films are definitely not of the same quality. What do you think would have happened if you had Jackie Gleason as Popeye Doyle? I think he would have been great. Yeah. But at that time, the film was made by 20th Century Fox. Sure. And I suggested Gleason, and I called Gleason, got his phone number, told him the story. We didn't have a script, but I told him what it was, and he said, okay, kid, that sounds

interesting. I went to the head of the studio, Dick Zanuck. He said, no way. We will never make another film with Jackie Gleason. He had made a film, a silent film, about a clown called Gigo. Yeah. G-I-G-O-T.

It was a silent movie. Yeah, right, right. But it was the biggest disaster in the history of Fox at that time. And so he was against Gleason. But Gleason was my idea of the character. A big, heavy set, what we used to call a black Irishman. You know, a dark, brooding Irish guy who loved to drink and break heads and carried a great girth along with him.

What compelled you to do Sorcerer from Wages of Fear? What was your relationship with that film, the original film? I thought it was great, but not many people had seen it. The Wages of Fear in this country, in America, was not widely seen at all. But I thought that it was a metaphor for the world situation. Four strangers riding a load of dynamite. And if they did, they hated each other. They were all flawed. But if they didn't cooperate, they would blow up together. And that to me, then and now seems a metaphor for the world situation.

You have all of these great powers, all going in different directions, and if they don't get on the same page, everything's going to blow up. And that's the metaphor of sorcerer and the wages of fear. Did you see it for your own self? I mean, I don't know what the 70s were like, and I don't have a specific sense

of your reputation at that time but it seemed like a pretty crazy time uh you know in terms of uh you know the shifting of uh of the the business and and the sort of weight that you and that crew had of directors at that time that that did you find that that movie was a like a journey for yourself and confronting your own potential self-demise through your own ambition and creativity? I didn't think of it that way at the time. I thought of it as a story that I wanted to tell. I did not want to do a remake of H.G. Clouseau's film.

I wanted to do all new characters, all new incidents, and all new events. Just the central notion. In many ways, it's like doing another production of a great play, like Hamlet. I mean, Laurence Olivier did Hamlet back in the 40s and 50s. And was it supposed to stop then? and 50s and was it supposed to stop then I mean the first production of Hamlet I think in 1601 was done by an actor named Richard Burbage and at the Globe Theater and in fact at the Globe Theater the audience used to stand they didn't sit down they stood they ate roast beef, they ate chicken stuff, and they talked to the stage. And when Richard Burbage played the death scene in Hamlet, he was cheered, and the audience yelled out, Die again, Burbage, die again. He played the death scene three times.

Now, there were no critics around to say this was great or Burbage was terrible. Nothing. There was just this play. And if there had not been the first folio of Shakespeare that came along some, I guess, 50 or 75 years later, you wouldn't have Hamlet. But every production of Hamlet is different. Yeah. And Sorcerer is different. Right.

But inspired by the wages of fear. But can you see yourself, where you sit now with your life experience, all that you've done, when you look back at that time shooting in those jungles, I mean, do you know that guy still? Yeah. I'm not all that different. I would not take the same risks now because I put people's lives in danger on a number of the films I did.

Did you know you were doing it? I didn't care. I didn't think about it. And the people that followed me did not think about it. I would not do that today. I would not film a chase like the French Connection today with no clearances, no permissions, no nothing. Just send a car for 26 blocks, 90 miles an hour through regular traffic. No, I wouldn't do that.

I don't think they would let you do that. Well, they didn't want to let me do that then. But I had all these cops around me. Yeah. And with their badges, they were off-duty cops. And they were with me when I shot the chase in case we got busted. So they were watching your back. Yeah.

But today, no one should do that today. There have been guys who have taken similar chances in recent years, and people got killed. Yeah. And it's only by the grace of God that nobody got hurt or killed on a film like The French Connection. And that was the farthest thing from my mind. I felt that I was bulletproof.

And I felt that the people around me were not going to be hurt or injured. You were conscious of that? Like there was a mania to it almost? I felt that what I did was the only possible way to do it. I couldn't get permission to do something like that. Who would give you permission to go 90 miles an hour for 26 blocks through traffic? The only thing we had was a gumball on top of the car that Hackman and the stuntman drove. So you couldn't see the gumball when we were inside the car, and we took it off when we

were shooting exteriors. Oh, my God. But you had a screaming siren as I was blowing through traffic. Yeah. That stuff is all real. Now, today, they do just as good, if not better, on a computer. Do you think that really? Yeah, I do, and the audience does, too.

The audience doesn't mind that these effects are computer generated images. But I think that there's been some new neural pathways created for that expectation. Like I think that you can do a lot more with a computer, but I think you innately know that it's not real. And you watch the French Connection and there's a grittiness to it where you're like holy shit but it's still not real mark it's a movie no but you just told me people's lives were at stake yeah and that's not a good thing i get that but it's on film uh it is on film and um i don't uh boast about it i think the french connection is a damn well-made film and people's lives were in danger including my own yeah and i frankly didn't is a damn well-made film, and people's lives were in danger, including my own. Yeah.

And I frankly didn't give a damn. Yeah. I mean, I don't mean I devalued human lives. I never thought about it. You were caught up in your process. We're going to do this. Yeah. This way.

Did you fight for it? There was nobody to resist me. See, that's the freedom I'm talking about. Yeah, we were there alone. This was, you know, like being castaways. Well, let's talk a little bit about that, like, you know, because I know, like, something comes into my mind. You know, Nicholson, I think, was, one time Nicholson was, you know,

talking, I think, it was one of the last times, I think, he went to the Golden Globes. I don't remember whatson was, you know, talking, I think it was one of the last times I think he went to the Golden Globes. I don't remember what it was, but he was talking, was reflecting about when he started acting, when your generation of filmmakers started to really take over Hollywood, that there was this crossover for a while there between, you know, your generation and old Hollywood. Like everyone was sort of around. So you got to spend time you know with the with the filmmakers that you respected and admired and it was all part of the same community now who were you able to sort of like when when you were coming up and you were starting to when you made French Connection I made I imagine that gave you a lot of access to to yeah so who who did you seek out and what did you learn from the generation before you my closest friends from the golden era

of hollywood were billy wilder richard brooks bud yorkin who was a great television director who created all in the family right with uh norman right with norman lear and a number of other people like that but the names that come to mind right away are Wilder. I used to have a hamburger with Billy three, four days a week at the old Johnny Rockets in Beverly Hills. I'll tell you a funny anecdote about being in Billy's apartment. And Billy had Giacomettis and Brocks and Picassos and great artworks. He also had on one of his walls a little framed postcard-like object.

It was framed on the wall next to a Brock. And I looked at it, and I said, Billy, what the hell is this? I looked at it, and I said, Billy, what the hell is this? And he said, this was one of the cards that they passed out when they had the first preview of the film Nanachka with Greta Garbo that Billy wrote and Ernst Lubitsch directed. and their habit then was when Lubitsch, when they'd stop, finish looking at a preview, they were in a limousine going from Pasadena back home, Lubitsch would sit in the back of the car with Billy and he'd flip through these cards that the audience used to fill out

and he stopped at one card and burst into laughter. And Billy said, what is that? And Lubitsch handed it to him. And that's the card that's framed on his wall. And this is for the film Ninochka, which is really a work of art. The card says, this is the funniest film I ever seen. This film is so funny, I peed in my girlfriend's hand. And he framed that.

And, you know, when I was a kid and I went to previews in Chicago, I used to fill out all kinds of crazy... Right. I'd say, you know, I'd say, what did you think of this film? This film stunk. It was terrible.

You know, just to rat fuck the, you know, the guys who made it. Yeah, yeah. But I guess that card was sincere. It was terrible. You know, just to rat fuck the guys who made it. Yeah, yeah. But I guess that card was sincere. It was so funny. He peed in his girlfriend's hand. Billy Wilder loved that. Oh, yeah.

Billy was great. Richard Brooks, very interesting, deep, intelligent guy. Made Looking for Mr. Goodbar and In Cold Blood cold blood right a lot of great films i knew john houston oh how was that made one of my all-time favorites which i still watch i may go home and watch it today again which one the treasure of the sierra madre yeah which is boss crazy right that nothing like it today it's great see there you? Nothing like it today. It's great. See, there you go. Nothing like it today.

In my view. But, you know, there are people listening to this podcast who can't wait to see the next Spandex movie. You know, where guys wear Spandex and fly around and save the world. You know? Okay. That's what the theater is today. The best platform for films today is the digital platform. Places like Netflix and FX and HBO,

you know, not the theaters. For me. Well, let's go back. So you're in Chicago and you see Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. When did you see that? What did you do when see orson welles's citizen kane or when did you see that what were you what did you do when you were a kid you got brothers and sisters no i was an only child we lived in a one-room apartment in chicago no larger than this garage which i guess

is about uh 15 feet by 10 feet something like that the three of you and that was my mother and father and me we had a little burner not a kitchen one bathroom wow they had a bed that came out of the wall and i had a cot right and i never knew we were poor because everyone else around me lived the same way and my dad never made more than 50 a week what'd What did he do? He did a number of things. And he wound up in a men's clothing store that was owned by his brothers. Oh, yeah? And he worked there. And were they from another place or they all grew up here in the States?

Were they immigrants? All of my parents' origins were in Kiev, Russia, the Ukraine. And they came over when they were very young. My mother had 12 brothers and sisters. My father had 11. And as you can imagine, I was an only child. It would be very tough to have other children in a space like this, Mark. Yeah.

You know, with a child in the room. Well, you think that was why they didn't have more? Undoubtedly. Yeah. this mark yeah you know with a child in the room well you think that was why they didn't have more undoubtedly yeah i mean i was unaware of anything to do with their sex life did and you would know i would have to know i mean you know i crashed there and so did they yeah did you have a relationship with that huge extended family oh sure we were very close a lot of my relatives did well very well to do one was a very famous cop in chicago named harry lang harry lang and um his partner were the two guys who brought in frank nitty the gangster yeah yeah yeah and they shot nitty eight times in the stomach. And then my uncle put a bullet through his own left arm

and claimed that Nitti shot at him first. But Nitti didn't keep a gun in his office. My uncle's partner's name was Harry Miller. And Miller and Lang were the guys who brought in Nitti. Nitti lived. No kidding. With eight bullets in his gut. And for a variety of reasons, my uncle had to leave the Chicago police force.

