William Friedkin is the director of more than twenty films, among them "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection." For the latter, Friedkin won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Director, based on the film's stunning action sequences and incandescent appearances by Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman.
"I would like to tell you it was all my genius," Friedkin tells host Alec Baldwin at the Turner Classic Film Festival, "but I had nothing to do with casting the two leads in that picture."
Friedkin goes on to explain why he doesn't audition actors, how knowing a Sicilian helps with location scouting, and why learning to play tennis killed his career.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to. Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work? Thank you very much. Good evening, Good evening. My guest today is film director William Friedkin. I spoke with him at the Turner Classic Movies Festival in Hollywood, where we screened his picture The French Connection. Film critic Roger Ebert called The French Connection quote all surface movement, violence and suspense unquote. Many say it has the best chase scene ever between a car and an elevated train in Brooklyn. The French Connection won five Academy Awards, but Friedkin told me it wasn't a smooth ride to the red carpet. This film had been turned down by every major studio at least twice. And my do sir, a guy named Phil D'Antoni. He and I were going to do Dirty Harry with Frank Sinatra, and we had prepared that for about six months, and then Sinatra pulled out and the project was dead. We left and did The French Connection. But We went to every studio and they all turned it down. And finally Dick Zanek, who ran twentieth Century Fox, called us one day and said, you know, I don't know what the hell this thing is that you guys are talking about doing. The scripts not very good, he said, but maybe if I just have a hunch up about it, if you can make this thing for a million and a half dollars, go ahead. And he said, you better do it right away because I'm gonna be kicked out of here in about three weeks. And he was now New York. The New York that's depicted in this movie in the in the early seven these is a steaming, feated cesspool. Obviously, it's just so disgusting that there might be a couple of blocks in the sixties between Fifth and Park that might be cleaner than might have been cleaned up. But it was a pretty nasty back then, right. I liked it, you know, I thought it was I thought it was very cinematic. And I'm from Chicago, and I used to ride the subways and the elevated trains all the time, and I love the streets. I love the streets. And after this film was successful and I had another successful film. After that, I moved to California, learned how to play tennis and ruined my career. Don't ever if you're a young filmmaker, don't ever learn how to play tennis. Forget it. And you know you wanna walk the streets the way you did. You want to ride the subways, you want to see life. And so that's the way I approached this film. I came from this world. Did slumming? Did they give you your way in terms of the casting. What was it like for you casting actors back then when you made this film. Well, originally I wanted Jackie Gleason and the hell is so funny Jackie Gleason, you know, it's one of the greatest actors who ever lived and uh he was known as a comedian. But Dick Zanick said, no, I will never make another film with Jackie Gleason because Gleason had just prior to this, made a film that was the biggest disaster in the history of Fox. It was a silent movie about a clown called gi Go and it was a disaster. So we went through a lot of guys and we had um a very short time left when we had this at and we had a meeting with Gene Hackman, my producer, and I. We weren't that impressed. It was one of the dullest meetings I've ever had. But we had to start the picture, and so we hired Gene. I hired Roy Scheider immediately he walked into the room. I had a casting director who was not really a casting director. He was a critic for The Village Voice and he uh had. His name was Bob Wiener, and he had discovered a lot of interesting people as a critic. He discovered Whoopie Goldberg a number of other people. And he brought me Roy Scheider, who had not made a film. And Scheider came into my office and sat down. He had a resemblance to the character he played, whose name is Sonny Grasso. He's in the film too. I never auditioned. I've never have and never will addition and actor. I think it's embarrassing, you know, I think you probably know this early in your career. A lot of actors can read but then can't act it, or vice versa. So I go on instinct and Scheider sat down. I said, so what are you doing now, Roy? He said, well, I'm in an off Broadway play by Jean Jane and I said, what part do you play? He said, I play a cigar smoking nun. And I said, it's interesting. Okay, you're hired. That was it. He was perfect. He walked in the room as he was perfect. You know. Hackman had done Bonnie, done Bonnie and Clyde, but uh, you know, he was not really a lead. He was a great supporting actor, but hadn't played a leading role. And I didn't see him as Ed Egan. Let me say right away that I believe he became one of the greatest American actors ever. No, absolutely, but I didn't have him in mind at all. And I had a shorthand with my casting director. I said to him, look, let's get that to play the part of the French guy. Let's get that guy that was in that movie belde Jure, you know, as a Louis Bonoel film, wonderful movie, Catherine Di. Let's