Original subtitles

To me, the two most interesting characters

in the history of the world are Hitler and Jesus.

There's good and evil in everybody.

That's a truth that I believe,

that there is good and evil in every human being,

every single one of the people out there.

And me.

- Hello, motherfucker. - Hey Moe.

- How are you doing? - Good.

I don't admire Hitler at all.

You know, I don't want stupid people to think

that I'm praising Hitler.

But he was an example of extremes.

Nice cup of rich, hot, steaming, delicious,

flavorful black coffee, Moe.

As far as the 20th century is concerned,

Hitler was evil incarnate.

But I know a lot about Hitler

that doesn't add up to that.

Doesn't mean that our judgment of him should change.

It should not.

Good to the last drop.

What's interesting to me is that Hitler

took an entire race of really intelligent, hard-working,

sometimes brilliant people down to hell with him

in the same way that Jesus lifted up people's spirits.

That's a subject that interests me still.

Did you get your coffee?

Oh yes, rich, hot, steaming, delicious,

flavorful, and black, as usual.

Are you ready?

I am, shall we start?

Let's do it.

An archbishop recently said to me

the devil also had goodness.

The devil was a creature of God.

But he went bad.

I've had evil thoughts.

I've had good thoughts.

It's a constant struggle for humanity,

for every human being to have their goodness

overcome their dark side.

Is there really such a thing as demonic possession?

I don't know that.

I pray, I have spiritual training, so I've felt...

- Yes? - I'm Father Merrin.

I had equipment to deal with it.

I think the reason why the film is so successful

and people get so scared is because it starts

on a very real level,

so that the audience connects with the people,

they know who they are,

and it's going along at a very, like a normal reality.

And it's step by step, something happens

to pull the audience in to the darkness

so that when we're into the unbelievable,

they're believing it because it's unbelievable to us

and we've taken all of the steps there.

I'm offered horror films all the time.

Everybody who makes a horror film sends me a script.

And they all make the same mistake.

They don't start in a reality base

and get the audience involved emotionally in that.

And it's a big mistake.

If you just start out with the horror,

everybody goes ha ha ha, they laugh at it.

If I would have worked on that subject matter,

I would have probably tried to deal with evil

through metaphor and like because it is part of life.

Billy didn't do that, he just went for it.

He didn't mince around.

He shows it and he shows it over and over again

in the most direct possible way.

You know, the little girl's head goes all the way around

and you see it.

With the father and the holy spirit.

In Billy's film, it's not implied, it's shown.

Damian!

He doesn't philosophize about evil, he shows you evil.

Look down in pity!

You killed my mother!

You left her alone to die!

This might be a bit vague,

but my favorite scary movies are not the ones

that are the scariest,

that say, that's a very scary movie.

But they are the ones where I like being

with the characters, really.

Only a certain amount of the movie's going to be

the really terrifying parts.

The rest of it is pulling you in,

keeping you close to them,

whatever the world and the atmosphere of the movie is.

Just to live in the movie.

You suddenly just feel like this is really happening,

which has always been the thing that freak in movies.

They're built in something very real.

It legitimatized the horror film in a very new way.

It applied a certain kind of psychological rigor

and verisimilitude to a subject

that was always perceived to be lurid and comic book-y.

And Billy applied that to the genre,

and it was never the same.

Analogies are silly most of the time.

But what "Star Wars" was to the science fiction movie,

you know, a lot of ways,

"The Exorcist" was to the horror film.

"The Exorcist" was that first movie

that was so incredibly popular

that people went to the movie theater and stood in line,

not for the next show,

and not even for the show after that,

but for the show after that.

Because it was people needed to see "The Exorcist,"

because it was like nothing they'd ever seen before.

Within a few hours, a whole day's seats are gone.

That film, at the time, was so frightening.

I mean, an entire generation was given

a new breed of nightmare.

Halfway through the movie,

when Regan goes into the hospital,

I passed out.

I literally fainted in the seat,

sitting between two football players.

I was kind of overwhelmed by this girl

and what was happening to her in this film.

And the whole Catholic thing was working its magic

on me, too.

My mother had no problem with me seeing anything.

I asked her about it and she goes,

"Quentin, you're smart.

"There's nothing that you're gonna see in a movie

"that's going to mess you up.

"It's a movie."

But, "The Exorcist" was the first film in '73

she forbad me from seeing.

I did as much research as I could.

At the time I made the film,

there were only two reported cases in the 20th century

by the Catholic Church of demonic possession

in this country.

There was the 1949 case of a 14-year-old boy

in Cottage City, Maryland that Blatty based his novel on.

And he wrote it as a novel,

because he couldn't get any information

from the Catholic Church.

And the other case was a case in a small town in Iowa,

a little town called Earling,

E-A-R-L-I-N-G Iowa,

of a woman in 1922.

I talked to the aunt of the boy who was possessed.

And she told me some stories that were beyond

even what was in the novel.

And I put them into the film.

Like the furniture moving and trapping her in a room.

To what extent it is what happened in the actual case,

I just don't know.

It's the power of Christ that compels you.

The power of Christ compels you!

When they got to the exorcism,

Max blocked on the line, "The power of Christ compels you."

He couldn't remember it, he just blocked.

And they shot it over and over and over.

And Max was an atheist.

The power of Christ compels you!

Did Billy ever tell you that?

It just wouldn't come out of his mouth.

And Billy said to me,

"On a list of 100 things that could go wrong

"in this shooting, number 100 would be

"Max von Sydow blocking on a line."

He finally got it, but it was

mysterious.

It's God himself who commands you.

I made "The Exorcist" as a believer.

Everyone in my family in Chicago was Jewish.

And so I had to have a Hebrew school education.

And it was forced on me.

You know, it was, you had to do it.

I know a lot of Yiddish slang,

but I don't remember Hebrew

because I didn't absorb the teaching.

I now read the New Testament.

I seldom read the Old Testament.

I find the Old Testament a lot more fanciful.

Both my parents came from the Ukraine,

and they came over in what we call was steerage.

That means they were in the hold of a ship.

At the age of three, they were escapees,

but they quickly assimilated and became Americans.

I had a very happy childhood,

even though we were extremely poor.

But I didn't know we were poor,

because all of the people who lived in my apartment building

lived the same way.

My father didn't make a lot of money,

he made $50 a week at the most.

In a lot of countries, that is a lot of money.

In America, it's poverty.

I loved my mother and father.

I thought my mother was,

if she was Catholic, she would be a saint.

She would be nominated for sainthood.

I never heard her say a bad

or a negative word about anybody.

She was very loving and protective of me.

My father worked many long hours.

And every day,

I couldn't wait for him to come home at night.

And when he was off on the weekends,

he and I would play.

And he was a semi-professional softball player.

We did a lot of things together.

Where I grew up on the north side of Chicago,

you could go out and play in the streets.

The whole neighborhood was alive.

Billy Friedkin was the wild guy in some ways

when we were in high school together.

I remember being in one class

where it was a German teacher, very strict.

And there was a student up in front of the classroom

reciting something.

And suddenly, a group of masked marauders

with hoods on their heads so you couldn't see their faces

charged in, grabbed the kid who was speaking,

and kidnapped him right from the front of the classroom.

And he went out screaming and we all sat there.

What was that, what just happened?

