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While Oscar-winning director William Friedkin may be best known for Hollywood classics like The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), his roots are firmly entrenched in independent film. (Don't let the fact that he's been married to former Paramount chief Sherry Lansing for 15 years fool you.) He made his directorial debut with the hard-hitting 1962 documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (which he made while working in the mail room at Chicago's WGN-TV), and his early work includes two powerful but intimate screen translations of stage plays, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1968) and Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970).
Friedkin's latest, Bug, vividly brings Tracy Letts's theatrical portrait of paranoia and creepy-crawlies to cinematic life. Ashley Judd stars as a cocktail waitress who gets involved with a charming but enigmatic stranger (Michael Shannon, who originated the role on stage) who may or may not have been subjected to Army experiments that have left something living in his bloodstream. Intense and unsettling, Bug is a potent reminder of Friedkin's unparalleled skill at putting audiences inside his protagonists' heads, even when the story goes to disturbing places.
In a recent phone conversation, Friedkin spoke with FilmIndependent.org about turning plays into movies, why he no longer wants to make big-budget blockbusters, and the imminent re-release of one of his most controversial films, Cruising (1980), a thriller set against the backdrop of New York City's gay leather community.
Bug seems reminiscent of your early films like The Birthday Party and The Boys in the Band, where you were adapting plays for the screen. Did you have deja vu for that period in your career?
Not really. I mean, I did those two films and then I did 12 Angry Men (1997) for television, simply because I loved the scripts. I thought they were great parts for actors, and all three were either very profound or very funny or very moving in other ways. I saw them much more in terms of scripts for the cinema. A film can come from anywhere; it can be a novel, it can be an overheard piece of conversation, or even an anecdote. Really, To Live and Die in L.A. came about because some of these anecdotes I heard this ex-Secret Service man tell, and the surrealism of a Secret Service man's life. You know, one day he's guarding the President of the United States, and the next day he's chasing a guy in a very bad neighborhood for a forged credit card.
In terms of Bug, I find myself basically on the same page as the writer, in terms of a worldview. I think it's a really brilliant script, and it's funny and moving and really edgy and disturbing, with no real answer, just a lot of questions that it raises. With wonderful roles for actors.
When you're putting together funding for a film like this, is there ever pressure to "open up" the material and distance it from its origins on the stage?
I wouldn't do that; that would never come up. I had talked to a few people preliminarily about doing this; the independent companies, not a major studio. You wouldn't really want to do this film for a major studio, because they're in a different business. They're in the business of making 50, 60 million dollar films and up, way up, and then spending almost that much to market them. So I had had some conversations with some of the smaller companies, and Lionsgate was the only one that really said go ahead and make it. And we made it for four million dollars, all in; you know, actually less than that, there's a completion bond you had to pay for. That's the only kind of film that I want to do. Nothing else makes sense to me now. I don't want to do any of the sequels to these big-budget films, and I basically don't even see what comes out of the studios today, to be honest with you. There's a different zeitgeist, and I'm not saying it's better or worse, it just is different, and I don't relate to it as much as I did to films either from an earlier generation or my own.
Your big breakout came in the post-Easy Rider era, where studios were supposedly turning the keys over to the younger generation after suffering from big bombs like Cleopatra. Do you see the pendulum going back, where all these sequels and all these comic-book movies are going to lead to another generation of lean-and-mean Hollywood films?
I don't know. I mean, when that happens, it's because of what the audience wants to see, and it's a new audience today. I don't think that Hollywood creates these markets; I think they're very shrewd at following them, at absorbing these trends and feeding them. But I lived through the '70s, as you know, and there's been a lot written about that generation that really isn't true. They didn't turn the keys over to us. All of my contemporaries, we had a tough time making those pictures. Francis Coppola was fired several times off The Godfather and then reinstated. I was fired off The French Connection and reinstated. And by "fired," I mean threatened. All of us were threatened by the studios; they all wanted to control what we did, and we all had to fight a kind of rear-guard action against them, which you can do when you're younger and more energetic. But none of those studios wanted to make The French Connection. Every studio turned it down twice. And Fox, which ultimately did make it, they originally turned it down. So it wasn't like an open-door policy.
