FASCINATING BEYOND BELIEF

William Friedkin was supposed be incredibly difficult, according to the staff of the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, where he was promoting KILLER JOE and receiving an honorary award in April 2012. And when Roel Haanen was finally called into the suite for the interview by the PR girl of the distribution company she whispered to him not to ask about THE EXORCIST. The 76 years old director turned out to be courteous and talkative. Twice the press assistant tried to end the interview and twice Friedkin insisted they talk some more. Was he enjoying the conversation or just trying to bug the press assistant?

I just saw KILLER JOE this morning and I must say… 

Great movie, isn’t it? It’s beyond belief! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It makes CITIZEN KANE look like a piece of shit! [Laughs]

I wouldn’t say that, but as a lifelong fan of your work I had never thought that you would make a film like this anymore, or like BUG. It’s as if you have been reborn artistically.  

Well, thank you. But it’s the writer [Tracy Letts]. I’m on the same page with him. We have the same world view. He just won the Pulitzer Prize, which is a big prize for writers in America, and a Tony Award for best play, but that’s for a play that I don’t feel as close to as these two other works that he wrote for me as movies. The work that he just won these prizes for I don’t relate to as much. But I relate to his world view in his earlier work. 

You know, I had the honor of working with Harold Pinter and I feel about this guy as I did about Pinter. I worked with Pinter for the same reason I worked with Letts on these two films: I’m on the same page in terms of their world view. There is so much truth in his characters and he spares them nothing.  

There’s a myth that the American family is a nuclear family where everybody loves each other and gets along, but the truth of the matter is more like KILLER JOE. The American family for the most part is dysfunctional. The parents and children don’t get along, they live in different worlds. More so than when I grew up. You know, I grew up as the son of immigrants. My parents were from the Ukraine. We were a very close-knit family. That was from the old country. You don’t have that much in America now. You have young people who are of a completely different mindset than their parents. And in this case [of KILLER JOE] you have a son that wants to kill his mother and the father who tries to raise the money to have the mother killed!

It’s almost something out of Jerry Springer.  

There is more truth to Jerry Springer unfortunately than any of us would like to admit. That’s pretty close to what it actually is. It’s no longer Norman Rockwell.

Almost everyone in KILLER JOE is morally corrupted. Joe Cooper isn’t even the worst of them.  

Well, Dottie is the most truthful to me. Her father is a lost cause, her brother is a lost cause. She has nowhere else to go and like Cinderella she dreams of Prince Charming. And she finds Prince Charming, only he happens to be a hired killer. Now, Joe is pretty straightforward, except his whole life is a lie. He’s a detective in the Dallas Police Department and he does contract murder.

You got great roles from Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider and Al Pacino in your career. I believe we can add Matthew McConaughey to that list. But this role is very different from how the public sees him.  

But it’s closer to who he is. He grew up in the area where this film is set. He grew up among these people. He knew them and understood them. I had to tell him very little. Actually, he came to me for the part. His performance reminds me of Robert Mitchum. He’s known for romantic comedies because he’s such a good looking guy, but he has this dark side too. I don’t know how far he’s willing to go with it.

I think he went pretty far in KILLER JOE, especially in the last twenty minutes. Much has written about that explosion of violence, and some critics think it’s gratuitous. But I think it’s necessary. Because the family let Joe in and they knew what would happen if they didn’t live up to their part of the bargain. There have to be consequences.  

That’s very perceptive. You are right. They don’t live up to it.

I think the last twenty minutes are especially hard to watch because you don’t expect the movie to become this nightmarish. At times KILLER JOE is pretty funny, in a dark way. It’s the first film of yours that is truly funny at times.  

That’s really because of the writer. As I said: he and I are on the same page. And we are both in our own way darkly funny. I don’t find a lot of things funny. I can’t watch American television. These stupid sitcoms, where people are laughing all the time because there’s a sign that says: Laugh! Laugh! You know, I look at this stuff and it’s stupid. And I don’t like a lot of the comedians we have today. I don’t think they’re funny. These guys are not funny. But I used to think The Three Stooges were funny, and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and Abbott and Costello. We don’t have that anymore. Television now is worse than heroine. It’s addictive and awful. [KILLER JOE] is in many ways a reaction to popular entertainment, which I find hateful. And the film is a kind of ‘Fuck you!’ to the pictures that are made in my country today. They may be great, but I think they’re shit! Okay, most of them anyway. Based on comic books and video games… It’s stuff for kids! When I grew up there were films for kids and films for adults. Now the adult films are comic books and video games! They may work very well, but it’s nothing that I’m interested in, that’s all. 

Is that also the reason you made BUG and KILLER JOE outside of the Hollywood system? 