And he opened a tavern in Chicago. And as a kid, I used to work there. And I met all these characters from both sides of the law. Right. And was that fascinating to you? Oh, yeah. I mean, I can't oh yeah they were on another planet yeah you know oh yeah and uh these guys were cops but it was the first

inkling i had that the best cops were guys who could think like the bad guys right they were bad guys themselves that's right well that's what you get with Popeye Doyle in a way. There's a moral, there's a sort of like a moral ambiguity about how to do the job. Well, the precincts where they worked, the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the 28th Precinct in Harlem, These places were known as murder factories. You know? And in order to survive, they just broke every law that was there. Yeah. What drove you in the street was your instinct and the fear of getting killed yourself. And so they had to assume an attitude that persisted for many years in police departments across the country. And it's based on adrenaline.

Yeah. police departments across the country and it's based on adrenaline yeah i have i was out with the french connection cops when and doing the scenes like in that all african-american bar right where they rousted the joint and found all the vials of under the counter under the counter and stuff and that scene i saw played 30 or 40 times and when i went and saw it eddie egan gave me a 38 a policeman special and he said cover the back door and i used to pray to god that nobody would try to go out the back because i didn't was in real life emotionally unable to pull the trigger. Sure. Okay? We weren't supposed to. But I had, and I watched them do that and get away with it, and I know that they were driven, as are most cops today, by adrenaline.

You're a young cop. You've got a family at home, a couple of kids, a wife. You get up in the morning, strap on a gun and a badge and go into the street, and you don't know if you're coming back. Now, that's not to say that there aren't some cops, as there are people in every walk of life that may have racial prejudice. But the cops I met did not and many of the cops I met and rode with all across this country and in Europe some of them black had the same adrenaline drive well it sounds to me that during that time

you know certainly with French connection you seem to be driven by some of that same adrenaline. Now, after that movie, so you, okay, real quick, though. In Chicago, what got you into show business? I didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated high school. I went to high school, never paid attention to anything, didn't want to spend another day in a classroom, so I didn't go to college. The Saturday I graduated, I looked in the Chicago newspapers in the want ad section, and there was a job available for young people who wanted to work in the mailroom of a television station.

And I went to the wrong place. There were two stations, and they were across the street from each other. There was WBBM, which was a CBS affiliate in the Wrigley building. And in the Tribune Tower, there was WGN, which was known as the world's greatest newspaper. But they owned WGN Radio and Television, Channel 9 in Chicago. I went there on a Saturday to apply for a job in the mailroom. And the guy in the mailroom was an interesting guy. His name was Ray Domolsky. And he was there on Saturday. And he asked me about myself. I answered a few questions. I had had a lot of after school jobs before that. And at the end he said, okay, kid.

He said, you can start Monday. But he said, tell me something. Are you stupid? And I said, I'm sorry. And he said, are you stupid? I said, I don't know, possibly. He said, because look at that piece of paper where you have the ad for an opening in a mailroom.

He said, what does it say? I said, it said 444 North Michigan Avenue. He said, that's WBBM across the street. This is 441 North Michigan. We didn't place that ad. You came to the wrong place. But you seem like a nice kid, so I'm going to hire you. And that's how most people came up in the business then.

There were no film schools. There were no television schools. Television was new. You took an entry-level job in the mailroom or as an usher, and you worked your way up. What year is that? In my case, it was about 1956. Yeah.

So television is pretty new. Oh, it was very new. It was a miracle in people's home. You have no idea. None of your listeners have any idea what it was like to see an image in your house. We used to wake up at like 6 in the morning just to see the profile of a Buffalo Indian, which was the only thing showing on a TV screen. And you used to tune your screen to that image.

It was a drawing of a Buffalo Indian, like what used to be on the nickel. Right. And you would focus on that. But we would just sit there and look at this. We couldn't believe there was an image. It didn't move. Right. It didn't do anything.

Right. But there was an image in our home. It was a miracle. Yeah. It was magic. Yeah. I guess like the ancients, when something happened that was out of the ordinary, thought it was a miracle.

Sure. To me, television was a miracle. And you television was a was a miracle and you remember radio radio which was no inch television right but i remember dramatic radio yeah and that's the thing that influenced me most as a filmmaker dramatic radio the storytelling yes and with sound yeah the use of sound effects and music and the human voice uh tell a story. And a lot of those things creeped me out. Oh, yeah. There were amazing radio dramas then on shows called Suspense and Inner Sanctum and Orson Welles played The Shadow.

Oh, yeah. I was too young for the War of the Worlds broadcast. I heard it much later. Yeah. And I think it's probably exaggerated on the effect that it had. Sure. Because that show had a very small audience compared to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Who was a, Edgar Bergen was a ventriloquist.

Right. Which was weird. Right. Mortimer Snurd, too, right? Mortimer Snurd and Charlie McCarthy did the voices. But when you saw him on television, he was a terrible ventriloquist. His lips were moving while Charlie's were. I guess that's the one downside of television.

You saw that Edgar Bergen stunk. As a ventriloquist. But the characters and the dialogue were great. So television was mind-blowing. Oh, yeah. It was a miracle in everyone's home. And we could afford a television set, which was about as big as this computer you have in front of you. What shows do you remember?

Studio One and Playhouse 90. Right. These were the shows that grabbed me. 90 right these were the shows that grabbed me playhouse 90 was done live in several sound stages in what is was then called television city at cbs yeah on fairfax still there yeah and they did all these live shows with live cameras everywhere and there were some of the greatest things i've ever seen they were directed by people people like John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Franklin Schaffner, the guys who became the great film directors of the 70s. Yeah.

The generation that had just preceded mine. So when did you start directing? I was about 18 years old. Directing local television? Mm-hmm. In the studio? Yeah, it was all studio. Well, I occasionally did remotes, like an auto show where I had five cameras.

And you'd have a live camera, you know, and there would be livestock or something walking around at the International Amphitheater while there was an auto show. And a cow would walk in front of the camera, take a dump. No way to cut around it. You know, there it is, the glories of live TV. But most of the stuff I did was in the studio. I did every kind of show, cooking shows, news programs, interview shows. I was the floor manager on a show called They Stand Accused, which was a live courtroom drama that came on just before the Jackie Gleason show on the old

Dumont Network, which is now gone. It's interesting that the things you're saying are still on TV. The archetypes and the standards were set. Cooking shows, live court shows, you know, remotes from places. I mean, they're still staples. They are. They're still on. But then they were pretty much the only thing that was on. So now you have hundreds of things to choose from. So when did you start doing it?

There were only three networks then. I know. And a bunch of local stations. Do you miss that time? No. No, that's what got me started, though. Yeah. So how'd you make it out here?

I mean, when did you come? What compelled you towards the films? In that period, I think it was around 1956. Somebody told me that there was a great film playing at a art house on the near north side called the surf theater and the film was called citizen kane yeah i knew nothing about it before citizen kane i just used to go to films as a kid on saturday afternoon and see the Three Stooges and a cartoon and a newsreel and a couple of funky shorts and stuff. And, you know, it was a place for kids to go for a quarter on a Saturday afternoon.

Somebody said, you should see this film called Citizen Kane, which originally came out in 1941. This was 15 years later. I went to see this film, and I was captivated. I stayed in the theater all day. I went to the first show, which was a noon show, and I watched it until the 10 o'clock show and left at midnight. And I came out of there thinking,

I don't know what in the hell this is, but whatever it is, that's what I want to do. But I was in live television. And then a strange thing happened. I hate going to parties still to this day. I like to see and talk to people in small groups or one-on-one. But I don't like gigantic parties. There was a woman in Chicago, very wealthy, social woman who loved and supported the arts. And she did a few, produced a few programs at the TV station where I worked.

Yeah. And she used to try and get me to come to her parties on Friday night. And you're like 25 now or what? Less. And she lived in what was known as the Gold Coast area of Chicago, near Northside. She lived in a mansion. And on a Friday night, she had people from all walks of life. Lenny Bruce used to go there.

And Oscar Brown Jr. and Alderman from Chicago, Dr. Bergen Evans of Northwestern University's English department. So she was putting together like these dinners, salons almost, where you get engaged in conversation. A hundred people, salons, massive with food and drink. And one day I found myself squeezed against a corner. I went there, finally. And there were a hundred-odd people around. And I'm standing next to a priest, a guy in a priest collar. And I'm holding a drink, and he's holding a drink. And I didn't know what to say to him, but I just blurted out,

Father, where is your church? And he said, oh, I don't have a church. He said, I'm the Protestant chaplain at the Cook County Jail on Death Row. And I said, oh. And I instinctively, I said, have you ever met anybody on Death row that you thought was innocent? And he said, yeah, there's a guy now, a black guy who's 32 years old.

He's been in for nine years. He's up for first degree murder. And both the warden and I think that he was beaten to confess by the Chicago cops. And it just went right through me. And I thought about this conversation. His name was Father Robert Serfling. And I thought about this conversation all weekend, and I called him at the Cook County Jail on a Monday morning.

I said, Father, you remember me? He said, yeah, we talked at Lois Solomon's. I said, could I meet this guy whose name was Paul Crump, C-R-U-M-P? He said, well, why would you want to meet him? I said, I don't know, but I said, I work in television, and I might be able to do him some good. He said, you can't do him any good. All of his appeals have been denied.

He was denied twice by the United States Supreme Court. He was denied certiorari, which meant that the court would take his case. The court denied hearing his case twice by one vote, five to four against. He's finished. by one vote, five to four against. He's finished. The only thing that could save him is a pardon from the governor, who was then Otto Koerner, Democratic governor. And I thought, I said, well, look, I don't know, maybe I could get his story in front of the public and something could happen. And he said, let me ask the warden. Now, the warden was a guy named Jack Johnson. Yeah.

