He blasted the urban thriller in 1971 with French Connection. Revolutionized fantasy cinema in 1973 with The Exorcist. Subsequently signed at least three great masterpieces – Sorcerer in 1977 (his remake of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear), La Chasse (Cruising) in 1980 and Police Fédérale Los Angeles in 1985. He was adored cinephiles as much by the multitude of unforgettable scenes with which his films are riddled as by his personality as a maverick, big mouth allergic to concessions, fascinating creator with a loose tongue and a jubilant sense of humor (we are not close to forgetting his interview by a poor Nicolas Winding Refn that he ends up driving crazy).
Oscar for best director for French Connection (which won five, including best picture and best actor for Gene Hackman), this pesky Billy was in the 70s one of the most robust pillars of what specialists later named The New Hollywood – that handful of genius, daredevil and innovative directors who turned Hollywood upside down at the turn of the decade, such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby and George Lucas. We loved him, Billy, because of all these famous names, he was the one who paid the most for his uncompromising vision of his art, signing against all odds films as kamikaze as Sorcerer and Cruising, disintegrated in their time by the critics and the public.
His admirers suspected a near end but like all the great artists who have accompanied our lives for so many years, we always said to ourselves that the inevitable would still be avoided for a long time. Moreover, still active, William Friedkin was to present his latest feature film The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial at the next Venice Film Festival. Starring Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role, the film is a retelling of the play that inspired Edward Dmytryk’s Hurricane on the Caine in 1954.
Born on August 29, 1935 in Chicago, the only son of parents of Ukrainian Jewish origin, Friedkin says he was struck as a teenager by the vision of Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, which triggered his vocation. A lover of French cinema, whether before or after the New Wave, William Friedkin had a devouring passion for filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Henri-George Clouzot, Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch or, of course, Jean-Luc Godard.
He retained from the New Wave and his debut in documentaries his taste for a rough style, with a shoulder-mounted camera and a predilection for apparent chaos on the screen. He rose to fame with French Connection and then The Exorcist (punctuated by his unforgettable piano theme Tubular Bells), two popular and critical triumphs produced back-to-back and whose shootings were as electric as the bubbling temperament of their author.
In his autobiography Friedkin Connection (2014, Editions de La Martinière), “Battling Billy” recalled in great detail behind the scenes of this spectacular and completely unconscious car chase through the streets of Brooklyn, with Gene Hackman at the wheel, filmed at the small morning with a snatch and without having previously blocked the arteries concerned. He also returned to this series of strange events that punctuated the filming of The Exorcist and to the famous anecdote of his slapping the comedian Bill O’Malley (alias Father Dyer in the film) to provoke the emotion sought – mission accomplished: the actor burst into tears in front of the camera.
This resounding failure marked the director to the point of depression, appalled to have gone so quickly from the status of Hollywood darling to that of the plague of the studios. Friedkin attempted to evacuate his spleen by flying to Paris for a while and eventually returned to the plateaus, but his career never fully recovered from this uncontrolled slip into the wall.
Three years later, William Friedkin endured new hardships by shooting his thriller La Chasse (Cruising), adapted from a novel by Gerald Walker published in 1970. Account of the hunt for a serial killer striking the New York gay community, by a straight cop (camped by Al Pacino) agreeing to infiltrate the underworld of the city, the film, once again, met with critical and public opprobrium. Its implosion at the box office, against a backdrop of controversy accusing Friedkin of being homophobic, devastated Pacino’s career and further compromised the filmmaker’s chances of reconciling with the studios.
In 1985, William Friedkin offered the 7th art another essential thriller, fortunately for him more consensual than Cruising and received with less indifference at the box office: Police Fédérale Los Angeles (To live and die in L.A in V.O). A single article would not be enough to describe the major influence of this sulphurous speedster on entire generations of young directors. Also adapted from a novel, published in 1984 by ex-special agent Gerald Petievich (co-author of the screenplay with Friedkin) about his own fight against a network of counterfeiters, Federal Police Los Angeles revealed in the main role William Petersen, future CSI profiler Gil Grissom.
In 1987, rather than exploiting his relative resurgence in popularity with To live and die in L.A, the intrepid Friedkin did as he pleased and signed one of his darkest and most chilling works: Le Sang punishment (based on the novel Rampage by William P. Wood), which follows from the inside the investigation of the trial of a serial killer for whom the prosecutor seeks the death penalty. Clinical and often frightening, the film probes the American legal system and its notion of capital punishment, while trying to identify the madness of the murderer. In 1992, the film was re-released in an alternate edit more reflecting William Friedkin’s shift in favor of the ultimate punishment – something he never shied away from.
Between two failures in the 90s and 2000s, this goldsmith of moral ambiguity offered us a few other talented peaks, including the sexy thriller Jade in 1995 and, in 2003, the incredible survival stripped Down (one of his films the most). underestimated) in which Tommy Lee Jones portrayed an ex-special forces agent tracking one of his recruits who had become a serial killer (Benicio del Toro). Produced outside the studio system, his last two fictional feature films, Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011) introduced Friedkin to a new generation of moviegoers.
Clever as a monkey, the filmmaker knew how to make wonderful use of the era of social networks and its return to favor in the spirit of the times, accepting many invitations to festivals and other cinematheque events. We had met him ourselves in Cannes, in 2016 and, true to his reputation as a boaster, Friedkin was overflowing with projects (none of which saw the light of day as far as we know) and took the opportunity to curse the TV series inspired by his classic L ‘Exorcist.
We had met him again in 2018, on the occasion of the publication of the book Sorcerer: on the roof of the world (La Rabbia editions) by our colleague Samuel Blumenfeld. Friedkin then told us about his love for Fellini’s cinema and musicals, as well as his recent documentary on Father Gabriele Amorth, official exorcist of the Vatican (The Devil and Father Amorth, shot in 2017 for Netflix).
Passionate about opera (he staged several in the 2000s) as much as new technologies, tireless transmitter of culture over the course of his numerous interviews, William Friedkin pulverized our cultural lives with the force of a hurricane, thread of unforgettable film visions from French Connection to Killer Joe. As one of his great admirers, the French director Nicolas Boukhrief, says about him: Friedkin was a fellow traveler. Expected and dreaded, his death leaves us inconsolable by the wayside.