“About fifty miles an hour,” he said.
“Great—that means a car going full speed could theoretically catch up to it.”
He nodded. “I suppose so.”
Phil jumped in. “Is it possible we could use one of the two lines—either Myrtle Avenue or Coney Island?”
The TA guy smiled. “Your idea is far-fetched. No one’s ever jacked a train, and we don’t want to give people ideas. What you’re asking would be difficult, damn difficult.”
I started to think how I might “steal” the sequence. Phil and Kenny told the TA guy it was the most important scene in our film, and we might have to go to Chicago to shoot the whole picture, which would take a lot of New Yorkers off the clock. That was bullshit, of course—we could never move the production out of New York—but we were trying to appeal to the guy any way we could.
He shook his head. “Awfully difficult.”
It seemed hopeless. We thanked him and asked if he’d let us shoot the subway cat and mouse between Popeye and Charnier. “That could be arranged,” he said. We didn’t want to push our luck further, so we got up to leave. As we got to the door, he said, “Just a minute.”
We turned back. “I said it would be difficult, not impossible.”
“What would it take?” Kenny asked.
Without hesitation the Transit Authority guy said, “If I let you shoot what you just described, I’d be in a world of trouble.”
“Right,” said Phil.
A long pause. Remember, Phil is a Sicilian from the Bronx. “What would it take?”
“Forty K and a one-way ticket to Jamaica.”
“Why one way?” Kenny Utt asked.
“’Cause when your film comes out, I’ll be fired.”
And that’s what it took. We had a total budget of $1.5 million, that was tight, but Dick Zanuck understood. He approved the extra forty grand and Kenny put it in a separate account so it could be paid under the table. When the film opened, the honcho was fired, and I hope he lived happily ever after in Jamaica.
Even though we got a green light, the Transit Authority placed a number of restrictions on how and when we could film. There was no way we’d be allowed to stage a train crash. Owen and I came up with a simple solution: we could park the front car of our train directly behind the rear of another, and pull away quickly, filming in backward motion, eight frames per second instead of twenty-four. This gave the illusion of a subjective view of hurtling into a stationary train. What makes it believable is the sound on impact which we added later; also, the next immediate shot was a handheld angle showing the passengers falling and thrashing around as Nicoli is thrown to the floor of the train and loses his gun.
We were allowed to use a section of the Stillwell Avenue line from Bay Fiftieth to Sixty-Second Street in Brooklyn. For most of the action we used El car number 6609, which is now in the Transit Authority Museum on permanent display. We could only film from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon to avoid rush hours. The chase was filmed over nonconsecutive days from December 1970 to January 1971. Daylight in New York in the winter was gone by 4:00 p.m. Though the entire New York sequence was filmed in thirty-five days, it would have been shorter if we had a more flexible schedule with the train, but we were lucky to get permission to do it at all. Bill Hickman, the stunt driver, drove for Hackman, whenever you couldn’t see his face. All of Hackman’s reactions were shot separately with a camera mounted on the hood of the Pontiac, or occasionally we would tow the car from a camera truck with two cameras on different lenses pointing at Gene. These shots were made within a very short distance, usually less than a city block. I would shout instructions to Gene over a two-way radio, which rested on the passenger seat next to him:
“You’re pissed off . . . you’re looking up at the tracks. . . . You’re going to hit something. . . . Turn the wheel! . . . Turn it! . . . Look left . . . a car is going to hit you!”
Gene’s reactions were terrific; you actually feared not only for his safety but that he might kill a pedestrian. All the close shots of his face, his hands on the wheel, or his feet on the gas pedal and brakes were made separately, with Gene driving. I planned five specific stunts that reflected the characteristics of the neighborhood. We didn’t put stunt people in the street; all the passersby were real, and the other traffic as well, including cars that Gene tries to flag down before he commandeers the Pontiac. The only times we used stunt drivers were for the near-misses that accidentally became collisions.
These were the six “events” I had planned:
1. Popeye confiscates a car while it’s in motion. (The Pontiac was prerigged by the stunt and special effects crew.)
2. Popeye’s car is going full speed under the tracks. He looks up to check the progress of the train. A car shoots out of the intersection as he goes through a red light. Popeye’s car spins away, and cuts across a gas station to get back below the tracks.