A big, heavy set bull of a guy who had executed three people in the electric chair and did not want to execute anyone else. And he liked Paul Crump. And he felt that Crump had become rehabilitated in prison and he may not have been guilty in the first place. So he let me come down and meet him, meet Crump. And I went to the television station where I worked. I totally believed in Crump's story, as did many others. And I went to the TV station and the general manager said, we don't make documentaries. We do live television. We don't want to do a documentary film. And so I went across town to the ABC station, which was Channel 7 in Chicago,

run by a man called Red Quinlan, who had wanted to hire me. But I stayed at WGN because I was doing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra program live and that was a great experience at WGN so I stayed there but Quinlan financed a 16 millimeter documentary that I made with another guy who was a live tv cameraman named Bill Butler, who later was the cameraman, the director of photography on Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a number of other great films. But he and I started together, and we learned by rote how to make a film. We had access to Death Row, and I knew nothing about how to make a documentary i had never seen one yeah but i was motivated to make this film as a kind of court of last resort for this guy yeah we made this film it's very primitive whatever but it was shown to the governor of Illinois, Otto Koerner, and he sent me a note. And the note said,

I've seen your documentary, and though my parole and pardon board has voted two to one to send Mr. Crump to the electric chair, I'm going to pardon him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. And that was a first. I mean, it had happened once before that I'm aware of in Chicago, the Loeb-Leopold case. Right. Where Clarence Darrow defended Loeb and Leopold, and they got life imprisonment instead of the chair.

They were kids, teenagers. Anyway, the film saved this man's life and red quinlan then entered it in a whole bunch of film festivals where it won uh the best not only best documentary but best film it won the golden gate award at the san francisco film festival in 1960 uh has that thing been re-released it's been re-released it's out there you can what's it called the people versus paul crump but it saved this gentleman's life and i thought my god the power of film right what you can do with film yeah and then i had offers to come out to Hollywood to do documentaries. And I came out to California in 1965 after I had moved to ABC in Chicago and Bill Butler and I had our own documentary unit. So you were doing docs.

I started after having done over a thousand live shows. I went into documentary film and did three or four in Chicago for ABC. And then David Walper brought me to LA where I did documentaries for Walper and the ABC network. And how did the opportunity for the first narrative film come? The first narrative film, the first thing I ever did on a soundstage was the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The first narrative film, the first thing I ever did on a soundstage was the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The producer of the Hitchcock Hour, who is Norman Lloyd at that time, had been on for 10 years.

Norman Lloyd was a great actor. He's still alive. He's 101 years old. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the guy who played the saboteur in Hitchcock's film Saboteur. And he worked with the Mercury Theater and Orson Welles. Right. He's still around, God bless him. I think Judd Apatow just used him in Trainwreck, didn't he?

I don't know, but he could have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's Norman, and he was the producer. And he saw the William Morris office started to represent me. And they showed my documentary around Hollywood. Yeah. As like a calling card. Yeah.

And Norman Lloyd saw it and he said that there was more suspense in the first five minutes of that film than anything they had done that year on the Hitchcock Hour. And I went to meet with him and he gave me a script that was written by James Bridges, who later became a fine screenwriter, Urban Cowboy and a number of other, I think he wrote The China Syndrome. Oh, right. Yeah. But he had written the script for The Hitchcock Hour and it was starring John Gavin, who was in Psycho. Yeah. Norman said, look, I have to let John Gavin see your film, and he has approval of who's going to direct it. And if he had said no, I probably wouldn't have a career. But John saw the film and said, okay,

I don't imagine this guy's any worse than some of the other guys you got directing these shows. Yeah. And so he approved me. And then how does he, and then the first big movie was The French Connection? No, the next, the first feature I made was with Sonny and Cher. Sonny Bono wanted to work with a young guy on their first feature film, and they showed him some of my documentaries,

and then the Hitchcock Hour. Sonny and I met. We became great friends, and we wrote the script together. We ad-libbed a movie called Good Times, and it was just a joy to work with them. And the film did well. It was made for nothing, just a joy to work with them yeah and the film did well it was made for nothing and the producer sold it to columbia for i think five million dollars which was not chump change in those days

sure and they were a big act at that time they were big they had all kinds of number one songs right right uh i got you babe yeah yeah uh the beat goes on. Yeah. Better sit down, kids. Uh-huh. Sonny was one of the few geniuses I've ever met. Yeah? He couldn't read a note of music. All the music was in his head. It started with Phil Spector, I think. He was a gopher for Phil Spector. Yeah.

And did you guys remain friends throughout his life? Till he died in a ski accident. Terrible. In Aspen. Yeah. And I occasionally still see Cher. Oh, yeah? And I've gone to a lot of her shows in Vegas.

But, you know, I don't know where she lives now. We're in a different world. But we were close for many years after. So through the Sonny and Cher and through the stuff you were doing, you were offered the French Connection? No. The next thing I did was a film of Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party.

Right. Which I saw when I was much younger in San Francisco, and it mesmerized me, as did Citizen Kane, the movie. Pinter's play, The Birthday Party, was and is an incredible piece of work. It's heavy, right? Well, yeah. It's called A Comedy of Menace. just an incredible was and is an incredible piece of work it's heavy right well yeah it's called a comedy of menace but there's more menace than comedy and it was that your first experience with really you know taking a piece of theater and trying to imagine it as film well i was as i say really moved by it and they came to me a company called palomar

pictures uh which was owned by the abc television network they said what would you like to do and i said the birthday party i called harold pinter i got his phone number in england we spoke and he didn't know who the hell i was uh but i guess something i said intrigued him right and i went to england to meet with him and we met for two or three days at his house and he said okay let's do it and um he wrote the screenplay and i spent a year with Pinter where I learned pretty much everything I know about drama. He was incredible. As you know, he's won the Nobel Prize for Literature toward the end of his life. And he was probably the most fascinating man I've ever met, and I learned so much from him. Well, what are some of the things that you carry with you that haven't just become second nature about drama that stand out in your head from him?

Well, in Pinter's style, which is not a style that I totally adopted, every single word, every comma, every period had meaning. There were no throwaway, there was no throwaway dialogue. Every single word. He wrote pauses in, right? He wrote in the pauses. Yeah. And a long pause was different from a short pause.

And he made it a practice never to explain the meanings of his work. If you didn't get it, the hell with you. He got it. And he wrote stuff that was completely off the radar in the late 50s and early 60s. Birthday Party, I think, had been written in 1958 betrayal did he write he wrote betrayal which is a story told backwards a play yeah where the last scene of the play appears first and works at bay it's way back to when this couple first met and um so he experimented with form but he taught me that every word does count he would seldom use useless adjectives like the word very yeah what does the word very mean if i say to you i like you very

much does that give any indication of how much i like you no very much what is very this is this water is very good or not very good or whatever you might say there are certain words that carry no meaning like interesting interesting is the worst thing you could say about somebody's movie or podcast if somebody says this podcast is interesting it's an abject failure you know it's the worst thing you could say because all of the arts are created for a purpose, which is to draw out an emotional response from the listener or the viewer. That's all. Yeah. Not to be interesting.

Yeah. Who in the hell wants interesting? Yeah. But Pinter's work was gripping and involving there was not a wasted sentence a wasted word or a wasted comma and that impressed me very much to this day yeah and in writing my autobiography i actually made a pass on my autobiography where i took out every time I use the word very uh-huh as a meaningless word did you leave him out took him out I did one pass of the book which pretty thick book and took out the word very but Pinter also when he came

to the rehearsals of the birthday party and the actors would say, Harold, what does this mean? Or what does that mean? He would say, I have no idea what it means or why it's there. You have to figure that out for yourself. Now, there are many actors that work today from backstory.old provided no backstory like how how were these two people who are in conflict with one another how were they when they were children how did this guy feel about his parents or he doesn't care about any of that crap i'll give you an example of how i've used that yeah in a film i made a film called The Hunted with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro. And this is how Tommy Lee Jones works.

If he's cast right, you never talk to him about meaning or backstory or even what's going in front of the camera. You'll just sit with him. He knows all of that. That's why he's agreed to take the role right so all you do is all I do is I say Tommy you come in that door you walk over here you sit down you talk to this guy over here then you get up you look out the window over there then you come back sit down you take a drink of water say something him then you leave yeah I just give him the

action he says let me see if i got this right i come in that door over there i sit down over there i talk to this guy over here i get up and look out the window come back sit down say a line to him take a sip of water get up and leave i said that's right he's okay i'm ready and he shoot it one take done yeah with benicio del toro yeah in the same scene in the same movie you come in that why do i come in the door what if you discovered me lying on the floor well um how did i feel about my father when i was 14 years old and i would say to Benicio and other actors. Like that, of that ilk. Who need a backstory and really from which to work, I would say, look, I don't know. If it isn't on the page, it's not on the stage.

And I could make up some bullshit. I could make up a story about how you felt about your father when you were 14. But I don't really know. Yeah. So I could lie to you. And if it helps you, I will make up such a story. And eventually we'd come around to him doing the staging that I asked him to do. Right. Or suggesting a better staging.

Because when you're a director, you must consider that there are many ways to do a scene infinite number of ways to do just to shoot the two of us in this room sure and the best idea works yeah wherever you get the best idea of how to do the scene or where to put the camera high low straight on from the floor from the ceiling from behind a monitor whatever to pan around the room and see what's here the best idea usually comes to the fore and it could come from the prop man or a stage hand which is i don't pay why i don't pay a lot of attention to the auteur theory because they Because film is a collaborative medium. Right. You work alone.

Yeah. With one person, I imagine. Sometimes you've had two. I've done TV, and collaboration is necessary. Well, only in the performing arts. If you're a painter, all you need is a blank canvas and paint and a brush. Right. And your imagination. Phot paint and a brush. Right. And your imagination.

Photographer, the same. Yeah. If you're a writer, you just need a pencil. Right. A typewriter or a computer. Sure. And you work alone from your imagination. A composer works the same way.

