“The first thing I look for in an actor is intelligence. I don’t really care what they have or haven’t done before, so long as they’re physically right for the part, or can be, and they have the intelligence to dig in and find out who the character is.” – William Friedkin

William Friedkin, born in Chicago, Illinois. is an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter closely identified with the “New Hollywood” movement of the 1970s

William Friedkin began working in the mailroom at WGN-TV immediately after high school and, within two years, at the age of 18, he was directing several live TV shows and documentaries. He directed Off-Season, one of the last Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes in 1965 and was bollocked by Hitchcock for being improperly dressed; he was not wearing a tie.

1965 was the year William Friedkin moved to Hollywood and in 1967 directed his first film, Good Times in which Sonny and Cher appear as themselves in a spoof of various genres, including mysteries, westerns and spy thrillers. Friedkin later agreed with his critics that, in his words, the film was unwatchable but also remarked “I’ve made better films than Good Times but I’ve never had so much fun”

Friedkin directed Harold Pinter’s “comedy of menace” The Birthday Party (1968); a fictional account of the 1925 invention of the striptease in The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and the first major American motion pictures to revolve around gay characters, The Boys in the Band (1970)

William Friedkin’s 1971 action thriller The French Connection was the first R-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Friedkin was influenced by the French film Z (1969) to shoot in a documentary style, he also took advice from Howard Hawks whose daughter was living with Friedkin at the time. Friedkin asked Hawks what he thought of his movies, to which Hawks bluntly replied that they were “lousy.” Instead Hawks recommended that he “Make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done.”

As well as Best Picture, The French Connection generated a Best Actor Oscar for Gene Hackman, Best Film Editing (Gerald B Greenberg), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Tidyman) and, for William Friedkin, the Academy Award for Best Director. Friedkin was also nominated for a BAFTA and won a Golden Globe and the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.

The Exorcist (1973) is a supernatural horror film adapted by William Peter Blatty from his 1971 novel which, although fiction, is inspired by the 1949 exorcism performed on an anonymous young boy known as “Roland Doe” or “Robbie Mannheim” (pseudonyms) by the Jesuit priest Fr. William S. Bowdern.

Although Friedkin has admitted he is very reluctant to speak about the factual aspects of the film, he made The Exorcist intending to immortalize the events involving Doe that took place in St. Louis and despite the relatively minor changes that were made, the film depicts everything that could be verified by those involved. In order to make the film, Friedkin was allowed access to the diaries of the priests involved, as well as the doctors and nurses; he also discussed the events with Doe’s aunt in great detail. Friedkin has said that he does not believe that the “head-spinning” actually occurred, but this has been disputed.

Warners had approached Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Mike Nichols, to direct, all of whom turned the project down.[21] Originally Mark Rydell was hired to direct, but William Peter Blatty insisted on Friedkin instead, because he wanted his film to have the same energy as Friedkin’s previous film, The French Connection.

Friedkin went to extraordinary lengths manipulating the actors to get the genuine reactions he wanted. Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair wore harnesses that could be violently yanked, both suffered back injuries, their screams of pain are heard in the film. Father William O’Malley played Father Joseph Dyer, Friedin slapped him to get the expression he wanted for a last rites scene, offending the Catholic members of his crew. e also fired blanks without warning on the set to elicit shock from Jason Miller (playing Father/Dr Damien Karras, SJ) for a take, and told Miller that the pea soup would hit him in the chest rather than the face in the projectile vomiting scene, resulting in his disgusted reaction. Lastly, he had Linda Blair’s (playing Regan) bedroom set built inside a freezer so that the actors’ breath could be visible on camera, which required the crew to wear cold-weather gear.

The film was made for $12 million, well over the initial budget. As it lacked any major stars Warners released it on only 30 screens, not expecting any great reaction. It grossed $1.9 million in its first week, setting house records in each theatre. The film earned $66.3 million in distributors’ rentals during its theatrical release in 1974 in the United States and Canada, becoming the second most popular film of that year (trailing The Sting which earned $68.5 million)[64] and Warners’ highest-grossing film of all time. To date the worldwide gross is over $440 million.

The Exorcist was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 1974, winning two. It is the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture. William Friedkin was also nominated for a Golden Globe and a Directors Guild of America award.

William Friedkin disagrees with the widely considered opinion that Sorcerer (1987) is a remake of The Wages of Fear (1953). The plot depicts four outcasts from varied backgrounds meeting in a South American village, where they are assigned to transport cargoes of aged, poorly kept dynamite that is so unstable that it is ‘sweating’ its dangerous basic ingredient, nitroglycerine.

Friedkin recalls working with lead actor Roy Scheider as difficult, stating the actor had frequent mood swings which did not occur during the filming of The French Connection and theorized that after achieving stardom with Jaws he became “difficult”, which contrasted with his attitude from The French Connection, where he “would’ve lied [sic] down in front of an elevated train” for Friedkin. Roy Scheider also had his reservations about the work with Friedkin, on the one hand praising him as “extraordinarily gifted filmmaker, who told pictures with stories and shot beautifully” but despite his erudition, he was marred with distrusting attitude which made everyone around him very tense. According to Diane Kachmar, Friedkin believed that he inspired others to achieve great results, but Scheider did not favour such working conditions.[50] However, Scheider also admitted that only a director of Friedkin’s stature could have persuaded him to perform all the life-threatening scenes he did and added that upon seeing the dailies he “knew it was worth it”.[51] Despite the mutual tensions, the director rated Scheider highly, did not hold any grudges, and regretted he did not receive more recognition for his body of work. However, their relationship eventually “drifted apart”

Sorcerer grossed $9 million worldwide. It had cost $22 million. One reason may be that the first sixteen minutes have no dialogue in English, leading many in the audience to think they were watching a foreign language film and walking out. Critic Gene Siskel thought Sorcerer was a “very bad title”. To him the title might have indicated a certain likeness to The Exorcist and thought the audiences at the time were either bored with yet another film about exorcisms or that was precisely what they wanted and upon seeing the movie, they got confused, asking themselves “where’s the devil?”Whatever the reason. after the film’s poor reception, its financial disaster prompted Universal executives to void their contract with Friedkin immediately. Friedkin moved to France with his then-wife Jeanne Moreau where he recuperated from a malaria infection contracted during the filming and intended to sever ties with the American film industry.