The truth of the matter is, though, that most film -- and, I would say, theater -- directors do start young. You start young because it requires an enormous amount of energy to direct a movie. Perhaps only a bit less so to do a play, because you don't have that much time to work on a play. But youth is something that has come along with every generation, every decade. So yeah, they looked for guys who were young, as they do now. It was always that way. But the idea that they turned the asylum over to the lunatics is just not so. I remember how awful Francis used to feel; Bob Evans was head of Paramount, and he'd look at the dailies and call Francis and say, "It's too dark, we can't see anything, what the hell are you doing there?" I had a lot of problems with all the films I did at that time. I mean, The Exorcist, they were so nervous at Warners in those days; they never imagined it would be the success it was.
So you pretty much want to continue outside of the studio system at this point, then?
Well no, I just did this film for Lionsgate, and they're a studio. I mean, they won the Academy Award two years ago; they got the Best Picture over all of these -- buildings, you know? And that's all they are now, is buildings. You don't need the studios to make films anymore. You don't even need them to distribute film; that's what they're still doing, but they're doing more in terms of distributing than they are of producing. It's seldom that anyone at a studio really produces a film now. They greenlight them, and then that's it. But back in the era just before the one I came up in, you had studio heads making the pictures, like Darryl Zanuck and Louis Mayer. They made those films.
You have to work with a studio, but now there are many more alternatives to make the kind of films I want to make. There's Lionsgate, there's Sony Classics, there's Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, and many more. In the early days of independent film in this country, like John Cassavetes in the 1950s and '60s, those guys put up their own money. They could lose their house, you know? If the film lost money, you had to find someplace else to live! John Cassavetes had to take acting jobs that he didn't like or want to do to finance his movies.
And so did Orson Welles, for that matter.
Welles did all through his career with the exception of the first couple or first three that were made by RKO, and then they kicked him off the lot after having made what is arguably the greatest American film.
With Bug, did you have the opportunity to have rehearsal time with the cast?
The way I like to work is, once I cast the film, I'll meet with the actors, we'll talk about their characters, separately and together. I'll get their ideas; I'll tell them how I intend to shoot the picture, and then just before each scene, we'll talk about the staging. I'll tell them where I'd like them to be and where they should come to and what the shot's going to be. And then I start shooting. And if I want to correct something, I'll do it in a subsequent take. But most of the time, I don't do more than one or two takes. Because the actors are prepared. Ashley reminded me today that there was one occasion where we did five takes. And she just kept wanting to do more because she felt she was getting better. But normally, I try to create an atmosphere where the actors are comfortable, but not where they feel that they can do takes all day. Because an actor will want to do that, for the most part.
When you did The Boys in the Band, you were working with the original stage cast, and with this film, you've got just one actor who had performed in the play but the rest of the cast was new to the material. Is it different directing someone who is more used to the character than someone who's new to the work?
It is absolutely in no way an advantage to have done it on the stage. You have to break it down, you have to rethink it from the ground up, which we did with Boys in the Band. First of all, there's the business of -- especially with a work that's meant to be a comedy, as much of Boys in the Band was -- they're playing to the balcony, to the second balcony, and that doesn't work at all on film. And it's not just a matter of say the words softer; you have to rethink the character so you are recreating this character in front of a lens. Each take, each time, each scene. The same was true of Michael Shannon in this. I cast the original cast of Boys in the Band because I thought that physically, they were all wonderful. Yes, they had some familiarity with it, but believe me, every actor in every picture comes in with a familiarity with the character they're playing. I've done three plays; all of the other films I have done are not plays, but the actors all come in knowing their character. They've been cast because I felt they could reach these characters. But then, with someone who's played it onstage, there comes an enormous period where you have to get them to break it down and reevaluate the character. Because now there's no fourth wall anymore. There is no real audience out there. They're forced to literally play the scenes to one another, and to move around in ways that they never moved around on stage. So it's not an advantage unless you see something, and in terms of Michael Shannon, I was much more impressed with his talent and his depths than with what I had seen him do on the stage.
And I think with that character, it helps the audience to have a non-familiar face. It makes everything more unpredictable, whereas with an actor we know we think we can figure out what's going to happen.
Exactly, and that was true of Boys in the Band. Nobody really knew these guys. And it was accepted at the time almost as a documentary. You were in that room, with them. And I felt exactly like what you say about Shannon. This guy is a new face, but he's a tremendous actor who I could see was able to plumb the depths of a very difficult character.
So you're about to go to Cannes to screen Cruising.
Yeah, I made all-new prints of it, and it's going to screen on May 23, and then open in theaters in September and then the DVD comes out a couple of months later.