Right. But in any of the performing arts you work with many people it's a orson wells once called the equipment that is used in the making of a film a one-ton pencil it's actually about a 20-ton pencil yeah so you basically you're saying that that in the big picture tomm Tommy Lee's a little easier to work with. It's different because these backstories, which Pinter never dealt with, he would ridicule them. But these backstories are meaningless. I mean, an actor, to produce an emotion, ordinarily does work from something called sense memory. Yeah.

But it's their business. You remember what frightened you or made you happy or made you fall in love when you were much younger. And you utilize that experience to produce an emotion as another character. Let's get to the exorcist. So you win Best Picture, you win Best Director, you have French Connection, you know, it's sort of you're a made guy. We didn't really talk about how the French Connection happened. How'd that happen?

Everything happens by luck or accident. And everyone turned it down. Every studio turned it down for two years. Really? And I actually was on the unemployment line. I hadn't done anything for two years really and i actually was on the unemployment line i hadn't made done anything for two years i had just finished the boys in the band two years before but i wasn't working and finally one day dick zanuck called and said look i don't know what the hell this thing is you guys are trying to do i I'm sort of intrigued by it. If you can make it for a million and a half dollars, go ahead.

You better make it soon because I'm going to be fired out of here in six months. And he was. But he greenlit the film. We had a budget of $3 million, but we anticipated having a star like Paul Newman. Right. but we anticipated having a star like Paul Newman who was getting the top salary then, which was $500,000 a picture. Today it's chump change for a movie star.

But it wasn't then. And Dick Zanuck said, you don't need a movie star. Just get the right actor in this thing. And I remember saying to him, would you go with a non-actor who was right he said well like who who are you talking about I said you ever hear of a journalist in New York called Jimmy Breslin he said yeah yeah I love Breslin's writing style he wrote a lot like Damon Runyon yeah I said I know Jimmy Breslin he's's a good friend of mine. Let me go back and audition him and see how he did.

I had hired Scheider. Yeah. And I hire people based on instinct. Yeah. I don't read them. Right. If I thought you were right for a part, I wouldn't ask you to read it and audition. Yeah.

And with Roy Scheider, he walked into my casting director, who was not a casting director. He was a film and theater critic for the Village Voice in New York. He knew every actor in the country. And he discovered Whoopi Goldberg and a lot of people. And one day he brought Roy Scheider into my office. And Roy sat down opposite me as I'm sitting opposite you yeah and uh I said how you doing Roy he said oh great I said what are you doing now he had never shot a film yeah he said I'm in an off-broadway play by Jean Genet

and I said well what kind of part do you play I knew instantly he was the guy. And he said, I play a cigar-smoking nun. I said, oh, yeah? He said, yeah. I said, okay, you got the part. He said, what? Did you want me to read something? I said, read something? There's nothing to read.

These guys just run after guys. They chase guys. Get your hands up. You know, stop. Hey, you. You ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie? There's nothing to read. You are right for this part.

And I hired him. And then I had him rehearse with Jimmy Breslin. And the first day of rehearsal, Breslin was great. It was all improvisation. He was wonderful. And he improvised scenes with Scheider. And I had the young African-American actor, Alan Weeks. And we would improvise scenes outdoors. And the second day, Breslin would forget what he did the first day. On the third day day he showed up drunk the fourth day which was a thursday didn't

show up at all right and on friday i knew i had to fire him because it wasn't going to work he came in very contrite but he said to me um i didn't he was a good friend so i didn't know quite how to fire him but he said to me i'm sorry i was drunk and all this and he said um isn't there a car chase in this movie i said yeah he said well i gotta tell you he said i promised my mother on her deathbed i would never drive a car so i don't know how to drive i said you're fired that's how he got out hackman was not even on our radar. And where'd he come from? Well, he was suggested by his agent.

Yeah. We met with him, the producer and I. I wasn't convinced. He had never done a leading role either, but he was a good supporting actor. He had been in Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde, yeah, yeah. Played Warren Beatty's brother. Yeah.

Good in a number of things as a supporting actor, but I didn't see him as this dark Irishman. Yeah. But he was the last man standing, the last guy. And Zanuck was going to get fired, so we had to go. And it worked out. By the grace of God. You you know not my genius yeah believe me and you were capturing it like immediately with that documentary style so you got all that life

no second takes yeah there are no second takes in life mark is that true try it sometime try to do a retake on when you were 15 years old. You know, I feel okay. I don't think there's too many things I need to retake. You? I would if I could, but I can't. So what the hell? What would you change?

Or as you say, what the fuck? Yeah. Right? Yeah. No. What can you do? Change? No.

But, you know, the Robert Frost poem about the road not taken. Yeah. You're walking in a forest and there's a path that breaks left and another that breaks right. And the decision you make right there to take that path is what leads you to the rest of your life. And why did you make that decision then? Who in the hell knows? You know the great story, The Lady and the Tiger? Mm-mm.

You do? No. Oh, when I the Tiger? Mm-mm. You do? No. Oh, when I was a kid, I read it. Yeah. About some guy in ancient Rome who falls in love with the daughter of one of the Caesars, one of the kings. And the king says, okay, I'm going to put you into the arena where the Christians are thrown with the lions. And there'll be two doors.

Out of one door will come a man-eating lion, if you choose that door. And out of the other door will come my daughter. And if you choose the right door, you'll have my daughter. And if you choose the right door, you'll have my daughter. And if you choose the wrong door, your memory. Yeah. And the story never reveals what door this guy took.

That captured my imagination, although I read almost nothing when I was in high school. But that story captured my imagination. Every door we take is the lady or the tiger yeah sometimes both i guess so i had to think about that i i hate blank air but you know sometimes you you hit me with something i have to think about sometimes both yes indeed indeed oh yes yeah but who the hell knows i'm sure that you know when you started

and wanted to be a stand-up comic there probably wasn't such a thing as a podcast no there was not yeah you know sometimes desperation yields the most amazing things when you're up against the wall and you got nothing but a tunnel of darkness looking at you, you know, you can't give up. You open a door. Yeah, you got to open a door. You can't go back. There was a time when if somebody said to you, I'd like you to do a podcast, you'd say, what the hell is that? Of course.

Pod? What pod? Or even talking to people. I never saw myself talking to people. So you go from the French Connection to The Exorcist, and that must have been. Here's how that happened but i mean you have this weird fascination it's not weird but this uh you know about menace about thrillers about it seems like from when you were a kid listening to radio that the the haunted nature and the the the sort of uh supernatural and the magic oh fascinated me as it

does pretty much everybody sure and you know it, my philosophy is basically like what Hamlet said to his friend Horatio. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. And that's what I believe. Things I don't know or understand. I can't deny the power of religious belief. It's just there. Do you believe? Well, I believe in the teachings of Jesus, as I've said to you.

There are a number of things that don't filter through my consciousness easily, but the mystery of faith is something that you have to pay attention to. For example, you take Jesus, a guy walking in the desert and in the diaspora over 2,000 years ago with a robe and sandals, no television, no internet, no podcasts, nothing written. He might be back, though. I could get him on here, I hear. He might come, because you've got a very intelligent audience. But here's a guy that spoke under the radar.

He spoke in synagogues. He didn't come to start a new religion. In fact, he's written about in two histories of first century Jerusalem, one by Philo, another by a guy called Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish historian of first century Jerusalem. And all he wrote about Jesus was there was this man called Jesus Christ. He went among the people. He healed the sick, and he was beloved of the people. That's all it says.

Now, you read the Gospels, which were written a couple of hundred years later, the first one. There's nothing in his own handwriting, nothing that he published yeah no recordings of his voice yeah to our knowledge there was only one remaining thing that showed him in a drawing which is called the Mandylion of Edessa so people who weren't in his immediate presence didn't know him he read him see him There were thousands of people crucified by the Romans. Many of them were called Jesus. This particular guy is still worshipped by billions of people who have no way of seeing him literally, hearing him literally, other than through the mystery of faith so and i respect that sometimes i don't respect something like that when you get a guy like adolf hitler sure who also

preached to the masses but we did see him people did see and hear him and saw his recordings and his newsreels and everything else and they followed recordings and his newsreels and everything else, and they followed him. And his stage production, tremendous stage production. Well, yeah. The guys who produced Hitler were frigging geniuses. But to me, the two most interesting figures in recorded history are Hitler and Jesus. And it's good and evil, opposite ends of the pole.

And I don't understand the origins of either one. I don't know if I was around at the time of Christ, whether I would have been a follower or a believer or not, but I can't reject the teachings of Jesus. Right. Not in so far as they're presented by the church, but I can't reject the teachings of Jesus. Right. Not insofar as they're presented by the church, as I've said. No, but just the poetry and the story and the wisdom. The ideas and the wisdom and a way to live and how to treat your fellow human beings. But you must possess a dark side as well. Of course I do.

Everyone does. Yeah. But you must possess a dark side as well. Of course I do. Every human being, you and every listener, we have within us both good and evil. And life is a constant struggle for each of us to suppress our worst angels and to try not to do harm. And often we lose that battle. We don't succeed. Yeah. Fortunately, you have a few rounds. You hope that, you know, at least a struggle.

There are different times where the darker angels are running things. I think, I believe that there is a good and bad side to every human being. Of course. And so, you know, the exorcist is about that but if you want i'll tell you how i got to do that or not no i love something else i hate to direct the well no no no but the thing that i find amazing about it is though that you know even with you know the evolution of special effects the theatrics of the exorcist and the pacing of the exorcist and the story and it's still riveting it's a powerful story and but you're like i don't mind the the effects they work for me still it's still horribly creepy and i think that you know when her head spun around

that changed a lot of people's lives it was like the fucking shark and jaws like i can't go in a pool when it's at night but you know in the same with the exorcist you're never going to forget that thing you can't go in a swimming pool at night i got my. But, you know, and the same with the exorcist. You're never going to forget that thing. You can't go in a swimming pool at night? I got problems. You know, my dark side, you know, kind of hobbles me. Holy mackerel. I'm exaggerating a little, but the ocean. I'm not going to go in the ocean at night.