get the guy. You know, he had a kind of a beard, um two or three day growth of beard. And he said, you mean, uh uh, I forget the name of that Pierre something. I said, no, not that guy, the other guy. The So he went out and he hired this guy and he said, okay, the guy's name is Fernando Ray. I said, we'll hire him. So I went to the airport, Kennedy Airport, met his plane and uh, in those days, you could go right to the gate, and I didn't see the guys looking for I got paged. I went to the desk and there's this guy and it's not the guy from Bell Dejure. It was not at all the guy from Bel Dejure. But his name was Fernando Ray. So I meet this Guy's got this little goatee and he's very sophisticated Spanish. He looked like a Spanish grande. And the guy who was playing was had been a longshoreman and a Corsican, you know, a real rough hewn guy. So I'm driving this guy to his hotel and uh, I said, you know you you can't have this uh goatee for this case. Oh, I could never share my goatee. I said, why not? He said, Oh, I have sores all over my face. You would never want to see the sword. He said. By the way, you know, I'm not French, I'm Spanish, but I can learn enough French. I said, you weren't in Belle de Jure. No, no, I wasn't in bell Dejure. I've done other films with Louis spoonwell, but not Belle de Jure. So I get him into his hotel and I called my casting director and producer. I said, you stupid asshole, I said, this is not the guy. This is the wrong guy. Thank you very much. This is the wrong guy. And so he's what are you talking about? I said, this isn't the guy from Belle de Jure. So he looked it up and indeed the guy we wanted was named Francisco Ribal. So he said, well, what do you want me to do. I said, fire this guy and hire friend Cisco Ribal. I went back in the office. By the time I got there, they found that, uh, Francisco Ribal was not available, did not speak a word of English, so we got stuck with Fernando Ray. I would like to tell you that it was all my genius, but I didn't. I had nothing to do with casting the two leads in this picture. Now here it was. It was really the gift of the movie God. And I think you'll bear this out. There is a movie God. You know that sometimes smiles upon you an other times I wasna. I did the movie Hunt for Red October and they offered it to Sean Connery and he was sick. He had throat cancer and orient something seriously wrong with him, and they said he can't do the film. So they cast uh Klaus Maria and Dour in the lead role. And he was casting the lead and they called me up and they said we're gonna get Las Maria. Brand said okay, and then Connery calls back, like several weeks later, he's had treatments and he's on the mend and he comes back and said, I think I can do the film. So they called Classma Brandon when they say, you know, what were the dates you said you could work? And BRANDI, I am directing an opera and I am appearing in a film in the early window, I can shoot the film as these six weeks. I have to shoot the film these six weeks. And they were like, oh, that's too bad. We're so sorry. We'd get the schedule. We can't do it during those six weeks. Were so very sorry, Klaus. And he's gone, and Sean showed up and there you go. So the casting of films can sometimes be very very and sometimes it's very strange. It was in this picture. I can't think of anyone else in that part. Now, Um, he was just great and an absolutely wonderful actor. He told me how he got his start in film. He was actually discover Herd by Louise bun Well. Um. Bun Well's producer brought Bunwell to see some movie with another actor. He wanted to look at another actor in that film. And uh, after the movie, his producer said, well, what did you think? And he said, oh, I didn't like that actor. But the guy who plays the corpse, the dead guy, which is was Fernando Ray. He had no lines. He was laying in a coffin, and boon Well hired him. Now, I wrote this down. I have it on a piece of paper, but I may have left it in my seat. But off the top of my head, I'm struggling. Who edited this film? Who cut this film for you? A guy called Jerry Greenberg? Okay, and what was that experience? Like, yeah, let's hear it for the editing in this film? Who? Um? Jerry Greenberg edited The Boys in the Band with a man named Carl Lerner who was a very distinguished New York film editor, and Jerry was his assistant. And uh, when it came time to do this, Carl Lerner wasn't available, so I asked Jerry to do. What was that experience like for you? And him? Did it? Was he responsible for most of the cuts? Who do you get heavily involved without your song? I I work on every single aspect of editing. That's where the film is made. You know. To me, what you shoot is just raw material for the cutting room. The the when I first made films in New York, we would, uh, we'd come somewhere and you know, I think if my memory for years ago, as we'd stand inside of building and someone would say, man, this is a great lobby, and I think this is great, but you know, we can't kind of deal with them. This location is too expensive. And someone would make a joke and they'd say, well, we can come in here and do it Paul Morrissey style, you know. And when I was younger in the business, I turnus, I go, what does he mean, what's Paul Morrissey style? He said that means we run into the building without permits and we just start shooting till they kick us out. We kind of we go in, we stage it, and we go in. We squeeze off a couple of quick masters and some shots, and then we run out before the cops come. And I was like, wow, shoot up, miss people do that? I must say this