Of course, Billy Friedkin was the leader of these,

he was a prankster.

Cameras into your first positions.

Roll film.

By the time I came of age to work,

I had an early entry-level job in television.

And television was very new in people's homes then.

And my folks didn't understand

what I was doing in television.

I was just in the mail room,

you know, for almost two years,

until I moved up in television.

And that's how I started.

There were no schools then

that taught television production.

You learned on the job.

You had an entry level job, in the mail room in my case,

and some of the best film directors of the '60s and '70s

who started in the '50s as live television directors

in America.

This is a greater honor to me than an Academy Award.

Yes, really.

I wasn't interested in filmmaking

when I started in television.

Keep an eye on this for me

so it doesn't get graffitied, will you?

Anna Karenina this year, wow.

Diane Kurys.

This is fantastic.

I would've continued to do that until I saw Citizen Kane

when I was 21.

And then my ambition to become a film director took hold.

The day I saw Citizen Kane, I thought, my God,

the power of film.

The power of film to go so far below the surface

of a human life or a human lives.

In the '60s, I had heard of Billy

because he made a film that saved a man's life,

and I was extremely impressed with the notion

that film could actually save a life.

He had made a documentary called

"The People Versus Paul Crump."

For nine years, Paul Crump has tried

to tell his story.

Either nobody listened or nobody cared or nobody believed.

Fate caused me to go to this one party

on one particular Friday night.

There was 150 people in the room.

I was hiding in a corner like this,

trying to pretend I wasn't there.

And I had a drink.

I'm standing there with a drink like an idiot.

And there was a man standing next to me

with a priest's collar.

He was the protestant chaplain at the Cook County Jail.

I didn't know what to say.

What would you say to him?

He says, "I work on death row

"where they execute people in the electric chair."

"Father, have you ever encountered anyone

"who you thought was innocent on death row?"

This is the question that came out of my mouth.

And he said, "There's a guy now.

"He's an African-American.

"His name is Paul Crump."

I confessed and you would confess

and anybody else that was in the position

that I was in would've confessed.

And as a result of that,

you spent nine years in this jail because you were

- going to be executed. - That's right, nine years

right here, right here and no one believing

a fragment of what I say.

I think he was convicted of a murder.

And the film was so powerful

and the film was so effective,

that literally, the case was reviewed,

and ultimately the man was not executed.

He told me to stop playing.

He said, "You black son of a bitch,

"so what do you know, by God.

"you should be in the jungles."

It was shown to the governor of Illinois

whose name was Otto Kerner.

And he sent me a very brief letter saying

that after seeing my film,

he decided to spare Paul Crump's life.

And he was finally released to the custody of his sister.

I was so impressed that a film could save a life

that when I finally met Billy Friedkin,

I was very admiring and he was someone vaguely my age.

So it was doubly impressive.

When I made "The People Versus Paul Crump,"

a documentary that was not very well made,

but had the effect of saving a man's life,

I thought, what a great and powerful medium film is.

And then I went to Hollywood.

And then I went to Hollywood

and I was completely dispelled of that notion.

I didn't realize that I could use a documentary style

in film until I saw the film by Costa-Gavras called "Z."

How many have you seen that?

Great.

And that was the film that said to me it is possible

to use documentary technique in a fictional story.

Maybe if documentaries had been more possible,

if they had been showing them more,

he would've been one of the great documentarians.

His films have an element.

I mean, "French Connection" is shot with a,

you might say cinema verite documentary kind of quality.

"Police, emergency, I need your car."

What you see in that chase happened.

That happened frame by frame.

I filmed this chase in "The French Connection"

with real cars and real people walking on the streets.

If you cleared the streets of New York,

it wouldn't be New York.

It was dangerous, too dangerous.

I wouldn't do it today.

But that's what I had in mind then.

I had in mind a chase

that reflected the street life of Brooklyn.

It was decided that we was just gonna get in the car,

and whatever happens happens.

And of course, I got in the car with Bill Hickman.

Bill Hickman was gonna do the driving.

Now, the cameraman, Billy Friedkin,

did not allow him to do the filming because he was married.

I don't know any part of it.

All I know is that Billy Friedkin did the filming

in the car.

Before we were going,

I'll never forget this,

Bill Hickman was smoking a cigarette.

And it was in the ashtray.

And Billy got into the car and he said to Bill Hickman,

"You haven't shown me shit yet.

"This better be good.

"We're only going to be able to do this once.

"Whatever you've done before is shit.

"I really want to see what you can give me here."

With that, Hickman is lighting up a second cigarette

while the first one is in the ashtray, still going.

And I just said to myself, "I'm going to die.

"I'm going to die here," you know?

And so we got out there

and Bill Hickman, he let it go.

He just stole those shots, man.

They were through New York on a Sunday morning.

We're hellbent for disaster.

I mean, in many cases, you're just lucky

that people didn't get hit by cars.

I think that's the thing

is that because the films are so real,

I don't think they date.

William Friedkin did, I guess a 45th anniversary screening

at The Chinese.

I was there, and it was so loud and so forceful,

it just kind of wiped the floor

with a lot of contemporary movies.

Even today, it still looks great.

Like I think the thing is the way

that Hollywood makes movies has changed so much

that "French Connection" looks like

a breath of fresh air now.

I had this story, which had taken place 10 years before.

And I knew the two cops.

When I met them, I was more interested in making a film

about them than about the story.

They were kind of unique to me.

They were the first

good cop-bad cop that I met or was aware of.

So I had the ambition to capture their dynamic on film

with two actors.

And then I wanted to show another side of New York City

that I had not seen on film,

the darker side of New York City life.

It was estimated that there a quarter of a million

heroin users in the city of New York.

And don't forget, these people had to,

they had to make it every day,

you know what I mean by that?

So the crime was just totally

and completely through the roof.

And Billy had said to me,

"We would like to see how you toss somebody,"

toss meaning how do you search them.

So put him in the car, and we rode through the streets.

And so we began to stop people on the street

and toss them, if you will, how we would search them.

Aw man, who are you, Dick Tracy, or something?

I said I was clean.

I'm not gonna get stuck am I?

No, I said I was clean, didn't I?

If I do, you know what happens.

Yeah, I said I'm clean

Billy absorbed everything, everything.

And he couldn't look, he couldn't see enough,

he couldn't ask enough questions.

To me, he was, you know, part of how I was introduced

to New York was through "The French Connection."

Part of how I was introduced to LA

is through "To Live and Die in LA."

When you look at "French Connection," you feel New York.

When you look at "To Live and Die in LA,"

you feel LA, and you feel it in that period.

It is, does serve as kind of a time capsule.

I think it's because Billy's very invested

in entering these worlds

and then with the things he learns, he gets details.

It also takes his story some place else

that he can't take it until he experiences those worlds.

I called up Billy and I said,

"If you can come up to the precinct,

"I'm going to take a guy down.

"Hopefully his friend is there with him.

"He used a shotgun

"and the shotgun took out the daughter, the father,

"and I'm sorry to say, you know, a four-year-old kid

"in the crib."

And Billy came up, exactly with me.

I went down, you know, with my partner.

I went down with Billy.

And I set a fire in the hall with the garbage cans.

And people were screaming, "It's fire, it's fire!"

