William Friedkin: Interviews

By Christopher Lane

Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school–educated filmmakers of the directors’ era, Friedkin got his start as a mailroom clerk at a local TV station and worked his way up to becoming a full-blown Hollywood filmmaker by his thirties. His rapid rise behind the camera from television director to Oscar winner came with self-confidence and unorthodox methods. Known for his gritty and auteurist style, Friedkin’s films tell the story of a changing America upended by crime, hypocrisy, the occult, and amorality. Although his subsequent films achieved varying levels of success, his cultural impact is undeniable.

William Friedkin: Interviews collects fifteen articles, interviews, and seminars spanning Friedkin’s career. He discusses early influences, early successes, awards, and current projects. The volume provides coverage of his directorial process, beliefs, and anecdotes from his time serving as the creative force of some of the biggest films of the 1970s and beyond—from his early days in Chicago to his run-ins with Alfred Hitchcock to firing guns on set and witnessing an actual exorcism in Italy. Through previously unpublished and obscure interviews and seminars, the story of William Friedkin’s work and life is woven together into a candid and concise impression for cinephiles, horror junkies, and aspiring filmmakers alike. Readers will gain insight into Friedkin’s genius from his own perspectives and discover the thoughts and processes of a true maverick of American cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496827104

Book preview

Harold Lloyd Master Seminars with William Friedkin

American Film Institute / 1974

From AFI’s Harold Lloyd Master Seminars, January 9, 1974 © 1974, courtesy of American Film Institute.

American Film Institute: Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Mr. William Friedkin. Do you want to make any opening statement about your work?

William Friedkin: No, I think the work is its own reward. It speaks for itself. You might be curious as to how I got started. I started in television in Chicago. I started in the mailroom of a television station and—

AFI: Which one?

Friedkin: WGN in Chicago and I let everybody there down because they all thought I’d take over the mailroom one day, because I was one of the best mailroom guys they ever had. Live TV was just happening and there were all kinds of dramatic and musical and variety shows, and I thought I would probably make a career out of live television. I started in the mailroom as I say, then became a floor manager, which is like an assistant director in films. I was directing by the time I was seventeen. I did about two thousand live TV shows in about eight years and I would probably still be working in live TV if I hadn’t been fired from every station for which I worked.

AFI: Why?

Friedkin: Once I got fired because I was the youngest guy on the staff and they had to make a cut in the staff and so they fired the guys who were young and single and I was the youngest and the singlest. Then I used to get in trouble a lot at a couple of these stations in Chicago and I used to try a lot of things and sometimes after sign-off, a couple of the cameramen and I used to go to the sound stage and fool around and just experiment with things. We used to try some stuff and the chief engineer would come in the studio and see us playing with his cameras and his equipment and say, What is this? You can’t do that. It’s not in the deck. So, I got fired. Three stations. I figured I had to do something, so I came out to Hollywood and became a movie director.

AFI: Just like that?

Friedkin: Sort of … pretty much. l did a documentary film in Chicago which I was sort of pretty proud of. It was called The People vs. Paul Crump and it was about a black man who was on death row for twelve years at the Cook County Jail. It was the first film I ever made. I learned how to make this film by doing it. I did it as a kind of court of last resort for this fellow, who was on trial for murder and going to the chair and the film was instrumental in the governor of Illinois commuting his sentence to life imprisonment, but I knew nothing at that time about how to make a film at all. I was a live television director and I went into an equipment rental house in Chicago and I asked a guy named Jack Baron to show me how to load a camera and show me how to take sound and fortunately for me, the Arriflex camera had just hit. It had just come to Chicago, the Arriflex 16. I mean it might have been some lousy piece of equipment and I never would have learned anything had I learned on an old Bolex or something, I don’t think I would have really come up with as much technical information that afforded me so much later as I did. The Arriflex had just come into Chicago. This was 1959. And he showed me how to work it, and also the Nagra tape recorder had come in and he showed me how to operate a Nagra and an Arriflex. Another guy and I went out and made this movie. And we didn’t know anything about how you get it together. We went out and we shot things that we thought would be good, but then we didn’t realize that that was on negative we were working with, so we were cutting it. Along the line, we kept learning certain things like sync sound. We had no idea how you got a sync signal on—well, you’ve all been through it. I went through it only in the making of this documentary. The money was put up by the local ABC station in Chicago and they said, Can you make this one-hour documentary? which they didn’t really want to make, but I really wanted to make it. And I went and did a big selling job on it and they said, Can you make it for $500? I said, Absolutely. You know, there’s no way you could make this for $500. It cost about $7,000. They went crazy and I got fired from there. But that won the San Francisco Film Festival award and Dave Wolper saw it and he hired me and that’s how I came out here.

AFI: What was the first movie you did?

Friedkin: It was called Good Times with Sonny and Cher. It was 1966. And I think it was seen by eleven people in Topanga Canyon. I’d like to have the right to it now though. But I was doing these documentaries for Wolper, and Sonny Bono had a hit record and we met, and he said, Hey, we got a guy who wants to put up some money to make a movie. Would you like to direct it? I said, Sure. He said, Can you make it for $500? He said can you make it for some incredible thing which we couldn’t make it for, but we made it anyway and it died, had a short, happy life. The Night They Raided Minsky’s was my second picture and then The Birthday Party, Boys in the Band, [The] French Connection.

AFI: How did you become interested in suspense? That seems to be in almost all of your movies in one way or another.

Friedkin: When I was much younger, I used to make up stories and scare the little girls in my neighborhood. Really. I have vivid memories of making up these outlandish stories that would drive these little girls to tears, and the more response I got out of them the scarier would be these fantasies that I would make up. But then, I guess the pictures that had the most effect on me when I was younger were suspense films, like Wages of Fear. I don’t know if any of you ever saw that or Diabolique by the same director, Clouzot. And those two pictures really had a great influence on me. Then I went to work for Hitchcock later after all these documentaries. As a matter of fact, I did the last Alfred Hitchcock Hour ever made. My contract with Hitchcock consisted of him coming on the set on my first day of shooting. He was there to film his introduction to the series and God, I was really terrified because he was this great director and he came up to me and he stared at me and he said, Mr. Friedkin, you’re not wearing a tie. And I said, No, no. And I wasn’t, either. He said, Usually, our directors wear ties. I thought he was putting me on, but he was absolutely straight and that’s all he ever said to me. So, I mean I’ve used that advice in all my suspense films ever since. But that’s the only contact I had with Mr. Hitchcock. I loved Psycho, you know, and I sort of studied, went to school on Psycho. By that I mean I’ve seen it thirty times. It’s