“We were reflecting what we could perceive, which was paranoia everywhere and irrational fear. Certainly, my films of the 1970s reflected just that.” — William Friedkin

William Friedkin was “there” in my life before I put it together that movies were a thing made by humans. As a kid, they were just full-immersion stories coming from out of the land of the imagination. It wasn’t until later, as a college student, that I put things together, learned who William Friedkin was, learned the trajectory and timeline. Some magic is lost when you gain knowledge. This is one of the ironies of life I treasure, rather than reject.

I saw The Exorcist at a sleepover when I was a kid. In other words, way too young. My friends’ parents were far more lax than my own parents in what they allowed their kids to see. As a young Catholic child, the movie rocked me, terrified me so much I couldn’t sleep, and I can say, without too much exaggeration, I was never really the same again. Something shifted, something broke. Looking back on this first viewing, trying to remove the ballast of intervening years and knowledge-gaining, I remember how the camera angles and sudden cuts jolted me, scared me SO MUCH, even if nothing particularly terrifying was happening onscreen. I now know this is due to Friedkin’s filmmaking. I didn’t watch the film. I feared it.

I feel like it’s the best way to see The Exorcist, if possible. Come to it when you are a credulous child, and way too young for the material.

Friedkin’s films imprinted themselves on me more times after that. I saw The French Connection in high school as well as Cruising, when I was falling down my Al Pacino rabbit hole at age 13, 14. Similar to The Exorcist, I was not ready for Cruising. I had no protection and/or context to grapple with it. It was so grownup I knew I shouldn’t be watching it, but I couldn’t look away. I didn’t even know it was directed by the same guy who scared me so much as a grade-schooler with The Exorcist. I recently interviewed author Sean Abley about his new book Queer Horror: A Film Guide, and we discussed Cruising quite a bit.

The things you come to “too early” stick. These films set a kind of standard in my head, a bar by which I would judge other films, even though I was a sophomore in high school and much of what was happening to me, the relationships I formed with films, was in the subconscious.

Once I was in college, I started getting conscious about the films I watched, the figures I felt I needed to know about in order to understand the artform, this “thing” I had been immersed in before I even had a memory. Friedkin was a major part of my development as a movie-goer: he showed me things I wasn’t ready for, things I didn’t really want to see and yet felt I had to experience. He was always in a category all his own. His vision was wide and deep. His filmmaking is energetic and visceral: it’s from the guts.

The car chase scene in Bullitt holds the top spot for “car chase scenes”, a ranking it deserves. But Friedkin was responsible for not one, but two, of the car chase scenes by which I judge all other car chase scenes. The first, of course, is the famous one in The French Connection, where Gene Hackman, beneath the elevated train tracks, chases the train above him. The scene is insane. But the second car chase scene really sets the bar for me, and Friedkin tops himSELF with the car chase scene in To Live and Die in L.A..

The chase feels like it goes on forEVER (it also features a car chasing a train). The chase includes a car driving the wrong way on a crowded Los Angeles freeway. The stunt driving in this sequence is second to none.

The story of Sorcerer, and its failure, is now part of Hollywood mythology, laid out in detail in Peter Suskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The movie is insane and there are certain scenes where you literally don’t know how they did it. What you’re seeing onscreen is really happening, and it looks fucking dangerous.. Star Wars was a seismic event, for better or worse. Sorcerer was a casualty of something it had nothing to do with. I wrote about Sorcerer in 2008.

Not every filmmaker introduces you to the joy of cinema while simultaneously ruining your childhood.

And I thank him for both.

 
 
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