I'm curious, since the 25th anniversary was a couple of years ago, what's the hook for the reissue?
We made the film for United Artists, and then Warner Bros. bought the UA library, hundreds of titles. And they sent out a list of these new titles to video retailers, fan magazines and other publications, a select group of critics, and said, "Which of these films that has never been on DVD would you like to see on DVD?" And Cruising was at the top of that list. And over the years, at my website, I've gotten literally thousands of inquiries. "Is it ever coming out on DVD?" It's a film that has taken on a certain cachet over the years, largely because of a new generation that heard about it but has never seen it, or saw a bad video copy of it.
When you and I recently talked about it at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, I was sad to hear that the legendary "director's cut" doesn't exist.
We can't find it! There was 40 minutes that I believe was destroyed. They looked in every possible vault. Then we heard that it was UA's practice to get rid of everything. Not just this film, but everything they had. I know that Warners acquired Yentl, the Streisand movie, and UA threw out all the outtakes and added scenes and stuff. That was their practice. I can tell you with Cruising that the added scenes would not have contributed to the story in any way. They were simply extremely graphic depictions of the sexual activity.
So this was the stuff you had to cut to get an R rating?
Oh, yeah. I had to cut 40 minutes out of the film to get an R rating. And with some of that, you would have said, "Well why? Why this?" But it freaked out the ratings board at that time.
It probably still would.
No doubt! It's basically run by prudes and self-appointed arbiters of the public morals. That's basically what they do. There was a time when it was much more liberal. But I can say this version is stronger. A lot of the stuff had to be blurred out in the original theatrical release for the ratings board. There are a lot of scenes in the club they made me just fog out, like it was a smoke-filled room. But now it's extremely graphic and focused.
If the film did that well in the survey, it's probably fair to say that time has been kind to Cruising. Do you think that people can look at it in a new context now rather than think about how controversial it was while you were making it?
It is a different time. When Cruising came out, it was sort of the first stages of gay liberation. And you have to understand that 27 years ago, gay groups, like any other groups, had different attitudes and ideas and opinions. It wasn't a unified response. There were those people who thought that the picture was strong and depicted a part of gay life accurately, and there were others who felt that its message was that if you are gay, you are prone to violence or getting killed or you were going to kill somebody. And that's just totally ridiculous. But I understood the protest, because I guess a lot of the leadership at that time felt that that was not the best foot forward for a gay lifestyle.
And then it was released about ten years after that in major cities, and the critical attitude had begun to change. And then there appeared all these articles, both in America and overseas, reevaluating Cruising, often the same publications that reviewed it before, but with a new set of critics, who had a different attitude and realized that the background of that lifestyle was simply that -- a background for a murder mystery. And that it was never intended to be a comment on gay life. The film was just set there. Now that freaked a lot of people. It didn't freak any of the people who went to those clubs; they were strong supporters of the movie, and those are the people who are in the film. Because I didn't use extras; I couldn't possibly. They allowed me to go into the clubs. I met all the guys, I went to the clubs, I started to frequent them. I asked them if they minded being filmed, and I'd say 95% of the guys had no problem with it. And there were days when we were shooting the film when there were thousands of gay rights advocates lined up and throwing rocks and bricks and cans at the set, and the guys from the clubs were throwing them back! It was unbelievable, what went on then.
On the DVD, this fellow Laurent Bouzereau, who's a really good guy who makes these behind-the-scenes films, he did an hour-long documentary on the making of Cruising, and it was extraordinary for me to see. I had forgotten how really variegated the reactions to the film had been.
Given that you've had a lot of acclaim as an opera director in recent years, have you given any thought to directing a musical?
I'd love to. I've been talking to Placido Domingo about doing South Pacific with a Broadway actress. Because it was originally written for a bass, and Placido's a tenor, but he can get low enough. And sometimes that role has been sung by tenors.
And one last question -- you're a longtime director and producer, and I'm sure you've seen it all in the film industry. But were there any shocking revelations you discovered about the business as the spouse of a studio head?
What I was not conscious of before being married to Sherry was the extraordinary babysitting aspect of that job. We'd be on vacation somewhere out of this country, and there would be a constant stream of phone calls -- producers, actors, or directors complaining about this and that, and you can't let this happen, and I need to reshoot for three days or the movie's in the toilet, and it never stopped. Never stopped! And now that she's out of it, I've never seen anyone so relieved, so pleased to be doing something else.
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