My friend Billy: Mark Kermode remembers The Exorcist director William Friedkin
In his excellent 1990 biography, Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, writer Nat Segaloff quotes the Oscar-winning film-maker as wryly observing: “You know what it’s going to say on my tombstone? It’s going to say ‘The Man Who Directed The Exorcist.’” As someone who has spent a lifetime declaring The Exorcist (1973) to be the greatest movie ever made, I understand how it might perhaps have overshadowed a career that was as long as it was varied.
Yet Friedkin, whom I first met back in the 1990s when I was a starstruck fan (which I remained), did so much more than helm the movie that changed my life – and the lives of many others. He proved himself one of the most fearless and inventive directors of his generation, working in a string of genres – from musical comedy to serious psychodrama; political satire to police thriller; stage play adaptations to tales of supernatural terror – with equal ease and enthusiasm.
My initial encounter called Billy – was on the phone, in 1990, when I interviewed him about his bonkers psycho-nanny/killer-tree movie (yes, really), . The reviews had not been good, but Friedkin was typically unfazed. Back in 1977, the reviews for his remake had also been excoriating and the film had been a major box-office flop. Yet is now widely acknowledged to be one of Friedkin’s finest films – a gruellingly nihilistic exercise in nail-biting suspense; a hellish journey into the heart of darkness. Crucially, Friedkin understood that not every film finds its audience first time around, and so he was equally upbeat when the erotic thriller took a similar drubbing in 1995, defiantly telling me at the time that it was “probably my favourite movie”. (He later said he’d been joking, but I think in the moment he meant it.)
