SIFF: William Friedkin on Killer Joe, His 007 Offer, The MPAA, and Citizen Kane

ON WHAT KEEPS FRIEDKIN MAKING MOVIES: CITIZEN KANE
“When I left high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t go to college, I never read a book through in high school, and when I finally graduated, I remember thinking, ‘I wonder what the hell I’m going to do?’ I had no real prospects. By accident, I went to see a film called Citizen Kane. And I saw it five straight times in the theater that day… I say by accident, but there was probably some logic to it that I didn’t understand, or maybe it was the grace of God that led me to see this film, because when I left, I decided that that was really what I wanted to do with my life. And that is, to make a film like that. I had no idea how to go about it, but that’s what I wanted to do – and what keeps me going, why I’m still doing this. Because I haven’t made a film that could really even be mentioned in the same sentence with that film. And that’s what keeps me making films. It’s true. [Pause] I wouldn’t shit you.”

And later: "I haven’t even come close."

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THE RATINGS BOARD IS ‘BULLSHIT’
"To me the ratings board are a complete joke, they’re bullshit. Do any of you have children? Young children go to school, and you know the names of their teachers, maybe even their principal. You know the Mayor of this city, you know the governor of this state, you can probably name a whole bunch of Supreme Court justices. And there’s not one person in this room or in this city or anywhere that can name anybody on the ratings board! They’re totally anonymous, I have no idea how they get there, what they had to do to get there, who they are, and the work they do is not legal, is not legally binding. If a 13-year-old walks in and sees this movie, they’re not going to go to jail, nor is their parent. So I’m glad that we got an NC-17. My distributor, David Dinerstein, isn’t that happy… he likes to have films make a profit, and I couldn’t care less."

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HOW HE ACHIEVED THE ICONIC CHASE SCENE IN THE FRENCH CONNECTION

“I thought, I’ve got to beat Bullitt. So I looked at it and I analyzed the Bullitt chase, and I could see that they had taken the streets of San Francisco and blocked parts of it and ran cars over the hills. So I thought two things: One, I can’t have a car chasing another car, so what can this be? And two, New York has people all over the streets. I had to do it in the midst of crowds.”

There was a gentleman who was the head of the Transit Authority public relations. We had a meeting with him and said, ‘How fast does a train go?’ He said, ‘Top speed, 50 miles per hour.’ I said, ‘Great! We can do this!’ He said, ‘No you can’t.’ I said ‘Why?’ ‘Well, first of all, we’ve never had a train hijacked. Second, you have the train crashing into a park … it would be almost impossible for me to give you permission to do something like this. I said, ‘Okay,’ and started to think, well, I’ll just steal it… we thanked him and started to leave and he said, ‘Wait a minute! I told you it would be almost impossible…’

Now, my producer is a Sicilian. He said, ‘Well, what would it take?’ The guy, without blinking, said ‘$40,000 and a one-way ticket to Jamaica – because if I give you permission to do this, I’m going to get fired and I want to live in Jamaica.’ And that’s what happened.

The budget for The French Connection was a million-five, so $40,000 was a ton of money out of this budget. But I called Dick Zanuck and said, ‘We need another 40 grand to bribe this guy.’ He said, ‘What’s the chase going to be?’ So we described the chase to him over the phone and he said, ‘Okay, get another $40 grand.’ So that’s how we got to do it. But I had no clearances whatever. No permission from the city, we just went and drove for all the speed shots, 90 miles an hour for 26 blocks. I wouldn’t do that again.”

Years later, Friedkin felt he had to top himself with a car chase in To Live and Die in L.A. He figured on the only way to one-up his French Connection sequence: By making his chase go the wrong way on a freeway, right into oncoming cars.

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ON THE FRIEDKIN-DIRECTED BOND MOVIE THAT NEVER WAS

“I never used a second unit. There are some great second unit directors, but I’d rather shoot the first unit. I forget which one, but I was offered by a man named Cubby Broccoli to direct a James Bond movie. He sent me the script, and it was okay, and I would have loved to have done a Bond movie but he said, ‘By the way, don’t worry about the action stuff at all – I have three crews who do all that.’ I said, ‘That’s all I would want to do, the action stuff! I don’t want Bond standing there in a tuxedo, looking at some woman. Shaken, not stirred. So I passed.”

