The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Six more ceilings were built. Blatty was living in Georgetown. There was a writers’ strike, so he couldn’t come to the set. I called and told him what was happening, or not happening, and he heard the urgency in my voice; he flew to New York. I showed him the dailies. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Max was fine, and I had a block and couldn’t see it. Bill came out of the screening room: “You’re right,” he said, “it’s terrible.”

  When we first met, Max said, “The most powerful way to deliver a line is quietly.” Blatty believed Max no longer had the vocal ability to deliver the line the way I wanted. Whenever he had to take command and raise the volume, something shrill would come out, a high tenor, with no authority behind it.

  We went to Max’s dressing room. Unlike those of most star actors, his room was sparse—no photographs, no drawings, no memorabilia of any kind. It wasn’t so much a comfort zone as a monk’s retreat. “Max,” I said, “we’ve reached the point where I don’t know how to finish this scene. I’m willing to ask Ingmar Bergman to come in and direct it.” Max shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “It’s not a matter of Bergman. This has nothing to do with Bergman.”

  “Well, what is it?” I pressed.

  A long silence, then, “I think it’s that I don’t believe the words,” he said. “I don’t believe in God.”

  I never thought an actor had to believe the words of his character, only act them. An actor playing Dracula doesn’t need to become a vampire. Bill was as nonplussed as I was. I said, “But Max, you played Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I played him as a man, not a god.”

  Even more confused, I said, “Why don’t you play Merrin as a man? Don’t think of him as a priest with supernatural powers.”

  This was one of the lamest directions I’d ever given. Max turned toward his dressing room mirror. “Give me an hour,” he said gravely. Blatty and I left the room. We stood silently in the hall. Because we both shared the same dark sense of humor, we started to laugh.

  “Bill,” I said quietly. “What if we have Merrin die at this point in the script instead of later, and let Karras finish the exorcism?”

  “Well, you know it’s not that way in the novel, Billy,” he said, “but if that’s what it takes to complete the scene, I’ll do it.” He could see my anguish and frustration.

  He quickly wrote a draft of the scene that killed Merrin early. “I actually like it,” he said. “I like it better! It’ll work!”

  I said, “All right, Mr. Producer. You’re going to have to tell Max he’s going back to his family tomorrow morning.” We returned to the set, and before I told the cast how we planned to revise the scene, I asked Max to do one more take as originally written. He delivered the line with great strength on the first take, and the crisis was over. To this day, and after decades of reflection, I have no idea what really caused this brilliant actor to block, at the most crucial stage of his performance.

  Father Karras’s final confrontation with the demon was the last thing we shot. It was the one section of the book I wasn’t sure how to stage, and after a number of conversations with Blatty, I became even less certain. It is meant to be an act of self-sacrifice in which Karras offers his own life to the demon in return for Regan’s. As Blatty portrays it in the novel, only the aftermath of Karras’s death leap is seen, and only by Chris. Bill wanted to make it clear in the film that it was Karras’s choice to leap out the window, that he was no longer possessed when he sacrificed himself, and in a subsequent shot we see Regan on the floor, crying, but as her normal self. I confess now that my staging wasn’t clear, and I doubt that it was clarified for audiences. Later in the novel, but not in the film, Blatty has the detective speculate that Karras’s deliberate death has to do with a mental breakdown.

  In a letter to Blatty shortly after the publication of the novel, Father Bowdern argued that suicide as a motivation was misleading in a theological sense. “No matter what good intentions Karras might have had in your story, suicide could never be used as a means to achieve that end,” he wrote, underlining that suicide remains a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church.

  In a 1998 interview, Blatty said that the film did not make it clear that Karras “took the demon out the window, not the other way around.” Even though we added a moment wherein Karras actually shouts to the demon, “Take me, come into me!” according to Blatty, “audiences still got it wrong. . . . It’s not that it wasn’t delivered in a clear way . . . it’s that the audience is so numb with shock that they’re not noticing the choreography. . . . So that the problem we created, through no fault of our own, is that many people to this day interpret The Exorcist as a downer.”