film. Did you have permits for everything you did? For this? We didn't have a permit for for nothing except one thing. We had no permits to shoot in the streets or any of that. We just went out. But I had some actual cops with me who had badges and stuff, off duty cops and the two original French Connection cops. But I thought my producer and I thought, well, you know what, we better get permission from the subway to shoot on an elevated train. So so we went to see this guy. First of all, I asked him he was the head of the transit authority. He uh, it wasn't the CEO or anything like that, but he ran everything. We got an appointment with him, and the first thing I had to ask him was how fast can one of these trains go? Which I didn't know. I said, if a train could go at top speed at i'll say a hundred miles an hour. This chase idea would not work because the car would not be able to catch the train. And he said, well, the fastest speed that one of these trains goes as fifty miles an hour. So I the great, We've got a chase scene here. He said, what do you mean great? He said, the way you've described what you want to do. He said, if I gave you permission to do this, I would be fired. He said, we have never had a train crash, We've never had a guy hijack a train. He said, it's just you know, it really never has happened, and it would be extraordinarily difficult for me to approve anything approaching what you've just told me. So we thanked him, and I figured, well I'll steal this thing, and we started on a way out. He said, wait a minute, were you going? And my producer said, you just told us it would be extraordinarily difficult. He said, did I say impossible? No. My producer, who is a Sicilian, said to him how much? He said, New York He said forty thousand dollars and a one way ticket to Jamaica. And uh, I remember saying, well, why a one way ticket? Why don't you just go down have a nice face, he said, because if I give you permission, I will get fired and we'll we'll have to go down there and live live out my life. And that's what happened. Well, we gave him forty grand which was a huge percentage of the budget, and he lived happily ever after in Jamaica. There was no chase scene in the original script, so Friedkin and its producer Phil D'Antoni added one they were determined to outdo the chase scene in Bullet, the Steve McQueen film released a few years earlier. Take a listen to the Here's the Thing Archives, Well you can hear Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne talk about his night with Lucille Ball. Where was the house on Roxbury right next door to Jack Benning exactly and just down the street from Ira gersh one and around the corner front celebrity back with me. You take a listen, and Here's the Thing Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. When The Exorcist came out in it ushered in a new age of horror cinema. Audience reaction to the film was so strong that theater ushers carried smelling salts to revive those who had fainted. My guest, William Friedkin directed the movie. Warner Brothers did not want me for The Exorcist. Warner Brothers UH wanted for The Exorcist either Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, or Um who else? Arthur Pens, Stanley, Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn turned it down. He said he didn't want to do any more violence on film he had done Bonnie and Clyde. And Mike Nichols said, you will never be able to get a twelve year old girl to carry this film on her back and do the kind of things that are required. And Kubrick said, look, I only UH direct the films that I find and prepare myself. So all three of them turned it down, and the guy who wrote the novel in the screen play wanted me. And finally I was like the last man standing, and I had just won the Academy Award. That's how I got the exerci Now the same as with with French Connection, as with I mean, you do these two films back to back, French Connection and The Exorcist to classic films. Um what's it like in terms of you directing actors? Are you very Do you just hire them and you bring them in to do what you know they're gonna do, or do you have some kind of input with what they're like. Let me tell you how I work on a film. I I would not work this way on a play, And I direct a lot of operas, and I don't work this way on an opera. But with a film, the films that I've made, I'm more interested in spontaneity than anything else. The stuff that I do, the scripts that I've done, is not Shakespeare, you know. It's mostly street dialect, especially the French connection. So I want spontaneity, so I don't rehearse. I would talk to the actors and find the things that move them, either that caused them to laugh or cry or be frightened or whatever, and I would use those things from time to time in the making of the film to suggest, whenever it was necessary, some emotion. But I would never tell an actor really how to do it. The thing I look for more than anything else in an actor is intelligence. The actor's ability to perceive what the story is about and a way to get into it and you can find that out just by talking to an actor, you know, Roy Scheider. When I cast and he said, don't you want me to read for this part? I said, there's nothing to read. The guy goes, uh, get your hands up, Get what what is that? Who wants to listen to that? And a and a goddamn inference room? You know? Uh, He's so No, there's nothing to read. It wouldn't the Academy Award for Screenplay too exactly. But when you come, when you come into the experience of doing I'm only mentioning this because of it's because you're coming