And of course, the guy came out and I got him

without any trouble at all.

And Billy was right there.

And in fact, Billy put the handcuffs on him.

And we brought him back up and I charged him,

you know, with a triple homicide.

In the end, let me put it this way.

In the end, Billy Friedkin was a narcotic detective.

Mulderig.

You shot Mulderig.

That son of a bitch is here, I saw him.

I'm gonna get him.

And the ending

of "The French Connection" film,

it's virtually a documentary of that case.

If you were to talk to Sonny Grasso today,

who's still alive, and he was the cop played by Roy Scheider

in the film, if you asked him right now,

if you picked up your cell phone and called Sonny Grasso,

and you said, "Sonny, how accurate

"is 'The French Connection' movie to the case

"that you broke in 1961?"

he would say "About 95% accurate."

Now, the case took place 10 years before,

over a 10-month period.

The movie runs 100 minutes

and was made 10 years later.

But in the mind of the actual character,

it's 95% accurate.

So in that sense, I think it's probably

not a bad film.

For "The French Connection," William Friedkin was awarded

with an Academy Award, an Oscar.

And in 1973, a former production company

called The Directors Company,

together with Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola.

And "The Conversation" is one of the films that they produced.

Dear Francis, keep this wire with you

throughout production.

One, stay within budget at all times.

Two, finish on schedule.

Don't let the actors improvise, especially Hackman.

Think commercial.

Remember, it's my money you're spending.

That's a good letter.

That's very much him.

Ironically, "The Conversation" did come in on budget

and stuff, but it wasn't a commercial film.

And I think Gene Hackman told me

that on "The French Connection," he was working,

and the first few days, he wasn't sure what he was doing

and wore a funny hat.

He hadn't found his character yet.

And then one morning in the cold in New York,

there was, you know, like the table with coffee and donuts.

And he took a cup of coffee and he took a donut

and he dipped the donut in the coffee

took a bite, and threw the donut away.

And he heard a voice saying, "That's him."

And he looked and it was Billy Friedkin.

This guy was the kind of person who would take one bite

of a donut and throw it away.

And Gene told me that that made the character in his mind.

The ideal situation for me as a director

is to simply make a suggestion to an actor

and watch what the actor does with that.

And that was the entire cast of "The French Connection,"

the entire cast of "The Exorcist,"

the entire cast of "Bug,"

the entire cast of "Killer Joe."

For better or worse, sometimes,

he does create a vibe on the set.

Where'd you get those?

That's not Ansel's bit.

He's almost like a method director, I would say.

At a beginning of my character,

we were all lovey-dovey and everything was sweet.

And I noticed as my character started, you know,

you realized she was a little duplicitous,

and he just started treating me like shit on the set.

And at first, I didn't quite understand what was going on.

And then of course, later on, I bumped into Sherry

like right after we had wrapped, Billy's wife,

and she was like, "Billy loves you."

And I'm like, "Really?

"Like I kinda thought he hated me."

And she, and of course he called.

He's like, "Darling, you know I love you.

"I was just trying to get that performance out."

And you realize he just becomes part of the atmosphere.

If you lie to me, it'll be the last lie you ever tell.

- Rex. - Rex?

- Just Rex! - Who?

- Rex! - Correct.

Hands off, please.

Whether you're aware of him or not,

it's best to never state your intention.

It's best to have people wondering a little bit.

Because I know from my end,

I'm better when I'm not sure.

If you're intending to do that,

wait, where'd the line,

where was the line drawn between you and the character?

It's great to not know that with the person as an actor.

And a good director like Bill's not gonna ask,

because he knows if you say these things out loud

and state your deliberation or state your intention,

you, you kill the magic,

or whatever it is.

Peter, are they bad?

Get off!

He's always looking for people to put themselves out there.

There's no holding back.

There's no, you know, charming your way through the scene.

You've gotta go to the dark place.

He's very aware of when something is phony.

I'm a drone.

He really does what he needs to to get a great scene out of you.

Sometimes he can be quite frightening,

and sometimes he can be unbelievably nurturing.

And sometimes he gets very involved.

When I had to do a nude scene, he actually dropped his trousers

in front of the cast and crew,

which was pretty amazing, yeah.

Stop.

Take off your socks.

It's like, you know, are you nervous about taking your clothes off?

Like everyone's taking their clothes off! Here, I'll take my pants off!

It's like, he's just like, he's in it.

He's just passionate and he expects people to give like 200%

because he's giving 200%.

Good!

C'mon out of there. This isn't a mark.

There are no marks.

I try not to rehearse with actors,

as though they're giving a performance.

I'll very often, if they're playing a cop,

I'll send them out with real cops,

or real priests, as I did with Jason Miller

and Max von Sydow.

So I'll talk to them before we ever get to the set.

And then I'll stage it with the director of photography,

work out how the lighting's gonna be

and if the shot's gonna move or if the actor's gonna move.

Yeah, it's perfect.

I'll work all that out and then shoot it.

There's no rehearsal.

Rehearsal is for sissies.

Rehearsal is for dummies.

Catch the train, pass it.

And I don't know if Caleb told you,

but I'm a one-take guy.

Billy would do very few takes.

I mean, we rarely did more than one take.

And I've worked this and I've worked with directors,

you know, who do 40, 50 takes.

They are great filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick

who do 100 takes, and then there are people like,

you know, Sidney Lumet and Billy Friedkin who do one take

and make really wonderful movies.

I think for Billy, you know, he likes the challenge of that.

And when actors would want to do another take,

he would oftentimes, you know, say, well, okay.

He'd sort of give in and do another take.

And then he'd go, "Okay, just print the first one."

You know, Bill's got this thing, one take.

And I remember when he said that,

my blood pressure went up immediately. I was like...

But very immediately, before I could even exhale,

I was like, well, that's fucking fantastic.

Okay, then there's really no fucking around.

You just let it rip from take one, and that's it.

So it actually was cool to have that sort of pressure

put on that actually made it no pressure at all,

because it's like you only got one.

It's kind of like real life. It's like meeting someone for the first time.

You only do that once.

So if this your one, or maybe two takes of it,

fucking bring it, you know?

We were shooting in a bar in San Pedro.

We had what we were supposed to say.

We had sort of talked about that.

And then he said,

"All right, let's do a rehearsal, go ahead."

And they gave us an action and we walked out the door

and we walked across the parking lot,

and we were talking.

And then I jumped in the car and he walked out of the frame.

And Billy said, "Cut!"

He said, "That's it, we got it, we're done."

And we didn't even know we were shooting.

We didn't even know we were filming anything.

They do it.

Okay, let's move on.

They said, "Wait, wait a minute!"

"Huh, what?"

"There was a reflection!"

I said, "I don't care.

"No one's looking at that.

"If they're looking at that, we're dead."

We once made a shot, I think it was in Killer Joe,

where a car pulls away in the foreground,

revealing somebody.

And Caleb had a reflection of the camera crew in the car.

But the camera's moving so fast,

and he said, "Wait, we gotta do it again.

"There's a reflection."

I said, "Caleb, everybody knows that you need a camera

"to make a picture.

"If there's a camera reflected in the car,

"you know, no one will be surprised."

They're not thinking about that, who cares?

We didn't do it again.

But the normal way in filmmaking,

lets do it again until it's perfect.