  Blatty and I still disagree on this point. My feeling is that people take from the film what they bring to it. If you think the world is a dark and evil place where Satan rules, you can get that from The Exorcist. If on the other hand you believe, as I do, that a constant struggle takes place within all of us and that sometimes goodness wins out, that’s there as well.

  8

  THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

  I was determined to film the prologue in Iraq. The United States had no diplomatic relations with Iraq, not even a desk in a foreign embassy. I called Jack Valenti again. “Billy, this is probably a long shot,” Jack said, “but why don’t you contact the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations? They’ve got an office in New York.”

  I met with the Iraqi UN representative. He was a gracious man in his late forties, skeptical, but not discouraging. Iraq had been ruled for many years by a one-party government, the Ba’athist Party. “I’ll take your request to the highest level of our government,” the representative said. “As you know, there are few Americans in my country, so we will see.” We shook hands, parted, and I waited months for his response: “You can film where you choose in northern Iraq. However, you must limit the number of American personnel. You will have to make a formal request for exactly how many people you feel are absolutely necessary. We ask also that you hire Iraqis and train them to fill out your crew.”

  “Is there a film industry in Iraq?” I asked.

  “Not at this time”—he shook his head sadly—“which is why we want your personnel to help train our people.” I instantly agreed. “Two more requests,” he said. “We want your makeup person to teach Iraqis how to manufacture movie blood.” I didn’t ask why, nor do I know to this day.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “We want you to donate a print of your film The French Connection to the Iraqi government.” He smiled. I agreed to everything. I needed to bring only one actor, Max von Sydow. As far as American crew, I needed the makeup artist, Dick Smith, and his assistant Rick Baker; production designer Bill Malley and a veteran production coordinator, Bill Kaplan; and the first assistant director, Terry Donnelly. The rest of the crew would come from England, a country that maintained diplomatic relations with Iraq. My director of photography would be Billy Williams, who photographed Women in Love and other distinguished British films.

  In June 1973 we were granted permission to film in Iraq. I believed it would be one of the great adventures of my life. Ted Ashley in his usual fashion began by screaming at me: “Are you crazy? We can’t send you to Iraq.”

  “Where else should I shoot this scene, Ted?” I asked.

  “I don’t care,” he shot back. “You’re not going to Iraq. They’ll kill you.”

  Wells chimed in: “Aren’t we at war with them?” We weren’t.

  Historically and biblically, there is no more important country on earth than what was once called Mesopotamia. It’s known as the cradle of civilization. The Garden of Eden was there, as were Abraham and Isaac. Noah built the ark there. The Walls of Nineveh stood there, and I lived in a tent next to their remnants. Daniel entered the lion’s den in Iraq: Nebuchadnezzar, once king of Babylon, is buried there, and I visited his tomb. It’s shown without attribution in the film. Two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, cross in s
outhern Iraq, and I used to enjoy picnics there on the beach with my Iraqi friends.

  The week I left for Iraq, two hundred Jewish people were rounded up in the streets of Baghdad and tortured. They were confined for life or slaughtered. I was horrified, yet I knew that the mood, the atmosphere, the desert ruins, the Iraqi people, could not be reproduced on a soundstage or in the American desert. I wanted the film to have authenticity, and that started with the prologue. We couldn’t re-create Georgetown, so how could we duplicate northern Iraq?

  Bill Kaplan went ahead and sent back excellent location photos. He wrote that our hosts from the Ba’athist Party seemed cooperative and were anticipating our arrival. Iraq at that time had hostile relations with Iran, Kuwait, Syria, Turkey, and of course Israel and the United States. Their relations with the Kurds in the north of the country near Mosul, which was our eventual destination, were also bad.

  But Baghdad was a thriving, energetic city in 1973. The Bab al-Sharji souk was ablaze with color and rich with the scent of spice and incense. Rug merchants and tea houses kept family traditions for thousands of years. Western dress was as common as Arabic, and traffic in the main arteries was as claustrophobic as that of most big cities. Kids played soccer in the streets, and many wore T-shirts with pictures of American sports figures and movie stars.