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HOW HE CAST LINDA BLAIR IN THE EXORCIST
"I’ve never auditioned an actor, ever. I just have an instinct, when I meet somebody, if they’re right for the part or not. I should tell you how I hired Linda Blair. We had tried to cast The Exorcist for months. There were casting crews all over the country auditioning 12 and 13-year-old girls. I was looking at video tapes of them and didn’t see anyone I thought could do it. Then we started to look at 16 and 17-year-old women who looked younger, and that wasn’t working out. I was desperate. I didn’t think we could cast the movie. ‘I’ll never find a 12-year-old that can do this part!’"

"One day I was at my office at Warner Bros, which at the time was at 666 5th Avenue… my assistant rang me at the office and said, ‘There’s a woman out here named Eleanor Blair and she’s brought her daughter. They don’t have an appointment but she wonders if you’d see her?’ They came in and the instant they came in the door, I knew it was her. She was just right…"

"She had never acted, she had just done some modeling – you know the dresses that little girls wear in the newspaper. But she was a straight-A student, she had a horse that she used to win Blue Ribbons showing her horse at Madison Square Gardens, she was really bright, and she had just turned 12. I asked her and her mother to sit and said, ‘So Linda, do you know what The Exorcist is about?’"

She said, ‘Yes, I’ve read it.’

I asked her, ‘You did? What’s it about?’

She said, ‘It’s about a 12-year-old girl who gets possessed by The Devil and does a bunch of bad things.’

I asked, ‘Like what – what sort of bad things does she do?’

And she said, ‘Well, she hits her mother across the face, she pushes a man out of a bedroom window, and she masturbates with a crucifix.’

Her mother’s sitting there smiling… I said, ‘Do you know what that means, to masturbate?’

She said, ‘Yeah – it’s like jerking off, isn’t it?’

And I said, ‘Have you ever done that?’

She said, ‘Sure. Haven’t you?’

"I hired her on the spot – because, obviously, this material was not going to get to her. She was able to deal with it comfortably, she was wise way beyond her years, and was not going to get screwed up by the experience."

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ON SEQUELS TO HIS FILMS

"If you told me that right outside this theater there was a 30-car crash, people lying dead all over the street, I wouldn’t run out to see it. I get it, I know what that is. But I don’t need to see it. That’s how I feel about Exorcist 2, 3, and whatever."

[Exorcist sequel] would just be done for money. I could have made a lot of money, more than I made on The Exorcist – don’t you want to know how much I made for The Exorcist? [“How much did you make on The Exorcist?”] Never mind! The tax man might be out there.

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BEING THE ANTI-DAVID FINCHER (*MOVIELINE'S TERM)

"It took 19 days to shoot [Killer Joe]. I like to work fast. Who doesn’t? If it was much longer than that I would fall asleep on the set. I’d have to read a book. Seriously, I’m more interested as a director in spontaneity than perfection. I’m more interested in getting naturalistic human behavior on film than a perfect reading of the script. When I started I would do 20 takes, like everybody else, looking for some kind of perfection. And when I got into the editing room, I would find that it was the first printed take that I was using, that seemed to be the best, that seemed to be the most spontaneous. So I learned a few pictures later not to do more than one or two takes, and only if there was something technically wrong."

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FRIEDKIN’S FAVORITE FRIEDKIN

"The film of mine that I’m probably most proud of is The Rules of Engagement, with Tommy Lee Jones… the script was written by a man who later became a United States senator. A great cast, and a very important story about what is morality in warfare? How do you define morality inside an undeclared war? I think it’s a really great and powerful piece of film. [To audience] He doesn’t even have a clip of it. It’s probably because he’s a liberal. He thinks that Rules of Engagement is pro-military, which it’s not, but that’s the knee-jerk reaction. [To moderator David Poland] Did you like Rules of Engagement? How many stars did you give it?"

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AND DON’T GET FRIEDKIN STARTED ABOUT 3-D…
"By the way, I don’t care for 3-D either. Over the years I used to sneak up here [to Seattle], listen to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. I used to come up and watch the old Boston Celtics and Seattle Supersonics… but as film lovers, you know that the art of film is the illusion of a two-dimensional medium, like a great painting. It’s the illusion you get, it’s not that you actually see this podium in three dimensions. Who cares that this chair is in three dimensions, or you, or me? I don’t buy 3-D, I think it’s just a hype. It doesn’t add anything to the story. It’s very decorative and sort of interesting, but I don’t think it adds anything."

"The only thing that belongs in 3-D is sculpture, where you can walk around a sculpture and see the whole formation. ut I don’t need to do that with film, any more than I need to walk around the orchestra during a concert."

Look for more on Killer Joe July 22 in select theaters.

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