The following year Friedkin directed an abandoned John Frankenheimer project, The Brink’s Job (1978). The film, starring Columbo – Peter Fak, was a comedy based on the Brink’s robbery of 1950 in Boston, where almost 3 million dollars was stolen. Roger Ebert wrote, “The movie was directed by William Friedkin, best known for the violence and shock of The Exorcist, The French Connection, and Sorcerer. What he exhibits here, though, is a light touch, an ability to orchestrate rich human humour with a bunch of characters who look like they were born to stand in a police lineup. Falk, playing Pino, has never been better in a movie.”

In August 1978, 15 unedited reels of the film were stolen at gunpoint. While the robbers demanded a $1 million ransom,[8] the money was never paid because the robbers, showing a distinct lack of filmmaking knowledge, hijacked outtakes and dailies. During a ransom call, Friedkin told the robbers to “get a projector and enjoy the film; it was all theirs.”

William Friedkin wrote and directed Cruising (1980) an erotic crime thriller involving an undercover cop (Al Pacino) in the S&M subculture of New York City attempting to catch a serial killer who is preying on gay men.In addition to the protests that occurred when the film was released, the production itself was plagued by demonstrations. Protesters would clog streets, make lots of noise with the hundreds of whistles distributed by activists and climb up on rooftops and shine lights down on to the set to disrupt the lighting and distract the crew.

“Cruising came out around a time that gay liberation had made enormous strides among the general public. It also came out around the same time that AIDS was given a name. I simply used the background of the S&M world to do a murder mystery; it was based on a real case. But the timing of it was difficult because of what had been happening to gay people. Of course, it was not really set in a gay world; it was the S&M world. But many critics who wrote for gay publications or the underground press felt that the film was not the best foot forward as far as gay liberation was concerned, and they were right. Now it’s reevaluated as a film. It could be found wanting as a film, but it no longer has to undergo the stigma of being an anti-gay screed, which it never was.” – William Friedkin

1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. was a neo-noir action thriller written and directed by William Friedkin about the lengths to which two Secret Service agents go to arrest a counterfeiter. Reactions were mixed; Roger Ebert thought “The movie is also first-rate. The direction is the key. Friedkin has made some good movies … and some bad ones. This is his comeback, showing the depth and skill of the early pictures.” Janet Maslin disagreed: “Today, in the dazzling, superficial style that Mr Friedkin has so thoroughly mastered, it’s the car chases and shootouts and eye-catching settings that are truly the heart of the matter”

Jade (1995) was written by Joe Eszterhas who claims in his autobiography, Hollywood Animal, that William Friedkin changed the script so much that Eszterhas threatened to remove his name from the credits. He says that Paramount settled by giving him a “blind script deal” worth $2–4 million. The erotic thriller cost $50 million and returned less than one-fifth of that at the box office. Critical reaction was negative. Joe Eszterhas also claims that Friedkin’s fourth and current wife Sherry Lansing, the boss of Paramount Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, made Eszterhas issue a statement that he supported Paramount’s hiring of Friedkin as director for his Jade (1995) script. In truth, Eszterhas did not want the former Oscar-winner, whom he considered a washed-up has-been, to direct the picture, but he deferred to Lansing’s wishes.

In 2996 William Friedkin collaborated on the screenplay of Bug in which a woman holed up in a rural Oklahoma motel becomes involved with a paranoid man who suffers from delusional parasitosis and is obsessed with conspiracy theories. Friedkin asserts that the film is not a horror movie but is “in many ways, a black comedy love story. He stated in an interview, that “It’s not a genre film, but marketing works in mysterious ways. They have to find a genre for it. ‘This is a comedy. This is a melodrama. This is a love story. This is a horror film. This is an adventure film.’ Bug doesn’t fit easily into any of those categories.

Tracy Letts and William Friedkin again worked together on the screenplay of Killer Joe (2011), to date Friedkin’s last feature film. The film stars Matthew McConaughey in the title role, Emile Hirsch as 22-year-old drug dealer Chris Smith who intends to murder his mother (Gina Gershon) so that his sister Dottie (Juno Temple) will share the life insurance money with him, McConaughey is Joe Cooper, a police detective who has a side career as a contract killer. The film was not a box office success, only grossing $2 million in the domestic market and $2.6 million internationally. It was only released in 75 theatres nationwide; it had an estimated $10 million budget. On October 23, 2017, Friedkin announced that he is developing a series based on his film, but without McConaughey.

“Directing is the provenance of younger guys. When I broke into film, I had no specific genius. I was just young. That’s how I did it. The studios feel that movies are all about a youth movement, and they always have. That’s why Orson Welles got to make Citizen Kane (1941) at 25. It’s also why Billy Wilder at the end of his career, when he was smarter, wittier and more energetic than most directors half his age, couldn’t even get a meeting.” – William friedkin

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