Are you? Yeah, I have. Well, I have, but I mean, it's not comfortable. I have a kind of sleepwalker's faith that when I walk out that door door i'm not going to get hit by a car oh yeah i have some of that you know that's the only way to live you've never had moments where you're like i'm not going to do that because my faith tells me maybe i shouldn't i don't remember anything like that i usually just follow my instincts but here's how the exercise came about. I have to go back. I was asked by a great producer director named Blake Edwards.

Sure. Julie Andrews' husband. Yes, but more than that. And he had a television series on the air then. He was a great film director. He did Breakfast at Tiffany's. Did he do all the Pink Panther movies too? The Pink Panther.

But that was later, yeah. Pink Panther. But that was later, yeah. Pink Panther. But he had a series on television then called Peter Gunn, which had this great theme by Henry Mancini, which sort of became the foundation of rock and roll. It was... Was that it? And this was in the 50s.

And then that... Yeah. And it was really cool. and this was in the 50s and then that yeah you know and it was really cool yeah and those were the foundation chords

of rock and roll which came a couple of years later uh huh so good and but Blake

was gonna make a feature film of Peter Gunn yeah he didn't want to direct it only to write and produce it. And he invited me to meet with him at his offices at Paramount, get the script, read it, and if I liked it, I was going to direct it. I go to the first meeting.

I really thought this guy was an absolutely great filmmaker. Yeah. And I lived at the Sunset Marquee then. It's a little place on Alta Loma off Sunset. Yeah. It's now become more prominent. But then it was like a funky motel with a swimming pool. And I lived there.

I took the script home. And I read it. and i was really disappointed and i had to sit down and think through what i was going to say to him because i hated the script and how was i going to tell this master filmmaker that? Yeah. And so I went to his office the following Monday, and he prepared the same breakfast for me that he always had. It was an English muffin with strawberry jam and a little pot of tea. And we sat opposite each other, and he said, well, what did you think? and we sat opposite each other and he said well what did you think and i said blake i think your worst enemy would not have written this script for you this is a terrible piece of shit that's what you went with yeah yeah and i said i could only be honest yeah i said i i hate it i think

what you've done is you've taken two episodes that I remember seeing of Peter Gunn, which I loved on television, and you've sort of spliced them together, and it's not fresh. It's not going to be for the movie, not for me. Right. And he was a ninth-degree black belt karate. Yeah.

He stood up in all of his majesty and he said to me at the top of his voice he said what in the fuck do you know you don't know anything what do you know about scripts you've done a couple of middling to lousy pictures and i just see some talent in you and you're telling me about this script? Yeah. I said, Blake, that's how I feel. I'm sure you don't want me to lie to you and then go out and fail. He said, he put out his hand, and he said, thank you very much for letting me meet an interesting person.

And I left. As I'm leaving and walking to the parking lot at Paramount, I hear a voice behind me, Mr. Friedkin. And I see a guy running towards me with dark hair and a mustache, a swarthy complexion. Yeah, because in Blake's office, which was cavernous, there were a lot of people sitting in the shadows who I wasn't even introduced to. And this guy was one of I wasn't even introduced to. And this guy was one of them. And he introduced himself. He said, Mr. Friedkin, I'm William Peter Blatty.

He said, I wrote that script that you just knocked and lost a job. And I said, oh, geez, I'm sorry, Mr. Blatty. He said, no, no, you're right. He said, we all know the script doesn't work. I said, I didn't see your name on it. It just says screenplay by Blake Edwards. He said, yes, Blake often does that. He said, but I wrote the script.

Blake did some rewriting. But everyone who works for Blake knows it doesn't work. And he just wants to get the movie made while he's directing something else and he said i admire you for that because you lost a job doing that and i admire it he wrote the damn thing yeah we shook hands and then i didn't see him for maybe three or four years yeah now three or four years later i'm on the road doing publicity for the French Connection, which had not come out yet. And I was going to various cities across the country. I started on the East Coast. And before I left the Sunset Marquee, a manuscript arrived in a manila envelope from William Peter Blatty.

This is four years later. And I looked at it and I thought, oh, this is the guy that wrote that terrible Peter Gunn script. I tossed it in my suitcase, and I didn't read it. I went from New York, and I wound up my tour in San Francisco, and then I was going to come back to LA and the last night of the tour in San Francisco I was going to have dinner at eight o'clock I had a beautiful view of the whole city out my picture window and I finished my last interview at five and I finally opened this envelope after nine or ten days on the road yeah it's the exorcist by William Peter Blatty and I sit down a

very comfortable easy chair and I start to read it and I had the same feeling that most of the readers had it It totally zombied me out. I couldn't believe this. It was so believable. Yeah, yeah. And I canceled my 8 o'clock dinner. I read the whole thing in one sitting, and he had his phone number on the lead sheet,

and I called him, and I said, Bill, what the hell, what is this? And he told me that he was inspired by a story that had happened when he was an undergraduate at Georgetown in 1949. Yeah. He had written it as a novel. Yeah. I said, why do you? He said, what did you think?

I said, it's great. It's fantastic. He said, do you want to direct it? I said, well, first of all, why me? He said, because you're the only director I've met who didn't lie to me. And he said, but I have to tell you that there are three other directors that Warner Brothers has in mind. They want to give it first to Stanley Kubrick, then to Arthur Penn, if Kubrick passes, and then to Mike Nichols.

Wow. And he said, so I've got to go through that, but I'd love for you to direct it. Now, the French Connection had not come out yet. It was about to. So those are heavy hitters. had not come out yet. It was about to.

So those are heavy hitters. Kubrick passed because he said he was only developing his own stuff. Right. Arthur Penn did not want to do any more violence on screen. He had done Bonnie and Clyde. Made his point. Made his point. Yeah.

And Mike Nichols thought you could never find a 12-year-old girl who could give a performance that would carry that film. And by the way, when the film did come out, the first call I got was from Mike Nichols, in which he said, how in the hell did you do it? So now the studio insisted on them. They went through them one at a time. And then Blat blatty said what about bill friedkin they said no who the hell is bill friedkin right he's done a couple of art films below the radar what the hell no and now the three guys pass they had actually made a deal with another director who I will not name.

They had a deal with him to direct it. Why will you name him? Because I don't want to embarrass him. All right. And I know him. And we were friends. And he was offered this picture. Now, finally, they have hired this other guy yeah and the french connection opened

okay and blatty was still in so insistent on me because he had director approval yeah and when they said no we're not going to go with friedkin he He said, okay, Friday night, which is the night the French Connection opened, he had not seen it. He said, on Friday night, I'm going on the Johnny Carson show, and I'm going to tell Carson's viewers that you have refused to grant my deal where I get director approval of this picture, and I'm going to tell them that you have broken my deal on national television wait a minute wait a minute that day the french connection opened in theaters the and blatty was about to take off for burbank to do cars Carson show. Yeah. And he gets a, he called Frank Wells, who was the head of the studio then. And he said, and Frank said, Bill, he said, is this about Friedkin?

And Blatty said, yes, I'm about to drive over to the Carson show. And they said, well, Bill, we've seen the French Connection, and now we want him more than you do. And that's how I got the film. The rest is history. Yeah, I would say so. About a month, well, October 30th, I went to Washington, to Georgetown, where the city of Washington, D.C. put up a plaque on those steps where we filmed The Exorcist.

They put up a plaque officially designating them The Exorcist Steps and designating every October 30th as Exorcist Day. And the mayor of Washington spoke and the president of Georgetown and the city councilman. And I spoke and Blatty spoke and our names are on this plaque. And it's one of the top five tourist attractions in Washington. That movie blew minds. But we never discussed a horror film. We never talked about what we could do to make this scarier. It was inspired by a true story.

Well, you could feel that because the young priest was so compelling. That guy is a genius. What was that guy's name? Jason Miller. What a great actor. He had never been in a film before. Don't you think the same? This is all the movie, God, as with French Collection.

He was perfect for that. Unbelievable. I had originally hired another actor to play that part, but Jason Miller was a playwright. He had done a few small acting jobs, road companies outside of New York, bus tours, but he'd never been in a film and never had a lead. That's great.

So how did you get that performance out of Linda Boyer? By becoming like her father, more accurately her grandfather. She told me, I asked her, you know, what are the things that moved her the most when she was younger? When I met her, you know, what are the things that moved her the most when she was younger? When I met her, she was 12. Yeah. And she told me that the thing that really destroyed her was the death of her grandfather. But she was highly intelligent.

She was a straight-a student yeah Westport Connecticut she was a champion horsewoman she had never acted before she had only done some modeling little girls dresses and stuff in the newspaper but I talked to her and I learned a lot about her and what she was like growing up and what scared her and what disturbed her. The principal thing being the death of her grandfather, which I would refer to again and again with her. I would go to those things that made her laugh.

I'm off camera. And before she had to do a scene on camera, I would whisper to her very close to the camera and remind her of things that she had to do a scene on camera, I would whisper to her very close to the camera and remind her of things that she had told me. And I became like a surrogate father to her, although either her mother or father or both were on the set at all times. But I made it a game. She was 12 years old.

She had no idea of the implications of a lot of the stuff she was doing. For example, when I first met her, she said we had seen tapes and interviewed thousands of young girls. And I felt, as Mike Nichols did, that you'd never find a 12-year-old who could do the range of this stuff. And now I was interviewing 16-year-old girls and 17-year-old girls who looked younger to try and find someone who would not be totally destroyed by this. I remember sitting at my desk at Warner Brothers in New York at 666 Fifth Avenue, which is where they were located. That address has since come down. Everything's winding up. Which had since come down, that address. And my head was in my hands because I thought we could not cast this role. I had everybody else. And

my secretary buzzes me, my assistant, and says, there's a woman out here named Eleanor Blair, and she's come with her daughter. She doesn't have an appointment, but would you see her? And I said, sure. Yeah, I'll see her. Why why not the minute she walked in the door again like scheider it was like a gift from the movie god i knew it was her the first thing i look for in an actor of any age whatever is not even experience but intelligence that's the first thing I'm looking for. Intelligence, which you can sense in someone, even before you speak, in the eyes, in the attitude. She sits down, her mother sits next to her. I said, Linda, do you know anything about The Exorcist? She said, yeah, I read the book. I said, well, what's it about? She said, well, it's about a little girl who

gets possessed by a devil and she does a whole bunch of bad things. And I said, well, like what? Like what sort of bad things? And she says, well, she pushes a man out of her bedroom window and she hits her mother across the face and she masturbates with a crucifix. She hits her mother across the face, and she masturbates with a crucifix. And I looked at her mother, who was still smiling, and I said, do you know what that means, Linda? She said, what? I said, to masturbate. And they were not a religious family either.