from French connection and winning the Oscar and having all the success, and you come into um the Exorcist. Was Jason Miller your first choice? It wasn't the same thing again where a whole lot of actors turned down the parts of the content. Once again, it was the movie God we had cast another first of all this for The Exorcist. The studio wanted either Audrey Hepburn, Jane Fonda, or Anne Bancroft, and I thought, wonderful, you know this is great. After they hired me, so they offered the part to Audrey Hepburn, and she was married to an Italian doctor living in Italy. She read the script and she called me and said, you know, I this is very interesting. It's different for me, but I'd love to do it, but you have to come to Italy to film it. And I said, I'm not gonna go to Italy. I don't speak Italian and I wouldn't be able to communicate directly with the crew. We'd have to bring every actor over to Italy because you know it's set in Georgetown. And I said, miss Hepburn, wouldn't you just come over for a little while and do this. No, so she was out. We then went to Anne Bancroft, who said, I think this is terrific. So I love to do this, but I have to tell you I'm in my first month of pregnancy. And she said, if you guys want to wait for me now, I said to her, look, I think when you have your child, you are not gonna want to go right back to work. Nor do we want to wait nine months. Unfortunately, so we had a let her go. We then sent it to Jane Fonda, who sent us all the same telegram that said, why would I want to be in a piece of capitalist rip off? Bullshit like this. Now I've seen her since and she doesn't remember having sent that, but I haven't. That was her response. That I don't know how she really felt, but that was her response, honest. Yeah. Meanwhile, Ellen Burston was hockeing me all the time. I had seen the Last Picture Show, but I didn't know Ellen Burston from Claris Leachman. I didn't know which was which. But Ellen said to me, do you believe in destiny? Has anyone ever asked you that before? Uh? Well, she was the only one who ever asked me that. And I said, I guess I believe. And she said, I'm destined to play this part. I said, look, with the studio wants Jane Fonda and Bancroft or Audrey Hepburn, this was all going on. She said, I don't care. I'm destined to play this part. And it came about that she was the last person standing, and so we cast her against the wishes of the studio. They did not they wanted a big star for that um. Then we cast Stacy Keach to play Father Cares. He was a great is a great actor. He was the go to Eugene O'Neill actor on Broadway, and what happened. I went to New York and maybe it was that No but no, we cast her. I went to New York and I saw the opening night of a play called That Championships Season. And it was written by a man named Jason Miller. Never heard of him. Uh I thought the play was great. It was it really reeked of lapsed Catholicism. It was a play about a group of high school guys who won a championship under their coach, but cheated to win and they were suffering this guilt and the stage was just filled with Catholic guild. I felt so I I said to my casting director, who was this guy that wrote this? I'd love to talk to him, just to talk to him. It turned out that he had studied for the priesthood three years at Catholic University in Georgetown. He came up to meet me in and I was staying at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel and I had the flu and I had a lot of pills. He thought I was a pill freak, and uh, I thought he was a drunk. And he didn't know what the hell he was doing up there. And I asked him a lot of questions about studying for the priesthood and stuff, and I was a horrible meeting. And I went back to Los Angeles and about two weeks later, as we're starting to prepare the picture, he called me at Warner Brothers and he said, hey, you know that that book you were telling me about that You're going to film that Exorcist? He said, I said yeah. He said, I am that guy. He said, I am that character. I said, well, you're not. Stacy keach is that he's going to play the part. He said, I'm telling you, man, I am this guy. And he said, have you ever done anything like a screen test? And I said no, I've never shot a screen test. And what's the point. I told you, we've cast this. He had never made a film, never been in a movie, only played very small acting roles in a road road companies. He was delivering milk in Flushing, New York when he wrote Championship Season, and so he said, you gotta test me. You have to give me a screen test. I said, why, what a waste of time? He said, Man, I'm telling you so. I had great respect for him as a writer. I said, you want to shoot a screen test? Okay? You come out here on your own. You get out here. It was like, let's say it was a Tuesday. I said him, get out here by Thursday, and i'll shoot a screen test with you and i'll take it out of the camera and give it to you so you can show it to your kids. And Uh, he said, oh, I can't get out there Thursday. I said, what do you mean, He said, I don't fly. He said, I'll take the train. I'll be out there in a week, all right. So I set up an empty stage with a great cinematographer named Bill Freaker, and I had cast Burston and I said, look, we're gonna do a test to this guy, and let's do the scene where you first meet him in a little park in Georgetown and you tell him that you think your daughter is possessed. And she said, what why are we doing this? You've got a great actor. I said, I don't know why we're doing this. And I swear to God, I didn't We shoot the test, no sets, just Bill