The Hollywood mainstream would never make these films. And I would never make anything that they do now. I don’t even watch it. I can’t watch that stuff. TRANSFORMERS and THE WRATH OF… well, somebody. You know, STAR WARS one, two, three, four, five and six! That’s not for me. You know, I love mythology, I love genuine acts of heroism. I don’t find that in those pictures. To me, they’re stupid. Films weren’t stupid when I got into them. You had great American film makers like Joseph Mankiewicz, Richard Brooks and Elia Kazan. You had great foreign film makers like Antonioni, De Sica, Fellini and Kurosawa. What do we have now? I don’t know.

But surely there must be directors that are still making the kind of films that you like to see? 

I like the Coen brothers very much. I like Paul Thomas Anderson’s films. I like this guy, what’s his name? Roskam? The guy who made BULLHEAD. He’s Belgian, right? On the basis of that film I say he’s a powerful film maker. I’ll tell you the film maker I really respect today. I got to meet him and spend time with him in Vienna: Michael Haneke. A great film maker. The real deal. His stuff’s terrific.

You mentioned Pinter just now. In your early days you adapted two plays, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Now, later in your career, you’ve done two more and...  

That’s because they’re the best scripts around. I don’t seek out scripts from people who wrote a TRANSFORMER movie. These [playwrights] are good writers. Some of the best films were first done as stage plays. One of the greatest films I’ve ever seen in my life, ORDET, by Carl Theodor Dryer who was a great Danish director, that was a play. The great American film CASABLANCA was a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s and it ran for one week on Broadway. It was a failure. Somebody bought the rights to it and developed it as a screenplay. Nobody thinks of its origins as a play.

But I think THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE BOYS IN THE BAND betray much more of their origins as plays than BUG and KILLER JOE.  

That’s true. In fact, after I did the first two I actually asked myself if you could even make cinema of theatre. But after I read the screenplays of BUG and KILLER JOE I remembered that question and saw the answer. Yes, you could make cinema out of theatre. BUG and KILLER JOE are much more cinematic than the first two I did.

Also, KILLER JOE is much more opened up than BUG.  

Yes, Tracy Letts wrote new characters and new situations, new locations, new scenes. The screenplay is not written as a play at all. It’s origin is the play and the main characters are the same.

The last twenty minutes, the violence, was that in the play? 

Not exactly. The confrontation is in there, but it’s been completely rewritten.

That sequence got you an NC17 rating. Did you ever consider making any changes? 

Never! Because many theaters are owned or controlled by the religious right and they wouldn’t even play it at a less restricted rate. 

Can you still appeal it?  

We did appeal it and lost. The producers went to the appeal board, which is different from the ratings board, and we lost thirteen to nothing. Not even a chance. The ratings board called it aberrant!

That is strangely appropriate. There’s a book about your films called William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality.  

Oh, you mean the book by a guy called Clagett? Yeah, he hung around me for a while. I’ve never read the book. I didn’t spend that much time with him at all. His approach was very professorial. He approached it from the standpoint of a scholar. His book must be boring beyond belief.

It’s not actually. It’s pretty interesting.  

Still, I don’t read anything that’s written about me. I find it boring, to be honest with you. It’s hard to sum up someone’s life in a few thousand words or in a book. I couldn’t do it. I have a few heroes in life, but I don’t think I could sum up their lives, because everybody’s got good and evil within them. It’s very difficult to say this person is this and that person is that. Take for example the people we consider to be heroes in America, like John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, they were people with many flaws. Which we all have. It’s hard to sum up a person’s life. That’s why CITIZEN KANE is such a great film. It says exactly that.

In your films the heroes and villains aren’t always that different from each other. The characters in KILLER JOE are also in that grey area of morality.  

That’s human nature. It’s a constant struggle between our better angels and our demons who are trying to control us. That’s everybody. We’re all to a certain extent self destructive and then we‘re capable of great goodness and charity sometimes. This is human nature to me. That’s why I am drawn to material like Tracy Letts writes, because he acknowledges that.

You grew up poor. Is that why you understand the desperate choices these characters in KILLER JOE make? 

Yes, I grew up poor, but I didn’t know I grew up poor, because everybody else lived the same way. I lived in one room that is half the size of this room, together with my mother and father. There was a bed that came out of the wall. That was their bed. Mine was a little cot next to them. We had a kitchenette and one bathroom. But, you know, we were never hungry. My father worked.

But where does your fascination with the darkness in human nature come from, you think?

