![]() Philippe to break down, deconstruct and remember “The Exorcist,” revealing his “subliminal” tricks with sound and one-to-five frame glimpses of ghostly images inserted, the people he hired or wanted to hire, from the aforementioned composers to actor Stacy Keach (who would’ve been GREAT as the younger priest) and the “influences” he recognizes, from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to Dreyer’s “Ordet.”īut Renais (“Last Year in Marienbad,” “Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and Welles (“Citizen Kane”) were on his mind, too. A notoriously “volatile” figure on film sets, he’s aged into a movie making/film history/art history raconteur of the First Order, a Peter Bogdanovich, Oliver Stone or Orson Welles lite.įriedkin sits down with filmmaker Alexandre O. He tells of visiting a zen garden in Kyoto when premiering the film in Japan, wondering “What the hell’s THIS about?” and then weeping at the rocks in a sea of “raked sand.”Īnd he declares that “It looks like, in retrospect, that I knew what I was doing.” He recalls using an on set gun shot to get the right shocked/startled reactions from his actors. ![]() Friedkin talks about “serendipity,” and “instinctive” choices, quotes the great Fritz Lang about how relying on those “accidents” and coincidences and gut feelings is “a kind of sleepwalking security” for filmmakers like Lang (whom he interviewed for a doc in the ’70s) and himself. He rejects the notion that he was “foreshadowing ANYthing” in the iconic demonic possession thriller. ![]() “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield would do. “I wanted a piece of music” he says, that felt “like a cold hand on the back of the neck.” William Friedkin weaves anecdotes about “Exorcist” stars Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller and folds in stories about the great composers Bernard Hermann and Lalo Schifrin, both of whom he rejected when it came to scoring the film. If there’s one thing any film fan should take away from “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist,'” it’s exactly the same thing you should take away from “Friedkin Uncut,” the earlier doc about the quintessential hotshot Hollywood director of the ’70s.
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