2023-08-07 19:53:00
He dynamited the urban thriller in 1971 with French Connection. Revolutionized fantasy cinema in 1973 with The Exorcist. Subsequently signed at least three great masterpieces – Sorcerer a 1977 (son remake du wages of fear by Henri-George Clouzot), The hunt (Cruising) in 1980 and Los Angeles Federal Police in 1985. He was adored by moviegoers as much for the multitude of unforgettable scenes with which his films are riddled as for 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 about to forget his interview by a poor Nicolas Winding Refn that he ends up driving around).
Oscar for Best Director for French Connection (which won five, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Gene Hackman), damn Billy was one of the sturdiest pillars of what scholars later called The New Hollywood in the 1970s – that handful of brilliant, daredevil and innovative directors who turned Hollywood upside down at the start 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 et Cruisingdisintegrated in their time by critics and the public.
READ ALSO“Cruising”: the great return of William Friedkin’s cursed masterpieceIn short, these lines continue to be typed in order to postpone as long as possible these words that one would have naively wished never to write: William Friedkin is dead. Announced together on the sites of Variety a you Hollywood Reporter, his death at the age of 87, in his home of Bel-Air (Los Angeles), following pneumonia, was confirmed by his wife Sherry Lansing and by the dean of the university of Chapman University , Stephen Galloway. The last public appearances of the filmmaker, in the spring, showed him very thin and almost unrecognizable.
French cinema lover
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 Hurricane on the Caine d’Edward Dmytryk in 1954.
Born on August 29, 1935 in Chicago, the only son of parents of Ukrainian Jewish origin, Friedkin says he was stunned as a teenager by the vision of Citizen Kane of 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 Then The Exorcist (punctuated by its unforgettable piano theme Tubular Bells), two popular and critical triumphs produced in quick succession and whose filming was as electric as the bubbling temperament of their author.
Often epic shoots
In his autobiography Friedkin Connection (2014, Editions de La Martinière), “Battle 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 in the early morning at the snatch and without having previously blocked the arteries concerned. He also returned to this succession of strange events that punctuated the filming of The Exorcist and on the famous anecdote of his slap in the face to comedian Bill O’Malley (alias Father Dyer in the film) to provoke the desired emotion – mission accomplished: the actor burst into tears in front of the camera.
READ ALSOLa “French” before “La French”Married to Jeanne Moreau between 1977 and 1979, William Friedkin experienced one of his most severe setbacks in 1977 with Sorcererson remake you wages of fear by Clouzot based on the novel by Georges Arnaud, his idol whose blessing he sought in his Parisian apartment, shortly before the death of the French director. Shot between Paris, Israel, New Jersey and, above all, in backwaters in the middle of the Dominican and Mexican jungles, this staggering high-risk spectacle that Steve McQueen, Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura declined, plunged Friedkin and his team into a long ordeal of several months. Bad weather, illnesses, fired technicians, overwhelming logistics…
READ ALSOCiné-Crash #21: “Sorcerer”: the cursed remake of “Wages of Fear”Released in France under the title The Convoy of Fear (recently renamed Sorcerer for its blu-ray reissue), the film was carried at arm’s length, in mud, blood and tears by Friedkin. Then sank at the box office opposite Star Wars.
From studio darling to pestiferous
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 tried to evacuate his spleen by flying away for a while to Paris and ended up returning to the plateaus, but his career never fully recovered from this uncontrolled skid straight into the wall.
Three years later, William Friedkin endured new hardships while filming his thriller The Hunt (Cruising), adapted from a novel by Gerald Walker published in 1970. Story 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: Los Angeles Federal Police (To live and die in L.A in OV). A single article would not be enough to describe the major influence of this sulphurous fireball 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) on his own fight against a network of counterfeiters, Los Angeles Federal Police revealed in the main role William Petersen, future profiler Gil Grissom of the series The Experts.
READ ALSOWhen the hero of Experts almost became a star of the 80sRhythmed by the incredible pop rock soundtrack of the group Wang Chung, photographed by the legendary Robby Müller (Paris Texas), punctuated like Friedkin’s other great films with stunning scenes of mastery (including a relentless car chase), Federal Police Los Angeles is regularly cited as the greatest detective film of the 80s. For this film, Friedkin used , once again, his taste for realism by consulting for a long time real counterfeiters and by shooting several chase scenes without authorization.
In 1987, rather than exploiting its relative resurgence in popularity with To live and die in L.AFriedkin the intrepid does as he pleases and signs one of his darkest and chilling works: The Blood of Punishment (from the novel Rampage by William P. Wood), which follows from the inside the investigation of the trial of a serial killer for which the prosecutor requests 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 re-emerged in an alternate edit more reflecting William Friedkin’s shift in favor of the ultimate punishment – something he never shied away from.
Inspiration for generations of directors
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 pared down Hunted (one of his most underrated films) in which Tommy Lee Jones played 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 feature films, Bug (2006) et Killer Joe (2011) introduced Friedkin to a new generation of moviegoers.
Clever as a monkey, the filmmaker knew how to use the era of social networks and his 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 The Exorcist.
READ ALSOWilliam Friedkin: “The Exorcist series has nothing to do with my film”
We had come across him again, in 2018, on the occasion of the publication of the book Sorcerer: on top of the world (La Rabbia editions) of 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 Amorthfilmed in 2017 for Netflix).
Passionate about opera (he staged several in the 2000s) as much as new technologies, a 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 visions of cinema since French Connection until 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.
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