It happens to be interesting. You see, to me the two most interesting figures in the history of human kind are Jesus and Hitler. I find them fascinating to no end. I continually try to understand how millions of people have followed them. Jesus never wrote a word, has no published writings. There’s not even a painting or drawing of him, except maybe for the [Image of] Edessa which disappeared, which was supposedly a hand drawn picture of Jesus by someone who was sent by the Emir of Turkey to bring back something of Jesus. I mean, he walked around in simple robes and sandals in the desert, spoke on hillsides, never traveled much and millions of people follow him. And then there’s Hitler, who was a stupid little man. A homeless man who after World War I was begging in the streets of Vienna. And twelve, thirteen years later he’s taking the whole country down to hell. I find that fascinating beyond belief. I know a lot about both characters and try to read everything that’s been written about them, at least what’s been written historically. Like Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria who acknowledged that Jesus was a human being. In fact, there’s a small passage in Josephus, who was a Jewish historian in the first century in Jerusalem, in which he writes of Jesus that he was a man who walked among the people and he was beloved and he healed the sick. That’s all it says about him! Doesn’t say he was the son of God or resurrected. That’s all they knew about him in the first century. And now you have all these cathedrals and beautiful paintings after this… homeless man. I find it fascinating.  

But Hitler is considered by many to be all evil and Jesus to be all good. Do you think even they existed in that grey area of morality?

Yes! If you read the New Testament there are many times when Hitler… I mean Jesus was angry at his mother. At the wedding at Cana, where Jesus was a guest, his mother came to him and said: They don’t have enough wine to give to the guests. And Jesus becomes extremely angry with his mother: Woman, why do you ask this of me? He did what he didn’t want to do: he performed a miracle and turned the water into wine. But grudgingly, because he did not want to be thought of as a magician. So he yelled at his mother. Hitler on the other hand adored his mother. He did good things for her in his life. She was dying of cancer and there was a Jewish doctor, Bloch was his name, who took care of her. There was nothing he could do to cure her, but he made her comfortable. And Hitler saved his pennies and paid Dr. Bloch. And then his mother died. At the funeral Hitler was in tears and he hugged Dr. Bloch and thanked him for doing what he could. About ten years later Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and he called Dr. Bloch into the reich ministry and he said: You know, things are not gonna go well for your people here. So I’m offering you safe passage to wherever you wanna go. I will help you, so you can be well and live a good life. Dr. Bloch moved to New York and resumed his practice as a doctor. He lived until 1950. In his last year he published what I just told you in Look Magazine, the whole issue. It’s called Hitler, the Son. And it’s not anything we knew about Hitler. It’s about the son he was, who loved his mother. It’s very powerful stuff. Hitler, by the way, was raised in the Catholic Church. He was a Benedictine who sang in the choir. In Mein Kampf he says: people need religion. People need, as he called it, the supernatural in their lives. So there are many contradictions, as there are many contradictions about Jesus, who often rebuked his apostles and followers as being stupid: Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? He was constantly treating them like they were idiots. But then again, there’s redemption though his teachings. I am fascinated by both and I find parts of both in everyone. Anyone with deep hatred or vengeance in them could be another Hitler. And many people have shown the goodness of Jesus in how they treat people. So, Jesus and Hitler, to me, are the most fascinating people in history, and I don’t find their behavior strange at all, what I find strange are the followers. 

When you made SORCERER in 1977 you were at the height of your success. You had won an Oscar for THE FRENCH CONNECTION and made one of the most successful films of all time with THE EXORCIST. I believe SORCERER is every bit as great as those two films, but when it flopped, what did that do to you?

Nothing. Because I’d been very fortunate. I lived well. I lived in a nice house, I had a beautiful apartment in New York. Good friends. It did nothing to me personally.

What about professionally then? 

Oh, professionally? I lost a lot of stature. No question about it. If you pay attention to that sort of thing. But I don’t really pay attention to that. I’ve only made about fifteen or sixteen films in over fifty years. I’m not sure exactly how many. Not all of them are good and not all of them registered with the zeitgeist. That’s not the audience’s fault. I failed to reach the audience many times. But it wasn’t because I didn’t try. I always try.

But in the case of SORCERER, that film is now thought of as one of your best pictures. You must have felt then that you had made an extraordinary film, that it worked. How did you make sense of the fact that it didn’t do well at the box office?  

Look, it’s a privilege to express yourself creatively, in film, in writing, sculpting, painting, anything.  It’s a privilege. You wanna know what’s tragic in the arts? That Vincent van Gogh never sold a painting in his life. And now you can buy one for fifty million dollars. That Vermeer, who made the greatest painting I’ve ever seen, View of Delft, died broke. There was a custom in Delft that when a man died they would give his clothes to the poor. Vermeer’s clothes were in such poor condition they had to burn them. His wife was selling his canvasses on the street for next to nothing. There are only 37 known Vermeers. No one knows how many he painted. Many were probably sold or thrown away. He died broke and he was the greatest artist who ever lived, in my mind at least. Rembrandt wound up bankrupt. Beethoven ended up writing to his publisher asking when he would be paid for this and that. They all died broke. That SORCERER didn’t do as well isn’t even a blip on the screen of artistic tragedy. There is no tragedy in my art. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had audiences who appreciated my work. Sometimes they didn’t, but I had the opportunity to create something and express myself. And that’s a fantastic gift.

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.