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William Friedkin: Director William Friedkin
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One of the most powerful film directors of the 1970's, Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin was representative of Hollywood's first wave of hip, hot, young super-directors. Famed for his boisterous talent and booming ego, Friedkin earned a reputation for drawing out brilliant performances from his actors - by whatever means necessary. While a few of the director's notoriously manipulative tactics seemed questionable, no one could argue their effectiveness. Just five years after making his feature film debut, Friedkin snagged the Best Director Oscar for "The French Connection" (1971). The director's landmark achievement... would be his 1973 filmic adaptation of William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist." A landmark in special effects, make-up and storytelling, "The Exorcist" grossed - and grossed-out - millions.
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William Friedkin (born August 29 1939 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American movie and television director, producer, and screenwriter best known for directing The Exorcist and The French Connection in the early 1970s. After seeing the movie Citizen Kane as a boy, he became fascinated with movies and immediately began working for WGN-TV after high school. He eventually began directing live television shows and documentaries including The People vs. Paul Crump which won several awards and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence. In 1965 Friedkin moved to Hollywood and two years
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One of New Hollywood's most successful wunderkinder in the early '70s, William Friedkin suffered a precipitous fall from the box-office firmament in the late '70s, punctuated by the controversial cop film Cruising (1980). Nevertheless, Friedkin managed to keep his career alive, while the lasting impact of seminal horror film The Exorcist (1973) was confirmed by its enormously successful reissue in 2000. Raised in a Chicago slum, the young Friedkin fell in with a bad crowd, but his mother set him straight and Friedkin finished high school. Unable to afford college, Friedkin got a job in the mailroom at Chicago's WGN TV station. A budding cinephile who especially loved Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1952), Friedkin's ambition to become a director was stoked by his first viewing of Citizen Kane (1941) while working at WGN. By his early twenties, Friedkin was directing live television and making documentaries.
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There's no rational way of negotiating with Bug, and you get the sense that director William Friedkin likes it that way. The perfect thriller for the era of truthiness, it tight-focuses on Agnes (Ashley Judd), a spiritually dissolute waitress, and Peter (Michael Shannon), a mild if odd war vet. The two hook up in a motel room that suggests Dante by way of Godot. Peter's interest in conspiracy theories explodes into a mounting obsession with defeating a "bug" contracted in a Middle East conflict. Agnes--haunted by a tragedy that, like everything else here, may or may not be real--is glad for the oblivion his madness offers: microscopes, aluminum-foiled walls, and sliced flesh play prominently in their mounting delusions. Written by Tracy Letts, on whose off-Broadway hit it's based, Bug is astringently minimalist in technique, occasionally unbearably gruesome, and eventually so over-the-top that you don't know whether to laugh or despair over the human condition, although both are apt.
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Director William Friedkin does something in his films that very, very few other filmmakers have the acumen and creativity to achieve - he makes you think. Friedkin tries very hard not to interject his own judgements into the plots of his films. Rather, he structures his work so that the audience can't help but to be drawn in by the drama unfolding before their eyes. Then, they're allowed to intelligently sort out the facts for themselves, and make their own judgement call. In Friedkin's 1985 thriller, To Live and Die in L.A., is Detective Chance (William L. Petersen) a dedicated cop doing whatever it takes to get the job done, or simply a dangerous rogue? In this year's Rules of Engagement, was Colonel Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) justified in slaughtering 83 Yemeni civilians?
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William Friedkin has directed 17 much-talked-about feature films, including The Exorcist, Rules of Engagement, Jade, To Live and Die in L.A. and The French Connection. The American Film Institute looks back at his career in this documentary, which includes interviews with actors and colleagues. David Caruso, Michael Biehn, Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri all reminisce about working with the Academy Award-winning director.
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Director William Friedkin