However, I'm not looking for perfection

in the films that I've made.

I'm looking for spontaneity.

There's no need for it!

We're all concerned with human rights,

for God's sake.

But the kids who want to get an education have a right.

A lot of people say when it comes to directing

that 90% of directing is casting.

And is it 90%?

No, but you know, it's 80%.

It really is 80%.

It is, you know, these are the actors

that are going to take your movie all the way.

And when you cast a movie exquisitely,

like the way "The Exorcist" is cast,

then it's just perfect.

You can tell he's reaching for something deeper

by the kind of cast that he wants to use.

"Exorcist" is a perfect example of that.

Max von Sydow, he was the best film actor in the world

at the time.

And he had the dignity of spirit

that conveyed Father Merrin

better than anyone that I could think of.

Ellen Burstyn understood the story,

grew up a Catholic,

had left the Catholic church, but understood it.

My training is to be real.

That's what Strasberg taught.

And that's what I learned from him, how to be real

in the fiction.

And that was Billy's background, too.

So we were really on the same page.

The part of the young priest, Jason Miller,

we had cast an actor named Stacy Keach for that role.

Then one day I was in New York and I saw a play

that was written by Jason Miller,

who was only a part-time actor.

He was actually a milkman in Flushing, New York,

delivering milk.

We went to see Jason's play

that was appearing on Broadway at the time.

Do you know the name of it, I can't think of it.

A wonderful play called "That Championship Season"

that to me, it reeked of lapsed Catholicism.

And I said to my casting director,

"I'd love to meet this guy.

"I just want to talk to him."

She set up a meeting with me at my hotel room.

And it was a terrible meeting.

And we cast Stacy Keach.

And I went back to Hollywood to start preparing the picture.

I get a call from Jason Miller.

He was in New York.

And that by now, he's won the Pulitzer Prize for his play.

And he said, "Hey, you know that book

"you were talking to me about, that 'Exorcist' book?"

"Yeah?"

He said, "I am that guy."

I said, "Really?"

He said, "Yeah, that's me, that's my life.

"I studied for three years to be a priest

"at Catholic University in Washington DC.

"I had a crisis of faith.

"I dropped out of the church."

I said, "That's really interesting."

He said, "I'm telling you, this guy is me."

I said, "Well, it isn't you, it's Stacy Keach,

"'cause we've hired him to play the part."

Now, that little voice that appears in my head sometimes

said, "Go along with this guy.

"Maybe it's a joke."

But I like jokes.

I said, "Can you get a plane tomorrow

"and get out here tomorrow night?"

He said, "Fuck no."

He said, "I don't fly.

"I'm not gonna get in an airplane.

"It'll take me a week to get out there on a train."

I said, "You're really out of your fucking mind."

So he took the train and came out.

And I had Ellen Burstyn.

Jason did a screen test,

and that I did with him in California.

I had just two chairs,

and I took a shot over her shoulder on Jason Miller,

while she interviewed him.

And then I made a tight closeup of him

just saying the mass.

Don't rattle through the mass the way we hear it

in churches today all over the world.

Say the words as though you're saying them

for the first time.

Remember also, O Lord, thy servant Mary Karras,

who has gone before us with the sign of faith

and sleeps the sleep of peace.

And then, the next day, the rushes come out,

and I see them with the heads of Warner Brothers,

and with Bill Blatty,

and he just popped off the screen.

And I said to all the people in the room,

we gotta pay off Stacy Keach, and I'm gonna hire this guy.

They said, "You're what, fuck you!

"We're not doing it!

"We're not giving the lead to this fucking amateur!"

I said, "That's it, folks.

"You want me to do this picture?

"That's it, he's the guy."

It was a gift from the movie God.

Acting and filmmaking are both professions.

It's a job.

Some schmuck who sits around here and says,

"I'm an artist," is fucking crazy.

Out of this work, there can come art.

Of course there has, and there can.

It's rare.

Fellini was an artist.

Certainly Antonioni.

HG Clouseau was really an artist,

as well as Chris Lang and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton,

and a handful of actors.

No, I don't have a perception of myself as an artist.

That's the beginning of the end of a career,

when you start to believe that you're an artist.

And instead of just striving for the utmost professionalism

in the telling of the story.

Any time a director tries to make a big movie

that's difficult and that's challenging,

there's always those three movies.

"Sorcerer," "Apocalypse Now,"

and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God,"

looking at you, telling you, no you're just making a movie.

Yeah, that might a little rougher

and it might be taking you a long time to do it,

and maybe you're fighting for the time to do it

and do it right.

Like say it's something like when I do "Kill Bill."

Nevertheless, I'm not William Friedkin in Brazil,

or wherever the hell he was,

shooting in the jungle, doing "Sorcerer."

You gonna tell me where I'm going?

I swear to Christ I don't know.

"Sorcerer" is to me one of the greatest movies ever made.

It was the most difficult thing I've made.

We shot a number of places,

but especially in the Mexican jungle

and the Dominican Republic,

in the poorest village in the Dominican.

You know, you had the feeling, we'll never get a chance to do something

like this again, maybe, who knows.

So let's just go for it.

For me, it is the most important film that I've made

and the one that I hope to be remembered for,

if I'm remembered at all.

Most of you who were not even born when I made this film.

Let's see.

So nobody here was born when I made this film.

"Sorcerer" is the second adaptation of a novel

by Georges Arnaud.

In 1953, Clouzot brought to the screen for the first time

an adaptation with the title "Wages of Fear."

I never considered it a remake, and I still don't.

There must be well over 50 million productions of Hamlet

since it was first written in 1601.

So any version of Hamlet is not a remake.

It's another version, another vision.

But I must tell you, Wally and I created

all new characters and all new situations.

The only thing that's the same is the essential core

of four guys driving two trucks of dynamite

to an oil well fire.

And they're four desperate guys

who are doing this as a kind of a last chance.

What are you going to do with all of that money, you hump?

Talk to me.

What are you going to do?

Get laid.

And so it's a movie about attempted redemption,

but they won't actually succeed,

because fate doesn't necessarily favor redemption.

And he bought into it.

It was a choice, and a daring one.

And you know, he was right there.

He wanted to do that.

And we decided on picking characters

that were kind of challenging.

I said, "What about a guy who's a terrorist?"

Everybody should have something in their past

that's unforgivable.

The bridge scene is just one of the great suspense

moments in cinema.

It's one of the great filming of sequences.

The imagery itself, the editing.

It wasn't done through special effects.

It wasn't fake.

It was by really doing it.

Both "Apocalypse" and "Sorcerer" were made at a time

where if you wanted to show something extraordinary,

you had to do something extraordinary

and photograph it.

How in the actual film

did you do the bridge crossing scene?

With great difficulty.

One shot at a time.

The bridge had hidden beneath it a hydraulic system

so that the trucks were attached to the bridge from below

where you couldn't see them.

But many times, both trucks fell into the water.

And we had to pick them up.

I was in the truck when it went into the water.

I'm a great jogger.

No matter what the picture was, I would jog.

I'm doing "Sorcerer" with Roy Scheider.

Of course, I know him from "The French Connection."

So we were jogging in Santo Domingo.

It's like six o'clock in the morning.

And here goes these trucks go by with these workers,

and they have machetes.