But I said, do you know what it means to masturbate? She said, yeah, it's like jerking off, isn't it? I look at her mother, who's still smiling. I said, have you ever done that? And she said, sure, haven't you? That was it. That was her audition. She made it.

I knew this was not going to hurt her as a person. Right, right. She was comfortable with the language, comfortable with the ideas, and I made it a game every day on the set. And that movie made a fortune, right? dollars so far that's insane basically a three dollar ticket but much of it has been made through blu-ray and reissues reissues every halloween yeah and going back it was reissued constantly unbelievable but also But also it streams now. Yeah, yeah. So what led to Sorcerer? The way it's characterized in some histories of movies is that you made this indulgent film that was over budget and you're out of your mind.

And then when it was released, Star Wars buried it and you went into a hole. That's pretty accurate. Star Wars buried it and you went into a hole. That's pretty accurate. Hey, if you want the short version, you just nailed it. But when you finish that movie, because I

saw the director's cut, I imagine, and when I read about the movie, they didn't seem to realize that there was a gunshot at the end. There's a gunshot at the end. No, of the French Connection. No, no, of the Sorcerer. Oh, a gunshot in Sorcerer. Yeah. Or it's a truck backfiring.

Because the last thing that you see going through the frame of the long shot of the town outside the tavern is a truck with workers. Yeah, and right before that, you see two gangsters going in. Two gangsters go in, and it's the Lady or the Tiger ending. Okay. They go in, but he's surrounded by people who owe him their lives. Right. And a couple of sheriffs, local sheriffs. Yep.

And other guys who are armed. Everybody there is armed, if not with a gun, with a machete. And the question is, can these two gunslingers just take him out and leave or not? And so you hear what sounds like a gunshot but could be a truck backfiring. In fact, the sound I used was a truck backfiring. Ah. That sounds like a gun. Okay.

At the end of the French Connection, there's an unexplained gunshot. As Hackman runs down the long corridor and makes a turn, still looking for the French guy. Yeah. The camera holds on the empty, long basement corridor, and you hear a shot fired and then it goes to black and the ending is in the mind of the viewer as was the lady or the tiger i really had a hard time processing uh what you know if if scheider died at the end of sorcerer like you should you it is up to the viewer. You should have a hard time processing it. I didn't even indulge the truck backfiring.

I just figured he got it. That's okay. Welcome to your opinion. It bothered me. I don't know if he died or not. I know you don't, but you thought about it. If I don't show it, it doesn't exist. But you weighed this decision.

You put the sound in for this exact reason. The sound of a truck backfiring, which you interpreted as a gunshot. All right. I like to have my films go into the mind of the viewers and let them process it or not. Did you lose your mind during Shooting Sorcerer? That might be too strong a way to characterize it i was always in control of it yeah and i always tried to get what i envisioned on the screen did you yes and as a film that came the closest to the way i saw it my my mind's eye, that's the one. I loved it. Why, thank you. It reflected my view

of life, as I told you. And this is just, was the Vietnam War still going? Or just over? It was, it was basically over a couple of years. Nixon had basically ended the Vietnam War. You know, Vietnam reverberated throughout this country, and to some extent still does. And I think that at that time in the mid-70s to the late 70s, America, not so much that it lost its way, but it certainly became a new country, you know, after the 70s. America went through a national nervous breakdown after the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the Vietnam War. That took America through a national nervous breakdown. And that was sort of the sorcerer, sort of the end of that in a way, the sorcerer in many ways reflected that these men doing absolutely stupid things, which may or may not have resulted in their survival.

And in fact, three out of the four of them don't survive. Yeah. And but they were desperate. Like I tried to picture that movie coming out and what an audience at that time and how they would receive it. Well, it wasn't well received by the critics or the audience then. I can't believe the critics. What kind of critics would not receive that well? The same critics that rejected Citizen Kane and Vincent van Gogh, who never sold a painting in his lifetime. I'm not comparing myself to Vincent van Gogh by any means, but he made over 36 or 3700 works,

drawings, watercolors, oil paintings. You look at them today, you say, this man died without ever selling one of these and today you it would cost you a hundred million dollars if you could buy an oil painting there was a great story why what changed in the tastes of the art loving public that were buying the Impressionists at the time of Van Gogh, but not of Vincent. This is an outrageous mystery of fate. Not faith, as I mentioned earlier, but fate. Why didn't those people back then recognize this as the great art that it is? I have no idea. and that movie was about fate

sorcerer is about the mystery of fate yes when sorcerer released and star wars released were you were you mad no i mean uh i was unprepared for that radical radical shift in the zeitgeist. And it was. It was a major change. It was like from silent movies to sound. Did you know Lucas? Yes. I met Lucas when he used to serve the food at Francis Coppola's house that Ellie, Francis' wife, used to cook.

And Lucas was a kind of acolyte employed by Francis. And Francis had given Lucas some money. For THX. THX and some help. And he was an assistant to Francis. And he would serve dinners at Francis' house in San Francisco then. And then Francis backed him in American Graffiti after THX. And here comes American Graffiti.

And the guy who ran the studio, they had a preview of American Graffiti that Francis sort of grandfathered. Yeah. He had to be there in case Lucas didn't know how to make a movie. And they have a preview in San Francisco where they all lived. And the guy who ran Universal was a guy named Ned Tannen. And after the screening where the audience went wild, loved it, screaming, cheering, out in the hall at the theater, Ned Tannen says to Coppola and Lucas, he said, you guys let me down. He said, that's not

the film we talked about. We got to be in the cutting room Monday morning. This was at the North Point Theater in San Francisco. It's now gone. And he said, you know, I don't know where this went wrong, but it's wrong everywhere, and we've got to go in the cutting room and fix it. And Francis said, you don't know what you're talking about. Did you hear that audience? Did you see the audience in there? They went crazy for this. What is wrong with you?

He said, how much money have you got in this picture? And Tess, what do you mean? How much? He said, how much money do you have in the picture? You don't have a million dollars in this picture. He said, what do you have, about $900,000 at the most? And Tannen said, yeah, that's about right. And Francis whipped out his checkbook, and he said, I will buy this film from you right now I will write you a check for nine hundred thousand dollars and take this over and he didn't have nine hundred thousand dollars or anything like it but Tannen backed off and the film went out the way George made it you know when you talk about a mentor or a guy who was an inspiration to another filmmaker,

that's Coppola and Lucas. And, of course, they went down separate paths. So you sense with Star Wars that it was just a shift in the culture. Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, that rarely happened. It happened at times when, you know when black and white gave way to color and silent gave way to sound. There's nothing wrong with the great Buster Keaton and Chaplin movies, but along comes sound, which in many ways was a regression of the art form.

But that's what people wanted. They wanted sound to go with that. You thought it was that big of a shift. Without a doubt. That's what it is today. Yeah. Star Wars came out in 1977, but every other film is an offshoot of Star Wars. Right.

All these comic book superheroes. That's Star Wars. If Star Wars had failed, I don't know which direction film would have gone to where did you go i stayed on the path that i had set right after sorcerer after you know i imagine there was a a period where you were like i gotta get my head together uh yeah but i've always thought of myself, really, not as an artist, but as a working director. Where'd you go? I didn't make a film for a while. I didn't find anything I really wanted to do.

But almost two years later, I made a film called The Brinks Job. It was intended as a comedy about the actual Brinks robbery. Peter Falk, Paul Sorvino, Peter Boyle, Warren Oates. Ah, Warren Oates. Jenna Rowland, Alan Garfield. And we had a lot of fun. And I went to Boston to make it because I was a huge Celtic fan. Oh, yeah.

And I got to know Red Auerbach and very well. And for the next 10 years, I basically went to Celtics games and practices. And eventually they let me practice with the 80s team, Bird, McHale, and Parrish. Oh, yeah. And I got to suit up and I could run the plays. I could never rebound with those guys, but I became very close to Red and Bob Cousy. Oh, that's great.

And what about Cruisin'? That blew my mind in high school. That was a couple of years later. It's a crazy movie. That came about, I don't know if you know this, when I made The Exorcorcist there's a scene it's an arteriogram scene yeah you know where they try to uh where they put a needle oh yeah yeah yeah yeah in a neurosurgical room yeah and they inject a fluid that outlines the arteries

of the brain to see if she has arterial brain damage. And I shot that scene at the NYU, the New York University Medical Center, with an actual neurosurgeon and his assistant. And I noticed something about the assistant then. This was back in 1972 when I shot it. The assistant, who was a male nurse in effect, had an earring and a studded leather bracelet in the workplace. And that was rare, and especially in a hospital setting. And I just, I didn't comment to anybody about it. I just took note of it as being strange.

His name was Paul Bateson. He's in the movie. About four years later, five years later, I read on the front page of the New York Daily News, I see Paul Bateson's picture. And he's charged with several murders of gay men whose body parts were found in the East River of New York in plastic bags. And I see it's, who is this guy? Paul Bateson. I know this guy. And, oh my God. And I read on, I see he's being held at Rikers Island, and I see the name of his lawyer. And I find that he's being held because when these body parts came to surface in these plastic bags,

in very small print at the bottom of the bag, it said New York University Medical Center Neuropsychiatric Division. And that's how they traced the bags and the parts to him, and they charged him. So I call his lawyer, whose name was in the paper, I didn't know. And I said, look, I directed The Exorcist and Paul is in it. He said, yeah, I know. I said, would Paul see me or would you allow Paul to meet with me? He said, I'll ask him. And the answer came back, yes. And I had to go through about eight layers of bureaucracy to get into where he was being held pending trial for several murders.