3. As Popeye tries to pass a truck, we see a sign on the truck’s rear bumper: “Drive Carefully.” The truck makes an unexpected sharp left without signaling, just as Popeye tries to pass him on the left, causing a collision and spin-off.
4. As Popeye approaches an intersection while looking up at the tracks, a large moving van crosses in front of him, obscuring his view of a metal fence directly ahead. As the van passes, Popeye hits the fence straight on.
5. Popeye runs a red light. He sees a woman pushing a baby carriage step off a curb and into his path. He’s forced to swerve and crash into a pile of garbage cans stacked on a safety island.
6. He turns the wrong way onto a one-way street to get back under the tracks. Over his shoulder we see the train running parallel to him, less than half a block away as he crosses oncoming traffic.
Bill Hickman was driving Popeye’s car. We rehearsed several times at slow speeds, but the stunt driver in the other car mistimed his approach and, instead of screeching to a halt just before collision, rammed Popeye broadside. No one was hurt, but the car was bent like an accordion. Sass Bedig, our sole special effects man, went to work and, with his toolkit, put the car back in shape. I kept the crash in the film, as though Popeye’s car was only mildly damaged.
To achieve the effect of Popeye’s car narrowly missing the woman with the baby carriage I had a camera car mounted with three cameras on different lenses drive slowly toward a stuntwoman. We changed the camera speed to fast motion. As she stepped off the curb, the car swerved away from her before coming close. The focal length of the lenses made her appear closer. Separately, I had a stationary camera do a snap zoom into the woman’s face as she arrived at a designated mark on the street, and screamed on cue. These shots were intercut with close-ups of Hackman reacting behind the wheel, first with shock and fear, then anger.
There were other unplanned accidents involving stunt drivers, but in each case Sass Bedig was able to restore the Pontiac to driving condition.
Filming on the train went smoother. I used an actual conductor to play the conductor who gets shot, and the motorman, named Coke, was the actual motorman on the train. After several takes, he was able to convincingly fake a heart attack.
If you had been a visitor on the set, you wouldn’t have expected to see a legendary chase. Shooting any sequence, indeed an entire film, is like knitting—one stitch at a time. To an outsider, it can seem tedious. The director, like the knitter, has to visualize the entire film before shooting it.
But even after we shot everything planned, I didn’t feel we had a great sequence. The kinetic energy of the train footage was not equaled by the car stuff. Sometimes at the end of a shooting day I’d sit with Bill Hickman over drinks at a nearby bar. One afternoon he asked me how I felt about the stunt footage. I didn’t feel good about it, and I told him so. He was a skillful stunt driver, but his ideas were more sizzle than steak. The conversation became heated, and I said, “Bill, I’ve heard how great you are behind the wheel, but so far, you haven’t shown me a damn thing.” We were both wired from the d
rinks and what had been a difficult shoot. “You want me to show you something?” Hickman said, coming close to my face. “Put the car on Stillwell tomorrow morning, then I want you to get in it with me if you’ve got the balls!”
I had no idea what he had in mind. I couldn’t change the next day’s schedule, but I went to Phil and Kenny and told them I wanted to take the Pontiac back to Stillwell Avenue as soon as possible, which turned out to be several days later. I said I thought Hickman was going to do something crazy in response to my gauntlet. We called no actors or extras that morning. We mounted a camera in the passenger seat, a camera over Hickman’s shoulder, and one braced to the front bumper of the Pontiac on a wide-angle lens, which would appear to “eat up” the street. We got a police gumball (siren) and placed it on the roof of the car, unseen by the cameras. When Owen and Ricky saw what was about to happen, they begged off operating the over-shoulder camera; they each had families, and knew what we were about to do was dangerous. Two of the cameras were braced and would function automatically, without operators. I would operate the over-shoulder camera, despite objections by Kenny and Phil. The stunt crew padded me with a mattress and pillows. Randy Jurgensen, Sonny Grosso’s partner in the Twenty-Eighth Precinct, who has worked on several films with me, was on the floor of the car to make sure I was okay, and show his badge if unsuspecting policemen tried to stop us. Owen set the lens stops, Ricky turned on the remote cameras, and we took off: twenty-six blocks at ninety miles an hour, through busy intersections, through red lights, with no traffic control, no permits, no safeguards of any kind, only Hickman’s chutzpah, his skills behind the wheel, and “the grace of God.”