And up go the machetes, and they're saying something like,

they're saluting, 'El Tibidor'.

And I know I'm messing that up.

We come to find out that Jaws was playing there

and they were saluting the man that killed the shark.

They were saluting Roy Scheider.

I went back and I told Billy, I says,

"Billy, you know what, this is the guy

"that killed the shark."

And you know Billy, "Yeah, okay."

To me, a flaw in "Sorcerer"

is the casting of Roy Scheider

as the lead in the film.

He's not bad in the movie.

He's not the actor the movie needs.

And it's more to the fact the movie needed bigger shoulders

to place this type of an epic on.

And you know, when you read the people

that Friedkin had originally considered,

Steve McQueen or Robert Blake,

they would have been perfect.

I mean, they would have been absolutely perfect.

I think in particularly, Robert Blake

would have been perfect.

Later, you know, Billy and I have talked about this,

you know, would it have been a different movie?

It was written for Steve McQueen.

And therefore, it was written with very little dialogue.

McQueen didn't like dialogue himself.

And he was really wonderful at silent bits.

Should I have done a pass just for Scheider?

Then, you know, when I saw it the last time,

at Grauman's Chinese, I thought, this is a damn good movie.

There's no reason to change anything.

And in a lot of ways, I think it's a more perfect film

than the previous two.

But it is not a secret that it was a commercial failure

at the time.

Somehow, it shook the system

and kind of reinforced the idea

that the studios should be concentrating

on another type of entertainment

that was probably less challenging to the audience.

When the film was finished,

Universal was very, very nervous about the film.

First of all, it didn't have any stars in it.

It had foreign actors.

It opened in foreign languages in foreign locations.

It looked like a European film.

It didn't even look like an American film.

And it still doesn't.

Sid Sheinberg and Derek Diller insisted on having this lunch

with us to give notes on the film.

So Billy called.

I was painting my house.

So I came in and I had painters' overalls.

This is the pre-meeting.

He looked at me and he said,

"I want you to come to the meeting with the executives

"exactly dressed the way that you're dressed now."

He gave us direction, really.

He said, "When they're talking to you,

"don't look at their eyes.

"Look at their ear, look slightly off,

"or look at their shoulder when you're talking to them

"so that it will disorient them,

"because there won't be a way they can engage

"with your look."

So we had the meeting,

and Billy drank a tumbler of vodka

and fell off the chair.

And I said, "Oh, he does that all the time."

And the dialogue could have been written by Ionesco.

I mean, it made no sense at all.

Every time they suggested something, we said,

"Oh, we'll have to go to Ecuador to do that."

And then Sheinberg, you know, tried to bully him,

but it was unsuccessful.

He had final cut.

Listen, show business, if you're in this business

and you make movies

and you make movies that are the American commercial system,

you do have ups and downs.

To last, you have to have hits,

and you have to have some commercial movies.

But you're also going to have some failures.

It seems to be true of everybody, except Spielberg.

I don't care why it didn't perform.

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter

what the movies do.

If the title had been less cryptic,

if had been the original title,

which was "William Friedkin's Dynamite,"

that might have done a little better, all right.

If Steve McQueen had been in it, it might have done a little better.

But yeah, but I don't, frankly I don't really

care about how well it did or not.

The whole story of Hollywood can be expressed

in one sentence, which is success has many fathers,

and failure is an orphan.

So there's a cup of coffee in the shot,

which happened as we made a cut.

That's fine.

I'll periodically refer to this, but cheers.

Okay.

You know, filmmaking was always an experimental form,

because when the pioneers first got the ability

to make a movie, they didn't know how to make a movie.

They didn't know how it differed from a stage play.

But they were in a position to just try.

So if you can't experiment, you can't,

you can't learn what is possible.

I like to say that thinking you can make a good film

without risk is like saying you can make a baby without sex.

It's not possible.

You can't do art without risk.

You have to take a chance that it will fail.

And by doing that and seeing if it fails or it doesn't fail,

that's how we build a common language

and a common cinema.

Yeah, one of the things I really like

about Friedkin's technique in particular is

his cinematic set pieces,

you can get a sense of how to do a sequence like that

yourself if you study his sequences.

And when I say that, I'm not just talking about

like the car chase in "French Connection"

or the car chase in "To Live and Die in LA."

But I also mean like the foot chases.

Who is the greatest director of chase scenes?

Buster Keaton, without a doubt.

Who is in Buster Keaton's class?

Nobody.

Nobody can top Buster Keaton.

The chase scenes in a silent movie called "The General"

put everything else to shame, I'm sorry to say.

And they were actually done the way you see them.

The camera simply recorded

what Keaton had conceived of, acted in, and directed.

You know, all of the great filmmakers

are on the shoulders of previous,

you know, everyone's on the shoulder of Barnouw

or of Eisenstein or of Rossellini.

It is a tradition that is handed from one to another.

George Stevens and Billy Wilder,

Richard Books, Joe Mankiewicz,

the great musical directors like Stanley Donen,

who was a friend of mine.

♪ Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do ♪

♪ I'm singing in the rain ♪

♪ Just singing in the rain ♪

♪ What a glorious feeling ♪

♪ I'm happy again ♪

I did seek out the company of the old masters,

'cause they had a lot of information to impart.

Their work came out of their life experiences.

These were the giants.

Don't talk to me about the '70s.

The film directors of my generation were for the most part,

with the exception of myself,

were film student geeks.

They all went to film schools.

And I never went to a film school.

And so I never became part of that film school generation.

- Bill? - Yes sir?

Need it quiet, please.

B.

10 take one and B camera markers.

I had read somewhere that Fritz Lang was alive.

I didn't know he was alive.

I think he was 88 at the time.

And I called the Directors Guild.

I said, "Look, reach him, reach out to him.

"Send him a note or call him and tell him

"I'd like to meet and talk to him

"and give him my phone number."

And a few days later, I get a call from Fritz Lang.

"Yeah? Who's this?"

I said, "Well, who are you calling?"

And he said, "Is this Friedkin?"

"Yeah," I said.

"It's Fritz Lang, what do you want?"

in a thick German accent.

I said, "Well, I'd love to come and meet you."

He said, "Well, I don't want to meet you."

And he hung up the phone.

12 take one, A and B camera markers.

Yes.

A few days later, I get another phone call.

"Mr. Friedkin?"

"Yes?"

"This is Fritz Lang.

"People have told me about you.

"And so if you'd like to come and meet me,

"here's my address and you can come by tomorrow,

"not before 11."

So I went over and I met with him,

and he was a very interesting man.

He couldn't move very well.

His mind was still very much intact.

You know that here,

in the schools, religion is not taught?

How will you teach ethic

if not with religion?

I'm not a religious man.

But ethic you learn only through religion.

Fritz Lang said to me he had no liking

for his German films at all.

And I'm talking about "Metropolis" and "M"

and the films about Dr. Mabuse,

which was really about the rise of Hitler

and national socialism.

I personally think that I made my films

with a kind of a sleepwalking security.

I did things which I thought were right, period.

And as I said,

I had nobody, no model,

which I wanted to be like, you know?

He said, "My German films were all worthless."

I said, "'Metropolis'?"

"Worthless!"

"M?"

"Worthless!"

And he said that they were all cut by somebody else.