Freaker lighting in an empty studio, and they did that scene one take. And then I had Ellen Uh interview Jason with the camera over her shoulder on him, where she just asked him questions about his life, who he was, what his background was, his family, everything, And then I shot a very tight close up of him saying the Mass, but not saying it the way you used to hear it. Maybe you still do in church where the priest just rattles it off. You know the name of the Father a little book. I said, I would say the words of the Mass as though you really mean them, and well, you mean every word, and and say it, uh, with as much conviction as you can, and take your time. And I shot that in a close up. And we did that, and I wasn't sure about anything. But Burston came over to me and said, you're not going to hire this guy, are you? And I said, well why not? She said he can't act. He said he's not an actor. He can't act. And she said, when I tell Father Caress this story, worry about my daughter. I have to break down and collapse in his arms, and I need a big strong man to do that. It happened that she had was going with a big strong man at that time who was an actor that she wanted me to consider. But uh, she said, this guy is about five six. I said, you're probably right. And the next morning I saw the dailies and the camera just loved this guy. The camera just loved him. He looked great, he was real. And I went to Warner Brothers and I said, we're gonna pay off Stacy Keach and hire this guy. And they said, you're out of your mind. What is wrong with you? You're crazy, but you're possessed, Yes, something like that. I didn't want to do it. The writer didn't want to do it. Uh, nobody wanted to do it. But I said, this is what we're gonna do, and that's what we did. And he was brilliant, incredible. You said that Nichols said, no twelve year old could carry that film. How did you solve that problem? You yourself with Linda Blair. Nichols was wrong because he had not met Linda Blair. We we had cat We had auditioned several thousand girls. They were put on tape from all across the country by casting directors, and I must have looked at five hundred of them myself, just a minute or two and then out. And it appeared that there was nobody who could play this part who was twelve years old. And I had reached a point where I felt like that we couldn't make the picture. You could not find a twelve year old girl who a would understand all this stuff or be not be scarred by it, maybe for the rest of her life. And I didn't see that possibility in any of the audition tapes. We started to look at sixteen year olds who looked younger, and fifteen year olds, and one day my assistant in New York said, there's a woman out here who's brought her daughter. Her name is Eleanor Blair, and she doesn't have an appointment. Would you see her? And I said, okay, why not? Because we were striking out all over the place. In came this little girl with her mother. She was twelve, and I knew immediately that she was the girl instantly she sat down. She had never acted. She had done those things that you see like in the New York Daily News, in these newspapers with girls model coats and little dresses or shoes or something. She had done that, but no acting. So she sat down with her mother and I am She was a straight A student in Westport, Connecticut, and she was had one blue ribbons showing horses at Madison Square. Garden, but had never acted. But I said to her, Linda, do you know anything about this story? Do you know anything about the the Exorcist story? And she said, oh yes, I read the book as she did. She said yes, and I looked at her mother. Mother nodded, and I said, what what is it about? And she said, well, it's about a little girl who gets possessed by a devil and she does a whole bunch of bad things. I said, well, like what and she said, well, she hits her mother across the face, and she pushes a man out of her bedroom window, and she masturbates with a crucifix. And I said uh. I looked at her. Mother was smiling, and I said you know what that means. She said what I said to to to masturbate? And she said it was like jerking off, isn't it? And I said yes. Her mother was still smiling, and I said to her, have you ever done that? Have you ever done what you just said? She said, sure, haven't you? And so I hired her A kindred spirit. A kindred spirit. When I look at your career, it said you you make these films in the early seventies, and by the time you go to make Sorcerer. The movie business has changed. Did you feel that that you feel was changing underneath your face? Yes, I would tell my younger self or anybody who is starting in the film business at any time, do not escalate your expectations. Learn as much as you can from watching the works of filmmakers you admire. For the most part, they are the masters now. I never studied film. I never spent one day in a classroom learning about film technique. I never studied the camera. I started in live television in the mail room of a television station and work my way up. In today's world, if you're of any age, you can go out. You can buy a little digital camera. You can go out and shoot your own film and learn from what you're doing. You don't need to go to a film school or a film class. I think you just need to practice. If I was starting today, I would get it together by a camera, shoot something that represented how I felt about things, cut it and now. Then you can also put it on the internet. You can watch William Friedkin's movie The Exorcist right now on Netflix. X. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing