 and The Exorcist (1973), two of the most successful films of that decade. A compelling storyteller and a master technician, Friedkin once declared that his ambition when making a film was to provide 'exhilaration', and he would make famous use of the device of the car chase in The French Connection. He was not, however, without intellectual pretensions (late in life he claimed to 'read continuously' Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu), and sought to explore 'a moral zone where good and evil have become almost indistinguishable', adding: 'There is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal. My characters are usually in extremely pressured situations and have few alternatives. Usually their problems are self-created, or created by fate. The mystery of fate fascinates me a great deal. The way I've explored that is through the crime genre because it involves tense and pressured situations.' Until 1970 Friedkin was viewed simply as a precocious talent, but that changed with The French Connection, which is based on the real-life exploits of two New York detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso , and their role in what was then the biggest heroin bust in American history. In the early 1960s the two policemen had fortuitously discovered, while off-duty in a nightclub, that a huge shipment of the drug was being imported into the United States. With a budget of only $1.5 million, the story was set in the present (1971) to avoid spending money on cars, clothes, road signs and hairstyles. Roy Scheider (later star of the first two Jaws films) was hired to play Grosso, while Gene Hackman secured the role of Egan. Friedkin was famously difficult to work for, and his first meeting with Hackman was not propitious: 'He [Hackman] seemed humourless. I almost fell asleep at the lunch. I told Phil [D'Antoni, the producer] there was no way t){kind=link}
A compelling storyteller, he researched The French Connection by shadowing two New York detectives, breaking into apartments on drug busts
William Friedkin, who has died aged 87, enjoyed a brief apotheosis in his Hollywood career as the director of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), two of the most successful films of that decade.
A compelling storyteller and a master technician, Friedkin once declared that his ambition when making a film was to provide “exhilaration”, and he would make famous use of the device of the car chase in The French Connection.
He was not, however, without intellectual pretensions (late in life he claimed to “read continuously” Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu), and sought to explore “a moral zone where good and evil have become almost indistinguishable”, adding: “There is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal. My characters are usually in extremely pressured situations and have few alternatives. Usually their problems are self-created, or created by fate. The mystery of fate fascinates me a great deal. The way I’ve explored that is through the crime genre because it involves tense and pressured situations.”
Until 1970 Friedkin was viewed simply as a precocious talent, but that changed with The French Connection, which is based on the real-life exploits of two New York detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, and their role in what was then the biggest heroin bust in American history. In the early 1960s the two policemen had fortuitously discovered, while off-duty in a nightclub, that a huge shipment of the drug was being imported into the United States.