They were all changed.

And he only valued the films he made

after he came to America.

And none of them compare to "Metropolis," as few films do.

I liked "Metropolis" when I was shooting it.

And I told it to you already.

I didn't like it when I finished it,

because I think the end,

the go-between between capital brain and hand,

the workers, should be the heart, was too easy.

Simplistic you say?

Huh?

You felt it was, you feel now it's too simplistic.

- Or you felt... - Too simple.

One of the great films of all time is "Metropolis."

One of the great studies of evil is "M."

The film that made him leave Germany

was "Dr. Mabuse," because it was about Hitler,

and before Hitler came to power.

And when Hitler came to power,

Lang thought that he was going to be killed.

Goebbels sat behind a desk

very, very far away.

I said, "Herr Minister, I don't know if you know one thing.

"My father comes from an old peasant family,

"hundred and hundred years back.

"My mother was born Catholic,

"but her parents were Jewish."

So again, he turned on his charm and said,

"Mr. Lang, we decide who is an Aryan."

And I said, "Thank you."

Fritz Lang was a great filmmaker,

almost in a class by himself.

I think your question, all your questions are

is there a strict formula how to make a picture.

I don't think so.

Let me make it very clear.

Let me demystify all of the bullshit

that's written about filmmakers and film.

If you want to make a film,

you need a combination of ambition,

luck, and the grace of God.

And to me, the most important of those is the grace of God.

You get an opportunity, you get a chance,

but you have to go out and

try and make your chance.

That's it.

There's nothing else.

I think the best American filmmaker is a woman

named Kathryn Bigelow.

I think she is the best American filmmaker today.

She just went out and did it.

And she does it great.

There's some other young male filmmakers,

like Damien Chazelle,

I think he is possibly the future of American cinema.

That's very, very nice of him.

And what do you think about like this

on your shoulders?

Uh, yeah, I'm, uh,

yeah, I inevitably will disappoint him.

I first met,

well, actually, I remember really well.

It was at his house.

I drove up to his house to meet him.

It was like, to me, felt like visiting Hollywood royalty,

and the house kind of feels that way, too.

I remember the gate and pulling up.

It's at the top of a hill and he comes out,

saying, "Hey, Damien, come on in,"

and treats me to like the most delicious lunch

and then shows me around.

It was like so amazing.

He showed me his office that's filled with books

about every subject you could imagine,

and like his Oscar certificate from "The French Connection"

and this painting and this photo of Jeanne Moreau

from his years with her,

and then old "Exorcist" manuals and stuff.

It was kind of everything you hoped it would be.

These are drawings by Sergei Eisenstein.

They were given to me when I received

the Life Achievement Award at the Moscow Film Festival.

This is from "Ivan the Terrible,"

Eisenstein's watercolor or chalk

of the main character.

And this is from his film called "Que viva Mexico!"

He went in all these different directions, you know,

and yet I feel like he never made a movie

that wasn't a freaking movie,

you know, that didn't feel like it had his stamp on it

in some way.

Who started truly the '70s?

Which film started truly the '70s?

This decade of ambiguity starts with "French Connection,"

and where does this decade end?

With the financial disaster of "Heaven's Gate."

But it also ends with "Cruising."

And it ends with in the bleakest way.

To me, it was a murder mystery

set in the world of the S&M clubs,

which were at that time, 1980,

a growing phenomenon in the big cities of America.

And they were little known to the public

that didn't frequent these clubs and places.

Even gay people were not very aware of the S&M club.

It was a thing unto itself.

"Cruising" was so authentic.

I mean, it took you on a, like second level of hell

kind of tour of those places in New York.

The imagery is, while, maybe not as explicit as gay porn,

is actually rougher than it's in most gay porn

to be found in the late '70s.

I happen to know the head of the mafia of New York

who owned these clubs.

He was a friend of mine, Matty Ianniello.

He was known as Matty the Horse.

And he was a really nice man, as I knew him.

I never saw him do anything wrong.

He was exactly like Tony Soprano.

And one day, I had to ask him a favor,

which is would he allow me to film in his clubs.

And he did.

I can tell you factually,

what you see on that screen, I saw

when I was undercover working there.

Well, despite picketing, graffiti, and vandalism,

the movie entitled "Cruising" was completed,

and it will be shown in San Francisco this weekend.

The theme is the homosexual lifestyle,

but more specifically, however,

it's about a series of brutal murders of gays.

The gay community has protested,

wanting no showing of all of that film.

The film's distributors have other ideas.

It was reviled by the gay community at the time,

because they were worried that this S&M Tom from Finland

kind of sordid basement imagery

would marginalize them.

They wanted to, no, we're just like people

like everybody else.

Every day in this city,

dozens of gay people are beaten up,

come close to being murdered.

We're asking for them to withdraw it from circulation

from the country.

This film not only exaggerates that,

it is almost an incitement to go out and murder people.

But I wouldn't say withdraw something

from point of view of censorship.

From a point of view of extremely poor taste,

it's a piece of crap.

Cut to 1995, and I have a print of "Cruising,"

and I'm doing a play on Broadway.

And you know, a whole bunch of the people

working on the play,

as in a lot of theater in New York, are gay.

And that time that "Cruising" represents,

that's a world they only heard of.

That world more or less went away after AIDS.

So I had a screening of "Cruising."

And the whole like crew from the play went to see it.

And it blew their minds.

It just, they loved it.

One day this whole city's going to explode.

Used to be able to play stickball on these streets.

My favorite personal memory, though, of Friedkin was

him, it was like on Larchmont Village or something.

I bumped into Billy and I go,

"Hey, Billy, how are you doing?"

We talked a little bit on the street corner and everything.

And then I go, "Hey, I wanted to ask you.

"So like when you were doing 'Cruising'

"and the gay community was in an uproar about the film

"and they were calling you names

"and they were picketing in the streets and stuff,

"and you just keep making your movie

"and you keep making it in their neighborhood

"and everything," I go,

"what did you think about all that?"

And he goes, "I loved it!"

"Cruising" only interested me

as an exotic background for a murder mystery. That's it.

I had no political,

and I have never on any film I've made,

had any sense of what the politics of those films are.

Other people read things into them,

but I don't approach cinema

from a political position at all.

In fact, I don't trust politics or politicians.

Although, the Mayor of Strasbourg is a very nice man.

Mr. Ries, I met Monsieur Ries the other day.

Very nice man.

I did not realize that the Marseillaise

was written here by de Lisle, right?

And he has a picture of de Lisle performing

the Marseillaise for the first time in Strasbourg.

The Marseillaise is one of the greatest pieces of music

I've ever heard in my life.

I would pick up and go to war against my family

if they played the Marseillaise.

If someone said, "March on your family,"

I'm there.

Well, how political are his films?

The politics comes, I think,

from sort of the energy of his independent characters,

which is maybe part of the great American,

you know, frontier.

He was a larger than life character

and very impressive when I first met him.

"To Live and Die in LA" was another cop film.

You know.

Just another cop movie.

Listen, give me a break.

When he says, "just another cop film,"

he is being vastly too modest.

To be able to underestimate your own work,

to play with that,

means that you damn know for sure

that your films are different.

It's a terrific film and it's beautifully well-done,

and it's certainly not just another cop movie,

I'll say that. Or let me have one of those.