And I'm sitting with him in a room as big as this one. As I say, it's about 10 by 15. Approximately. And I'm in a room with him and there's a guard outside, not inside. Yeah. And we sit down. This is 1978 or so. The Exorcist has been out for five years. And Paul says to me, first thing he says is, how's the film doing?

And I said well it's doing great Paul it's still running I said Paul did you do these murders and he said I only remember doing the first one he said I was so high on the rest of these I honestly don't remember but I probably did because they got me on these bags. And the first murder was actually the theater critic for Variety in New York. His name was Addison Verrill. Yeah. And Paul used to go to the S&M bars on the west side of New York.

He'd pick up guys, take them back to his apartment. They'd do a lot of dope. And he'd wind up hitting them over a head with a frying pan. And then he cut them up and threw their bodies in these bags in the East River. And he remembered doing the first one, but he told me he didn't remember all the rest. I said, how many were there? He said, I'm not sure. He said, but they've asked me to confess to eight. And they said, if I confess to eight, they will lower my sentence and I'll get out in 25 years. I said, for eight murders? Yeah. I said, what are you going to do? He said, I don't know. I'm thinking about it. He confessed to the eight murders and got out 25 years later. He's around somewhere. He may be listening to this broadcast. I'm sure he went into witness protection. I don't know if he's still alive or still uses the name Paul Bateson, but that's who he was, and that's what gave me the idea for the film Cruising. And that movie was...

That was taking place. Not only these murders in the S&M bars, but the mysterious deaths of gay people, which did not have a name in 1978, But by 1980, when cruising came out, it was HIV, AIDS. So there were these mysterious deaths and murders. And there were articles by a guy called Arthur Bell in the Village Voice, who wrote, you know, sort of warning shots to gay people about not going to these bars. And I happened to know the guy who was the head of the West Side mob,

the Italian mob in New York, who owned all the bars. And he owned the mineshaft where i on little west 12th street it's now a gentrified restaurant area in the west side of new york again for street yeah he owned the bars and i went to him to his house he lived like tony soprano yeah he's a big fan of the french collection no he lived in long island yeah and he had his grandchildren grandchildren running around on the floor while we sat in the kitchen. And he would cut up pieces of salami and cheese. And we'd eat salami and cheese and talk about stuff. And one day I said to him, his name was Matty Ionello, Matty the horse.

And I said, Matty, I want to talk to you. I want to make a film in the mine shaft. And he went like this. He put his finger in front of his mouth like, shh. And he held his hand out, stop. Don't say another word. And then he said, so you're working on another film, huh, kid? And he changed the subject, went to something else.

And then we talked for about another 15, 20 minutes. We go outside. He said, I'll walk you to your car. We walk out of the house toward my car. He first walked me in the opposite direction because where my car was parked, he said, without moving his lips, he said, you see down the street there? You see that little dark Ford sitting down there? There's two guys sitting down there, and they've got binoculars on us.

So they're going to try to read our lips. So we're going to go this other way for a minute. He said, first of all, never talk about my business in my house. Never say a word about my business in my house. Now, what do you want? And I said, I want to shoot in the mine shaft. He said, don't write this down. I'm going to give you a name and a phone number. You remember this number? And he gave me the phone number and the name of the guy who managed the mine shaft for him. And he said, call him and tell him you spoke to me. He will have heard from me. So I called the guy a few days later, went down, met with him, and I had permission

to film in these bars with the guys who were members of this club. There were no actual extras. They were guys into this. A lot of them were members of a group called the FFA, the Fist Fuckers of America. And this was a private club, and I filmed there for, oh, at least a week. A lot of stuff I filmed I couldn't use in the final cut. Yeah, it was a heavy movie, man. The story was heavy. And, you know, a lot of people came out

at the time and said, this is anti-gay. And it absolutely was not. It was, it was specific. It was an unusual background. Yeah. for a murder mystery. That's the only way I had viewed it. Now, I had also made Boys in the Band some years earlier, and a lot of people thought that was anti-gay. It was written by a gay man. It's a great play, very funny. I think the movie we made is terrific,

and I think cruising in its own way is damn good. Yeah. But these were obviously not anti-gay films, but they were a peek behind the curtain of a culture that not too many people anywhere were aware of. Most of the reaction to cruising has changed as well. It's mostly positive. I remember when To Live and Die in L.A. came out because I was excited that he made a new movie. Again, it was about the thin line between the policeman and the criminal.

Yeah. Or between good and evil. And that's my subject. What was that guy? Was that Peterson? Billy Peterson. Oh, my God. It was his first film. First time I ever saw him. First film. He had a and evil and that's my subject what was that guy was that peterson billy peterson oh my god that was his first film first time i ever saw him first film he had a walk on as a bartender in michael mann's movie thief which he shot in chicago yeah but i saw him up at the toronto shakespeare festival the same guy that brought me roy scheider said you got to go up and see this guy billy Peterson, do Street Car Named Desire at the Toronto Shakespeare Festival. And I said, I don't want to see Street Car. Marlon Brando owns that part. Everyone who's ever done it just imitates Brando. And he said,

this guy does not. He is unique and original. And I go up there, I saw the performance, guy was great, I met with him, offered him the picture. It's interesting, now that I'm realizing it, that you've always had a relationship with theater in the films. That, like, you know,

even with Boys in the Band. Well, that's where actors come from, Mark. No, but I mean, like, you shoot plays. I've done a couple. I did Boys in the Band, The Birthday Party, and Bug and Killer Joe. But, you know, these are your most recent films. Great scripts. couple i did boys in the band the birthday party and uh but the recent one killer joe but don't

but you know these are these are your most recent films great scripts tracy letts is a genius these are great well we're on the same page what page is that that we have the same world view we look at life in a similar way sort of with an ironic view but we are obviously disturbed by the same sorts of things and we we see that you know there is this mystery of fate that's a part of life and also that people often do stupid things unintentionally that's what the point of view is that's one of them it's a when i say we're on the same page you and i are probably on the same page yeah i don't know what your politics are and i don't care but i imagine we have a similar outlook i don't think either one of us suffers fools gladly right uh that's where tracy and i that's the point at which we meet but we don't believe

you know the codes right we don't believe the codes well what about like in terms of the emotions and the the the visceral and violent nature and the sexuality of these plays in in in and they're very you know it's it's not easy to shoot a play as a film i would imagine because the script and the pace is different correct well if it's a great script it really doesn't matter and you're shooting on digital right i shot i shoot now on digital yes you have no problem with that no it's great when they release the picture yeah it has no dirt no scratches yeah no splices yeah you can tune you can go into a frame of film and tune the color you can make the sky bluer or lighter blue you can make people's faces warmer or colder stuff you could never do from frame to frame with 35 millimeter so yes i love it and by the way

over 90 percent 95 percent or more of all the screens run only digital i know i know i just like it like i guess i romanticize the the uh the the commitment necessary uh budgetarily and technology-wise to film. Most 35mm films are not in good shape enough to be seen. I know. It's like, you want to hear Caruso sing on an old 78 RPM record? No. And his voice sounds like this. With needle scratch yeah that's what 35 millimeter is compared to a digital

print right or something that you stream yeah on your computer right or ipad or iphone in 1080 uh ip high definition it's beautiful yeah i think and 35 mill i've seen prints of my films you know quentin tarantino's guy like very much he owns a theater yeah new beverly yeah and he runs only 35s and i've given him prints he actually had bootleg prints of a lot of my stuff and he calls me and asks me if it's okay to run in there and I say yes as long as I don't have to be there and see it. Yeah. Because 35s suck.

It's like listening to a podcast versus listening to radio on a tiny little thing that you used to plug into the wall and had nothing but static. Yeah. All right. I understand that. So I want the film to be seen as I see it through the viewfinder of the camera. I don't want the projectionist to have final cut where the film breaks in the projector as it often used to, and he'd have to splice it and you lose frames.

as it often used to, and he'd have to splice it, and you'd lose frames. Every time you run a 35-millimeter picture on a projector, it picks up dirt and scratches and often splices. And that was not built in. Yeah. But I know that there are a lot of people who feel, hell, that's the way I saw it. That's the purest way.

Bullshit. I want to see it clean. So these two plays you did with let's um we uh brought it up earlier there's a couple of things i want to bring around in terms of working with actors because it seems like sometimes when you work with someone like tommy lee jones that you you you trust his instincts he trusts his instincts but there are other actors that you feel like you have to get in their head, as we talked about with Jean and also Linda Blair a bit. But I noticed right away when I was watching Bug, and I don't want to give short shrift to some of the other movies like Jade or whatever. Oh, I'm sorry. But that was one of the best things I ever saw her do.

Oh, she's great in Bug, and she understood that paranoia. Bug is about the ability of two people who become romantically involved, and one person passes not only their worldview and their good stuff, but all their bad vibes to the other person right their paranoia it's about mutual paranoia and it's deeply disturbing and involving the actors were great everybody in it well that guy uh michael shannon wow he was he nailed it and ashley nailed it, and Ashley nailed it. And a lot of it comes from, in her case, the way she grew up, feelings that she had that I was able to tap into. But mostly she instinctively knew who that woman was.

She had never been able to play anything like that. Like Matthew McConaughey in Killer Joe, to play anything like that. Like Matthew McConaughey in Killer Joe, she had mostly done romantic comedies and sort of women's thrillers. And with those performances, like when you have these conversations with actors, do you sit down at a quiet place?

Yeah. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Some really comfortable place. You know, we don't do it in a restaurant or something we'll sit down in a quiet room often at my house uh occasionally at their house i first talked to mcconaughey about killer joe at his house then out in malibu yeah he's moved to austin texas back yeah i think he grew up there didn't he yeah from there yeah he's from there? Yeah. He's from East Texas. Yeah. And the first time Matthew read Killer Joe, he told me, and he said it publicly,

he threw it across the room into a big trash bin he had in his room. Yeah. He hated it. And then the people that gave it to him said, wait, you hated it? You better read this again. His agent and his lawyer said to him, you grew up with these guys. You know who these people are. And this is the different role that you're looking for. And in its own way, it's funny. It's really darkly humorous. And so he read it again, he said, and he got it. He got it.