I have not, and would not again, risk the lives of others as we did, but the best moments of the chase came from this one long run with three cameras; pedestrians and cars dashed out of the way, warned only by the oncoming siren. No one was hurt, thank God. I was exhausted and terrified. After we drove slowly back to base camp, I thanked Hickman, hugged him, and bought drinks that night. The next day I saw the rushes, and I knew the sequence was going to kill . . .
The chase sequence was important not only as a set piece but as a metaphor for Doyle’s obsession. I shot several scenes that attempted to underline his character, Charnier’s, and Nicoli’s. In the editing room I discovered that a lot of what I shot was, in fact, scaffolding. The film was a picture about obsession. The characters did not need “underlining.” The action defined the characters.
The scene in which the uncut heroin is tested for quality at the home of the “banker” Weinstock (Harold Gary), was shot at a luxurious suite in the Pierre Hotel. The young actor who plays the “chemist” Howard (Pat McDermott) was another discovery of Bob Weiner’s, and all the dialogue about the high quality of the raw heroin was improvised by him. I filmed the test in extreme close-up, using a small amount of actual heroin Sonny was able to liberate from the police property clerk’s office. “Howard” attaches a moistened needle to an ordinary household thermometer. He dips the needle into the heroin and inserts the thermometer into a small beaker of mineral oil over a Bunsen burner. He lights a flame at the base of the burner; the temperature of the oil will rise rapidly to over 250˚F if the heroin is pure. “Howard” comments with increasing appreciation as the temperature rises, “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval . . . U.S. Government certified . . . lunar trajectory . . . junk of the month club sirloin steak . . . Grade A poison . . .” At 250˚F he removes his glasses and proclaims, “Absolute dynamite . . . eighty-nine percent pure . . .”
The sixty kilos at $8,000 a kilo would be diluted before hitting the street, making the street value of the heroin around $32 million. In another field test shown later in the film, “Howard” cuts into one of the bags of heroin, inserts a small amount into a Petri dish, and adds a drop of oily substance known as a marquis reagent. If the powder turns purple, the heroin is pure. Again we used real heroin, so the color purple slowly appears.
Another key sequence for which we also had no permission was the traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, wherein Doyle, Russo, and Mulderig are tailing Patsy Fuca’s car into Manhattan and lose him on the bridge. Doyle stops his car, gets out, and starts running after Fuca. We would never have gotten permission to film a traffic jam on the bridge, but I had Egan, Grosso, and other off-duty detectives running interference for me. One morning I took Sonny to an overlook where we could see down to the Brooklyn Bridge. Traffic was flowing evenly.
I said, “Sonny, you see that bridge?”
“Yeah?” He nodded.
“In about a half hour,” I said, “I’m going to be ready to shoot a traffic jam down there. Remember the time when you and Eddie lost Frog One on a tail?”
Sonny remembered, and sent twelve detectives down to the bridge to park their cars. Hundreds of cars built up behind them, horns honking, tempers flaring, a real traffic jam, and I sent the actors into it to play the scene. Traffic had backed up so far that Police Headquarters sent a helicopter over to see what was happening. Eddie and Sonny flashed their badges at the chopper officers. They told them we were shooting a movie, and by then we had the scene in one take.
Another time, when we were shooting Doyle’s surveillance of Charnier on the Grand Central shuttle, I arrived early that morning and saw that Paul Ganapoler, Kenny Utt’s assistant production manager, had booked only twenty extras for the whole scene. The subway looked empty. I told Lou DiGiaimo, our extras casting director, to go up to Forty-Second Street and bring down as many people off the street as he could, telling them they’d be in a movie. Lou and his assistant managed to corral about two hundred people, which gave the scene its credibility—a cat-and-mouse game played against the background of a large, unsuspecting subway crowd. I don’t remember if we ever paid these people or not; certainly our budget didn’t allow for it, but you’d be surprised how many people will put aside what they’re doing to be in a movie. I briefed the crowd, telling them not to pay attention to what the actors were doing. Ricky picked up the handheld Arriflex, Owen gave him a lens stop, and we were shooting in natural fluorescent light. Often the actors didn’t know exactly where the cameras would be.