"To Live and Die in LA" came out,

and even like one of the guys actually saw

like a market research screening of "To Live and Die in LA."

And I even remember like, "Oh, who's the star of it?"

And he goes, "I don't know, "some guy I've never heard of before.

"He looks like Dan Marino, the football player."

I had never really done anything, you know.

I had only done theater.

I read a couple of pages and he said,

"That's it, you've got the part."

First time I met Billy personally,

it was for the auditions for "To Live and Die in LA."

He said, "Listen, I wanna make this movie

"with totally unknown people."

He said, "When people are looking at that screen,

"they don't have associations with another movie

"or an actor's career.

"I want nobodies.

"I wanna cast nobodies."

And he's looking at me.

An actor like to feel like he has some cachet.

To be fair to him, it was very early in my career,

and I'd made some movies,

and I was basically a downtown New York

avant garde theater actor.

So I certainly wasn't very well-known.

So I fit the bill as far as being an unknown.

Willem Dafoe, who had been in a couple movies, but I didn't know him.

When I say, I was maybe 18 when that movie came out.

And he was, you know, he was really electric in it.

How you doin', Ben Jessup.

William Petersen, it's very inspired choice casting him.

Cut yourself shaving, Mr. Jessup?

Just having those two guys together,

seeing those two people for the first time,

already you have a movie.

Turn around right there, asshole.

Killing Bill Petersen,

3/4, halfway through the movie, is a big surprise,

and it breaks a convention,

because he's set up to be your hero.

In fact, one of the things that I always remember

is when the film came out,

and they kept on saying,

this is a flawed movie

because they broke the rule number one.

You don't kill your hero.

And also, your hero is a sleazy guy.

Everybody's sleazy.

There's nobody to root for.

Now, keep in mind, this is many, many years

before Tarantino and, you know, many worlds

where your identification doesn't require

there to be a good man that survives

and then does the heroic thing.

So Billy, clearly, was ahead of the game on that.

And he was willing to play around with that.

That sequence in "To Live and Die in LA"

where they make the money,

it's a musical montage.

It has style all through it.

But it is also sort of recipe for counterfeiting money.

I mean, there's real attention to how to do you do this.

This is also where Billy was great.

He found people that knew how to do this.

We got in trouble for the counterfeiting stuff.

The Secret Service felt we were showing people

how to make money, and that wasn't a good idea.

I remember once we were printing money

in a remote location out in the desert.

We heard some helicopters go overhead.

And we all got very tense,

because what we were doing, technically,

I'm not sure how legal it was,

because we were printing money.

But we weren't distributing.

We were making it for a specific reason.

But there was that moment where we were flirting

with the legality effects.

Some of this money got in the wrong hands

and started getting passed around.

And I wasn't a part of any of that.

But I do know that they came at a certain point

and confronted a couple of the guys

that were working for Billy.

It was good, you know, it looked good.

Yeah, these guys that taught me how to print money,

I can only say, I don't ask questions.

I just learn from them.

But they know how to print money,

so that should tell you something.

The detail of how you do it is very,

is very interesting in that movie.

And it also says a lot about this character.

You know, he's a painter, but he can,

he knows how to actually make the money,

and it's not a simple thing.

It's hard to make money.

And I always like just the way he shows it to us.

He loves art.

I remember going to his house when we were making the film,

and he had a Corot in his bedroom.

And I thought, whoa, wow.

All of these are Japanese prints,

mostly by the great 19th century

Japanese printmaker Yoshitoshi.

There are very few of these prints.

I got them all in Kyoto.

Yoshitoshi was, in my opinion,

the greatest of the Japanese printmakers,

and was a favorite of Van Gogh's as well.

He had a huge collection of African art.

And it's used in one of the scenes.

And I wasn't knowledgeable about African art.

So I remember one of the lines that I improvised,

I mean, I checked with him okay.

Before I shoot a guy, I say unceremoniously,

I look at it and identify it.

I say something like "18th century Cameroon."

You take this in your ass.

No, Jesus, no!

Horrible.

I found afterward that that piece of art

was from Billy's collection.

So I inadvertently, out of ignorance, I must say,

I insulted Billy's collection.

He didn't tell me that.

Someone told me that later.

His energy, his intelligence, his passion continues.

He continues to figure things out

and to kind of fight.

Aside from how smart he is,

he's one of the smartest people I'll ever know,

and how funny he is,

because he makes me laugh more than anybody in the world,

he is brave.

He's courageous.

He's got balls that clank.

Yeah, I'm a cheerleader.

I love Billy.

He goes on and he's given us a lot.

I think that as a filmmaker, I probably

have a long way to go to reach

something that I would admire and respect.

As much as I've strived for reality,

I don't think that reality is the most important thing

in a film.

I most admire those filmmakers who have been able

to transcend reality and create another world

that has nothing to do with linear storytelling.

Like Antonioni, like Fellini.

I like Dario Argento's films,

which have nothing to do with reality.

Bu they have a lot to do with mood and texture.

So I have not been able, on many occasions,

to transcend reality.

Billy started as a radical filmmaker

and remained a radical filmmaker.

I would say that today, with his latest two films,

"Bug" and with "Killer Joe,"

he's going through his Japanese period.

In a sense, where I look at Japanese painting

as something extremely simple, just a few lines.

And with just these few lines, actually,

you get an incredible complexity.

What I think he understood as a filmmaker

is you don't necessarily need to go to Dominican Republic

in order to achieve greatness.

You actually can just stay on the sound stage, you have your story.

You have two actors, and this is at.

Dottie, it's me, Joe Cooper.

We're alone now.

It was a time right after I'd been doing

a bunch of romantic comedies,

and I was looking to find,

take on a new path in my career.

And nothing had come to me for a while.

And the first thing that came to me was a script,

"Killer Joe," by Tracy Letts and Bill Friedkin

was going to direct it.

I read it, and it is unlike any of the stuff

I'd been getting offered, for sure.

But I also remember reading it and thinking,

it made me sick to my stomach.

I said, I don't know if I wanna be a part of this.

I backed off and didn't read it right then,

backed off from it, went for a run or something.

Probably came back, had a beer, and read it again.

And Tracy Letts's dialogue,

the meter of his dialogue and the consistency of it,

but it's odd, it started to click.

So I heard the music of it.

And then all of a sudden, I started to find humor

and absurdity and truth in it.

You know, Tracy Letts is really good

at drawing the lives of lowlife characters

who sort of are struggling to sort of bring themselves back.

I think Tracy Letts and Billy are a good team,

because they're both confronted by the same sort of,

the kind of evil that sort of lurks in the world.

If you're implicated in this crime,

you are not, under any circumstances,

to reveal my identity or participation.

Oh, of course.

Well, every one of us has a secret life,

sometimes a double life.

That's interesting.

If you break this rule,

you'll be killed.

Like somebody who is married but cheats on his wife,

goes off somewhere with the girlfriend

in an anonymous way.

We all have secrets.

I'm gonna have a baby.

I think him, he made a choice that

a lot of people at that time were like probably, what?

He saw it clearly.

I'll go on to say this.

"True Detective," you know, the series "True Detective"?

They came to me for the Marty role

that Woody Harrelson played.

I read that and said,

"I know why you're coming to me for this.

