MIFF Session 8: FRIEDKIN UNCUT

Interview movies with film directors typically struggle to rise above the level of dvd extras. What you need is a raconteur but one whose filmography also compels. I can listen to John Landis talk about anything but don't care that much about any movie he's made. The best film about David Lynch wasn't about his film career but his life as a young artist and so avoided the self-caricature everything else made about him suffers from. But if it's William Friedkin who not only helped make Hollywood's 1970s centrally important in history but can talk about it with great style the documentarian's job is really that of not stuffing up.

In loosely thematic passages about particular films, working with writers and actors, and general thoughts on filmmaking, Friedkin takes us through a career of eye popping cinema with the ease of that rare party guest who has a lot of good stories that don't sound like lies. He's strangely modest the closer the talk gets to his own vision for particular projects, retreating more into the comfort of production stories, appreciation of other directors and actors. This is not exhaustive and the most hagiographic this film gets is the avoidance of things like the Sonny and Cher movie, The Guardian  or Jade. However, we're here for The Exorcist, French Connection and the repatriated Sorcerer and Cruising which get delivered to our door.

Supplementing Friedkin's own accounts are a host of peers from the ubiquitous Quentin Tarantino (always worth listening to), cast members of Friedkin's films (Willem Dafoe and Matthew McConaughey have some fine moments) to the surprisingly interesting Wes Anderson. This allows a break from the artist as character and clip heavy threads but dos also add momentum in the timeline.

Cineastes who were in their teens in the '90s will recall how exciting they found Tarantino's films. With good reason. QT stuffed his pieces with astutely chosen retro and cool in for a generation obsessed with both. It meant that a mass of Tarantino clones emerged in the following decade. Friedkin didn't have that kind of influence. He describes seeing the likes of Citizen Kane and being inspired by the notion that film could do such a thing and, rather than make Wellesian epics of his own, plunged into an on-the-job trained career exploring what he could make of the elements. This is why the French Connection and The Exorcist didn't resemble any film that had preceded them. If anything the crime movie and horror film both looked like the supercharged documentaries that might well have come from the documentarian that Friedkin started out being. This exhilarating portrait of a great filmmaker didn't make me want to go and remake the Exorcist, it made me want to watch every film I'd ever seen all at once.