Orson Welles said that making a movie was like playing with the biggest electric train set a kid ever had. That was literally true on The French Connection. Some of the things I did would never have been approved by a studio. I put people’s lives at risk. I say this more out of shame than pride; no film is worth it. That said, the danger level on The French Connection was Code Red. If someone had been hurt—or killed—I’d be writing this from a prison cell. Why did I do it? Why did I take things so far? You’d have to ask Ahab, Kurtz, or Popeye. If the film works, one reason may be that I shared their obsession.
New York was my Erector set, from the Upper East Side to the Lower West, with sections of Brooklyn and Queens thrown in. We operated more like a small independent company than a big studio. Dick Zanuck, as he’d predicted, was about to walk the plank at Fox, and no successor had been announced. Before we finished shooting, he was done, and the studio was being run by Elmo Williams, Darryl Zanuck’s former film editor. The Fox studio was in limbo, awaiting a Wall Street takeover. We were one of only two films in production, and no one was left who gave a damn about our picture. They were more concerned about saving their asses.
The last scene we photographed in New York was an unscheduled retake of the first day of shooting, wherein Doyle and Russo interrogate and rough up the dealer. I took them to an empty lot in Spanish Harlem and I told them to move freely and improvise. I asked Gene to end the scene with, “I’m gonna nail you for pickin’ your feet in Poughkeepsie.” I set up two cameras at right angles and had them shoot the scene as if we just happened on it. Fox didn’t allow reshoots without permission, and we were already over budget, so without telling the studio, we slipped it into the schedule, and the actors nailed it in one take.
The day we wrapped in New York, D’Antoni asked me how I felt about the picture. I said, “Phil, I think we
’ll get away with it, if we’re lucky, but don’t get your Oscar speech ready.”
Three days later we took off for a week of scouting and shooting in Marseille for the scenes that would introduce Charnier, Nicoli, and Devereaux (real name Angelvin). We hired a French crew, and they turned out to be excellent, especially the sound man, Jean-Louis Ducarme, who later worked with me on The Exorcist in Iraq and Sorcerer in many parts of the world.
The opening scene of The French Connection is in Marseille. We see a man in a trench coat watching a Lincoln Continental (we couldn’t get a Buick Invicta) that’s parked at the curb of a busy intersection. We cut quickly to the same man standing across the street from a café called the Fon-Ton (said to be the place where bouillabaisse was created). Two well-dressed businessmen come out of the café in the heart of the Marseille harbor. We follow them as they get into the Continental, and it passes the camera to reveal the man in the trench coat, still watching the car. The driver of the car, we later learn, is Alain Charnier (Jehan). Much later, it will be revealed that the trench-coated man is an undercover French narcotics detective. We follow him as he buys a baguette on one of the back streets of Marseille. He enters a small apartment building. In the lobby of the building we see Nicoli (Scaglia) behind a .45 mm. handgun as he shoots the detective in the face, then walks calmly away, grabbing a chunk of the dead man’s baguette.
To show the detective being shot in the faces we had a leading British makeup artist make a latex piece that, when pulled by an imperceptible wire, would explode a blood bag. We did several takes, none convincing. In frustration I called it a day without printing a single take. That night in Phil’s hotel room we talked about alternatives. I had never done a shot like this before, so we relied totally on the makeup artist. The phone rang; it was Stan Hough (pronounced “Huff”), head of physical production at Fox, calling from Los Angeles. Stan was a gruff man with a crew cut and the attitude of a marine drill sergeant. He was married to the beautiful actress Jean Peters, formerly the wife of Howard Hughes. Stan didn’t suffer fools gladly. We had three days to film in Marseille, and this was the end of the third day. Phil held the phone away from his ear so we could both listen.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 17