"But I like this other guy Rustin Cohle."

And they were like, what?

I go, "Go watch 'Killer Joe.'"

They watched "Killer Joe."

Next day he said, "We got it, you're right.

"We see why you're right for Rustin Cole."

Thank you.

I will be eternally grateful to Billy

for believing in me for that role,

because I really think it was a poignant turning point

in my career where people kind of really thought,

wow, she's got some acting chops.

And I thank Billy for that.

Gina Gershon, Ashley Judd,

Linda Blair, and Ellen Burstyn.

Do you find these people...

I mean, just listen to that list.

I'm sorry, I just got a hot flash.

I mean, I just got a,

I never heard it said like that before.

That's a pretty amazing list to be a part of.

I'm one of the female characters, yeah.

I mean, I think

he doesn't like a female to be simple.

No female in his movie is just a bimbo

that's there for eye candy, are they?

And I've never been interested in playing one of those roles

and I don't think any of those women

have ever been interested in playing one of those roles.

I'm getting angry!

The roles in his films are just as good for women as they are for men.

Even if it's less of them, they are just as powerful,

sometimes I actually think more effective.

Killer Joe, kind of sadistic.

He thinks it is a comedy.

I didn't know what comedy relief was.

But he took it as sort of a killer comedy.

Could I direct an opera?

I was asked out of the blue by Zubin Mehta,

one of the great conductors of music in the world.

We had a dinner in my house,

and I was such a great fan of his already,

you know, with his past films,

that I've seen practically all of them.

And during the dinner, I just asked him.

I said, "Would you like to do 'Wozzeck' with me?"

And he accepted immediately.

I did it because it was a challenge.

In opera, the most important element is the composer

and the composition.

Even though the composer's long dead, like Wagner,

Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Verdi,

they are the most important people in realizing an opera.

He told me several time,

you know, in opera, first is music.

The second most important element is the conductor,

his interpretation of the music.

Third, all very close together,

not gaps like this, but gaps like this,

third would be the singers, the performers.

Fourth, stage director.

Sometimes he changed the order.

But music first.

Billy has a fantastic incredible curiosity.

So for the opera, when we did Aida,

he had many meetings with Egyptologists,

just to find out what was the body language

related at the time with the people,

with the aristocracy,

with the breasts of the Egypt of the Pharaoh.

And that gave me the possibility, also,

to look at the music of Verdi from a different angle.

You know, I've done a lot of opera

with famous directors,

Georgia Straler, Michael Cocchianis,

and very big Austrian, German directors, too.

Billy fits right in with them, yeah.

One of the most beautiful sights in the world,

the Grand Canal in Venice.

Absolutely amazing.

How anybody ever thought to build like this on water,

unbelievable to me.

I think in my other life, I will be a gondolier

like this man here.

In 2017, he went back to his roots

of documentary filmmaking with a film

based on a real case of exorcism,

"The Devil and Father Amorth."

And I'm very curious to see the reaction

of the Italian people,

because this will be the first public screening of the film.

It is now 11:35 a.m. on the Grand Canal.

We're in a lovely taxi,

which probably costs $100 to make a 15-minute trip.

I had gone to the Vanity Fair Academy Award party,

and I was talking to the editor of Vanity Fair,

Graydon Carter.

He said, "Are you going,

"when are you going to do another opera?"

And I told him I had just finished "Aida" in Torino.

Hello!

But that I was going to go to Rome.

And he said, "What for?"

And I told him I was going to meet Father Amorth.

And he said, "Oh, you gotta write about this.

"You have to write an article for Vanity Fair."

And so I did.

I interviewed Father Amorth,

and I realized he knew "The Exorcist" film very well,

and he admired it.

And that surprised me.

So I asked him if he thought

I could ever witness an exorcism.

I would have thought no.

It's not an entertainment.

It's not something that people are invited to witness.

But to my amazement, he said,

"Let me think about it."

And a couple of days later, I got an email

from the head of the Pauline Priests, Father Stimamiglio.

And he wrote and said, "Father Amorth invites you

"to witness an exorcism."

I've seen voodoo in Jamaica.

I've seen other ceremonies throughout South America.

And I have never believed that there was anything authentic

about exorcism until I met Father Amorth.

I think in an odd way,

he wanted to sort of confront something he sort of created

in fiction, you know, to sort of face it in reality,

to sort of see if he was up to the challenge, I don't know.

I think there's always something about all of us

that having delved into a certain subject,

revisiting it 20, 30, 40 years later,

and then seeing where your,

remembering where your opinions were and your passions were

and testing them against where you now are in your life,

I can see that as being fascinating.

Venice is a magical place, a magical city.

And that's why when I got a call from the Venice festival,

"Would you show your film here?"

I didn't even think twice.

I said yes.

Others have asked me and I don't, I can't,

I'm too tired, I don't want to.

But I'm never too tired for Venice.

I'm gonna just walk out of the shot.

I don't believe in competition between films.

I don't allow my films to appear in any competition.

I like to show them at film festivals

so people who are really interested in film can see them.

Filmmaking is not like a tennis match.

It's not like a ping pong game.

It's not like a track meet.

What is a better film,

"Citizen Kane" or "Gone With the Wind?"

Most people would say "Gone With the Wind."

What is a better film, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"

or "Singin' in the Rain"?

I have no idea, I love them both.

So a film competition to me is a joke.

To me, it's a dirty joke, because there is this need

that people have to promote something

to have winners and losers.

And to judge one film better than another is nothing

but a subjective conclusion.

But I don't want a bunch of schmucks

who call themselves judges sitting in a fucking room

saying, "Oh, this 'La Dolce Vita' is not as good as

"'Batman versus Superman.'"

Fuck them and the horse they road in on

and the ship that brought them over here

and the dog that walks behind them.

Fuck them all!

Except nine people.

Fuck them all except six road guides,

two pallbearers, and one to count cadence.

There you have it, mic drop.

You're literally dropping the mic.

This is all good, I've never, thank you.

No, that's my attitude.

I can't help it.

♪ I'm a real wild one ♪

I've been married to Sherry, I think it's now 26 years.

And all I can tell you is that every day,

she enriches my life by her very presence.

Her degree of compassion

and concern for her family,

her friends, strangers, total strangers,

is amazing to me.

My mother had that, too.

♪ Ooh yeah, I'm a wild one ♪

Was it Jesus who said it's better to give

than to receive?

I don't know, somebody

very astute said that, and I think it's true.

It is better to give than to receive.

By that I mean friendship and compassion and love.

And rich, hot, steaming, delicious, flavorful black coffee.

♪ Gonna meet all my friends ♪

♪ Gonna have myself a ball ♪

♪ Gonna tell my friends ♪

♪ Gonna tell them all that I'm a wild one ♪

♪ Ooh yeah I'm a wild one ♪

♪ Gonna break loose, gonna keep a movin' wild ♪

♪ Gonna keep a swingin', baby, I'm a real wild child ♪

♪ I'm a real wild one and I like wild fun ♪

♪ In a world gone crazy everything seems hazy ♪

♪ I'm a wild one ♪

♪ Ooh yeah, I'm a wild one ♪

♪ Gonna break loose, gonna keep a movin' wild ♪

♪ Gonna keep a swingin' baby, I'm a real wild child ♪