And he called me, and we met. And we talked a little bit about my approach to it. I said, I don't do take two unless a light falls in the shot or the camera tips over. There is no take two. Always or just with ease? Always. I don't do take two. You know, let alone take 37.

I used to, like every other swinging dick that made a movie, I used to do endless takes looking for a miracle. Yeah. And I'd get in the cutting room. You're looking for a miracle on about take 27. And I'd get in the cutting room and I'd see that the best takes were the first or second one, the most spontaneous. They might not be word for word perfect, but they had the spontaneity. And so I tell the actors, that's what I'm going for.

So we talk over the scene. What is this scene about? And then I give them a staging, how I'm going for. So we talk over the scene. What is this scene about? And then I give them a staging, how I'm going to do it. And I'll sometimes use metaphor in talking to an actor. Yeah. Or I'll say things like, let's do it faster or slower. Or, you know, let's do it more quietly or louder. I've often done that,

but I don't stand there and try to bang out takes. Many directors have said, and I agree with, what's the secret of directing? Casting. If you've cast the right people and you're on the same page with them, it's probably going to work. Yeah.

So let's get back and close with this. You said you've seen The Shroud of Turin. Oh, yeah. Now, given your fascination with Jesus and given your fascination with the story, and you've obviously done a lot of research and have interest in it, what's your feelings on The Shroud of Turin? have interest in it. What's your feelings on the Shroud of Turin? When I first directed the opera Aida at the Teatro Reggio in Torino about 12 years ago,

you meet a lot of people socially when you come in as the director of an opera. They call you maestro. And it turns out that the people who control the Shroud of Turin are not the Catholic Church, but the relatives of the Savoia kings, who originally owned the Shroud of Turin in France, where they had their monarchy. And in the third century, they moved and built a castle in Torino and a basilica. And in that basilica, they brought with them from third century France the shroud that is allegedly the garment in which Jesus was wrapped when he was taken off the cross and placed in the tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea. That's the allegation. I met the last remaining relative of the Savoia family. His name is Serge de Yugoslavia. Serge of Yugoslavia. He's a nice guy.

He was in his 40s then. Young, attractive. I think he was in the stock market in Italy in various investments. And we met and became good friends. The Shroud had not been shown to the public for over 100 years. And he had control of who saw it. And I used to pull his leg. I say, Serge, I lived in an apartment

right across from the Basilica. And I used to say, Serge, you got to show me the shroud. I'm dying to see the shroud, knowing I'd never get to see it. It had not been open to the public. One day after weeks of this where I'm basically putting him on, he calls me on a Thursday, and he said, on Saturday, after the noon mass, you're not rehearsing, are you? I said, no.

Or I said something like, I'll move the rehearsal if I have to. Yeah. if I have to. He said, meet me right after the noon mass, wear a black suit, meet me on the steps of the basilica, tell Sherry to wear a black pantsuit, not a dress, and to cover her head. And he said, you wear a tie and meet me on the steps of the basilica Saturday. I said, Serge, I don't have a black suit, and I don't have a tie. He said, you have a dark coat? Yes.

Dark pants? Yes. Wear that, and I'll bring you a tie. We go to the steps of the Basilica. The noon mass lets out, and there is Serge and his mother, who lives in Florida. And his mother had a new boyfriend. She wasn't that old.

And she wanted to show the shroud to her new boyfriend. And they both live in Florida. So Serge arranged this private showing for eight people, to which Sherry and I were invited. private showing for eight people to which Sherry and I were invited. After the noon mass had completely let out, a big black limousine came around the corner with the Bishop of Piedmont, the region, the Piedmont or Piedmont region, and two or three priests accompanying him. And Serge said to us, you will have to kiss his ring. And we kissed the ring, both of us.

And then we went inside to the empty basilica. And as you walk toward the rather ornate altar, on the left-hand side is a long room covered from outside with leaded glass and from inside with velvet drapes that remained shut for 100 years, unless guys would go in there. And Serge handed the keys to this room to the bishop, who opened the doors. They rolled back the drapes, and now we are in a room that was probably twice as big as this room, 15 by 10.

It's probably 30 by 20. And the only thing you see in the room is just to the left of the altar. The only thing you see in the room is a painting of Jesus, and I don't know who it was by. It does not seem to be a well-known or famous portrait. And you see a rug, and the priests, there are eight of us, and the priests roll back the rug, and there's a foot pedal. back the rug and there's a foot pedal and the bishop placed his foot on the pedal at Serge's invitation and up from the floor rises this table that's about 15 feet long and it was covered after the rug is rolled back, it's covered by a red velvet cloth with an embroidered gold crucifix. And they roll that back, and beneath leaded glass on the table is the outline of a crucified man in blood.

is the outline of a crucified man in blood. And the most current DNA has shown that, and they're pretty good with the DNA now, that that image of the crucified man is not paint, certainly not photography, because its existence has been known since the 3rd century. Photography goes back to the 19th century. It in fact is type AB blood. And it's an outline of a crucified man including the outline of a crown of thorns.

And there's an outline of blood in the chest where the centurion's spear is supposed to have gone and you're looking at the image of a crucified man whose palms are crossed but they have been nailed through and his ankles are crossed and with one nail through both ankles. You see the outlines in blood of this image. And my wife and I and everyone else in the room burst into tears. As I think of it now, my eyes tear up. As I think of it now, my eyes tear up. And we see, what is the image of a crucified man?

In other words, we see before us man's inhumanity to man. Bang! I don't know if it's Jesus. The latest DNA has shown that the pollen on this cloth is from first century Jerusalem. Now, the Romans crucified thousands of people. Many of them called Jesus. We don't know that this is Jesus. I don't know that there were that many people or not crucified with a crown of thorns. This I didn't and don't know.

But I know that there were other Jesuses crucified. My wife and I, who are both Jewish, burst into uncontrollable and because of the power of this image and then the bishop in Italian translated by Serge to us started to explain the images in a in a clear way and it turns out that when you photograph if you if we weren't I didn't ask to photograph it but if someone photographs this image it doesn't show up it only showed when it was when the negative had been photographed and the photograph of the negative looks like this this is it yeah I carry it with me and that's the image that you get when you reproduce the

negative the positive image does not photograph but when you look at it by eye you see this outline in blood of a crucified man yeah and did now a few weeks or possibly a month or so later bishop john paul ii wanted to seeoud, and he had to get permission from the Savoia family through the Bishop of Piemonte. And he, of course, was allowed to come and see the Shroud. And there were hundreds of thousands of people outside waiting for him to appear outside the basilica. And he came out and he said words to the effect in Italian that this is a very important relic of the Catholic Church. He did not say for certain that this is the shroud of Jesus.

He did not say that this was definitely what is claimed for it. He said it's a very important relic of the Catholic faith, and it should be seen by everybody. So they then opened it to the public. This is about 10, 12 years ago, and over 2 million people filed by. This was shortly before Turin got the Winter Olympics. And then when I went back there to redirect the opera Aida in October, it had been reopened again 10, 12 years later. More millions of people filed by, but I didn't go in then because I had been alone with that image. You felt the opening of the original magic.

You know, that moment, how are you going to recapture that moment? Never. To me, the way you described it, and whether it was real or it wasn't, the mystical implications and the historical, I'm going to call it magic, of what it represents and what it could possibly be, and just the procedural that went up to you experiencing it was mind-blowing. Jesus did not want to be thought of as a magician and did not want to be thought of as someone who performed miracles. He was always quick to tell the people where these so-called miracles occurred, do not say anything, do not talk about this. He didn't want to be thought of as a magician or a role player. Now, it's possible to interpret from that that if I tell you,

hey, Mark, don't say anything about what we talked about, that the first thing you're going to do is go tell somebody. That's possible. But, you know, what draws me to the ideas of jesus is not the miracles no uh or the the supernatural right what draws me are the ideas the thoughts that are expressed in his word in his name none of the other stuff upon which the religion is built you know being born uh of a virgin birth none of that is really but you know i tell you that the mystery of faith just blows me away yeah no one saw this man that and by the way in those days in the time of Jesus, not only single women, but married women preached the gospel of Jesus. And today they can't be priests. And this great new pope they have, this liberal pope, I am hoping that he will change that.

Because women preached the gospel in the time of Jesus. Mary Magdalene, for example, only one example. Do you consider yourself a Christian? No. No. I consider myself a believer in the teachings of Jesus. I think the ritual is beautiful.

I find myself, as I photograph the Mass in the Exorcist with Jason Miller saying the Mass in a big close-up, calmly and quietly and deeply felt. That's how I feel about it. When I went to church to prepare for filming the Exorcist, the priests would rattle off the mass like it was rap poetry you know when he you couldn't hear the words in the name of the father and the son of the holy god i had jason miller say

take this cup and drink from it for this this is my blood, the blood of the everlasting covenant, the mystery of faith. He said it over and over again, quietly, in a close-up. And you see the wafer, and he said, for this is my body. Take this and eat of it, which is this ritual of the mass but i broke those phrases down to their essential meaning because they moved me so powerfully that he was playing a priest saying mass and i didn't want him to rattle it off like a rap record. It was amazing talking to you. Mark, I looked forward to this.

I knew because I've heard many of your podcasts, and you're in a class by yourself. I'm not kissing your ass. Everybody who's listening to this knows that. And I don't do this anymore. That was great. I appreciate that. I don't do this anymore that was great i don't do i appreciate that i don't do interviews i've done it i've said everything basically i have to say they're usually the same questions accompanied by the same answers because i can turn my brain on autopilot but not when i'm talking to you i thought it was great thank you i'm honored thanks for inviting me thanks for coming bill

that's what you call a rock and tour my friends that's a story a long story woven together by a series of stories and life experiences threaded through fate. I'd like to thank William Friedkin for being here. That was an honor and a pleasure. You can also go to WTFpod.com for all your WTF pod needs. Got a bunch of posters up there. Got stuff.

Get on the mailing list. Check the episode guide. It's actually WTFpod.com slash guide. Just use it on the show. Get hooked up with the Howl app for our archive. And I'm just going to play a little guitar. I know you've been through a lot. That was a long show. Thank you. Boomer lives!