In 1977, there was no director hotter in Hollywood than William Friedkin. His last two films, The French Connection and The Exorcist, were instant classics and now he was about to release what he considered his masterwork, Sorcerer. What he didn’t foresee, however, was that a modestly budgeted science-fiction epic called Star Wars would destroy his beloved film and change the Hollywood landscape forever.

A reimagining of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer stars Roy Scheider as one of four outcasts who take on a lucrative but dangerous job of transporting unstable dynamite through a South American jungle in dingy trucks. Though the film boasts solid acting and a thrilling sequence where the trucks must cross an ancient bridge—not to mention an incredible score from Tangerine Dream—production on the film was marred in delays and on-set conflict. Things didn’t get any better when Paramount released the film a month after Star Wars, quickly becoming a casualty of the craze over George Lucas’s intergalactic opera. Outside of the occasional repertory screening over the decades, Sorcerer was forgotten. Then in 2012, Friedkin sued both Paramount and Universal (which had international rights) to find who owned the film. Through that, Warner Bros. bought it and on Tuesday will release a remastered Blu-ray of the film; a select theatrical release is planned as well.

Friedkin chats with us about his quest to bring Sorcerer back to life, the time he and Francis Ford Coppola almost produced Star Wars, and why he’s responsible for the McConaissance.

Watching Sorcerer I couldn’t help but think of all the drama going on behind the camera.

I’ll tell you, it was a very exciting adventure all the way. It was difficult. But no more so than the difficulty of someone who works in an office from nine to five.

Except you were in a jungle.

Well, the point is that I loved doing it. I don’t think about the hardship, frankly. I got malaria afterwards, a lot of people were injured, got gangrene, and stuff like that, but I had all but blocked that out until recently when I’ve been asked to talk about it. I had this sleepwalker security that I could pull the movie off.

What has been the motivation all these years to literally keep Sorcerer in existence?

It’s come largely from film critics, film historians, people who have remembered the film, who saw it somewhere in some version and kept it alive. And, of course, the social networks popped up and it started to appear. There was a kind of groundswell.

The movie really epitomizes the freedom that not only you but “New Hollywood” directors like Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese had back then.

And that changed when Sorcerer opened.

Because Star Wars hit theaters.

That film changed the zeitgeist. I’d say 80 percent of American films today are all offshoots of Star Wars. If Star Wars had failed you would not have the kind of films that are popular today. Hollywood has given over completely to the comic-book and video-game heroes, and rightly so because they are successful, the audience wants them. But that hunger, that desire, was tapped by Star Wars.

So were you or the studio worried about Sorcerer’s opening?

No. My only memory of that period was that the studio had high hopes for Sorcerer. None of us could see the tsunami of Star Wars. It happened rather quickly. You know, virtually every studio passed on Star Wars. I had a company with Coppola and [Peter] Bogdanovich then called the Directors Company, it was financed by Paramount and we had the right to green-light any films we wanted, outside of our own, at a certain budget. Francis brought us the script of Star Wars and Peter and I looked at it and said, “What the hell is this? Who’s going to direct this?” And he said, “George.” And I said, “I don’t think so.” I couldn’t believe George could pull it off, and I was wrong.