  Just to the south of Baghdad were the ruins of ancient Babylon and the Tower of Babel. Little remained of them, and what restorations had been done were shoddy. There seemed to be many more ancient sites left to be uncovered, but the Iraqi authorities weren’t concerned with preserving their historic legacy. Many of these sites were looted or moved to museums in other countries. In the center of Baghdad, overlooking the city’s main square, was a statue of Hammurabi, known for writing one of the first codes of law. He was also the first king of the Babylonian Empire, seventeen centuries before Christ. His code, carved in stone on twelve tablets, is now in the Louvre. Its draconian punishment calls for chopping limbs off, disfiguration, and death. But there in the town square his stone image rests peacefully in kingly garb and headgear. On top of a barracks building directly across the street was an array of Ba’athist soldiers, alert behind automatic weapons.

  Mosul, 250 miles to the northwest, was our base of operations. The city is divided by a gap along the banks of the Tigris, with five bridges linking both sides. About a million and a half people lived there when I arrived. They were friendly and curious about us. I never felt closer to a people, anywhere, than I did to the men and women of Mosul during the months I spent in Iraq. There was a sense of joie de vivre about them. Women worked in all the professions; they were doctors, lawyers, and teachers. They didn’t have to wear burqas or other religious dress unless they chose to. The ruling Ba’athists had no opposition. They were led at that time by President Hassan al-Bakr, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Groucho Marx. On Sundays thousands of families would picnic and swim on the beaches of the Tigris. They would roast large blowfish called masgouf, split down the middle and suspended on sticks over small open fires. When the fish was browned on the outside and the white meat tender, you’d eat it with your hands; delicious.

  After dark in Mosul, whole families would sit on folding chairs or on the ground in the town center, watching an old twelve-inch black-and-white television set that was powered by a long cord running into one of the shops. I remember seeing hundreds of people watching the American television series The Fugitive, starring David Janssen. In English.

  I was assigned a guide who spoke perfect English and was as subversive at heart as I was. He loved to tweak the officials who hired him, and he was secretly unimpressed by his Ba’athist rulers. He was under strict orders not to take me into Kurdish territory, near the Turkish border. To drive through this area, you were stopped every mile or so to show passports to the Arab authorities, and a mile later you’d go through another passport check by the Kurds. My guide’s name was Tarik Zubaidy, and his favorite English expression was “peace and pizza,” usually whispered under his breath as a kind of slur upon all authority. We lived in tents next to the railroad station, where the Orient Express would come in once a week. Next to the station were the remnants of the Walls of Nineveh, a small pile of ancient mud and stone about a foot off the desert sand, comprising a circle that housed a Bedouin encampment with goats and camels. The only public telephone was in a police station two miles from our tents. It required four days to book a call to the United States, which was fine with me because I quickly developed a Kurtz complex and wanted no contact with the outside world. It took a month to find and clear the locations I needed, including the chaikhana (tea house) near the center of town, overlooking the tomb of Nebuchadnezzar; an old metallic forge; the museum curator’s offices; and the ancient winding streets.

  Our main location was the archaeological site that opens the film. We found it in Hatra, the city of the Sun God Shamash, less than an hour’s drive southwest of Mosul. It was built in the desert in the third century BC and contained some of the most beautiful limestone temples and monuments in the Arab world. It had been partially restored, and there was ongoing excavation by a German expedition that had been uncovering ancient Hatra for years. Though heavily fortified, the town was sacked by the Sassanians in 240 AD. A hundred thousand people were decapitated, and their heads, as well as those of statuary, were being discovered by the German expedition. This location, bathed in a magical pink desert light, was bright enough to film from early morning to ten in the evening. It contained many references to the ancient world and its mythology. The only thing missing was the giant statue of the demon Pazuzu, which we re-created at Warner Bros. in Burbank and had shipped to Iraq. Bill Malley had designed it, referring to photographs in the British Museum. Fourteen feet high and eight feet wide, it was made of fiberglass, with extended talons and a large protruding penis. We had it shipped from Los Angeles to Baghdad by the famous Flying Tigers air transport company, former World War II Air Force aces. They guaranteed the shipment would reach its destination safely within two weeks, but somehow it was lost and untraceable! Lost and untraceable? Impossible to conceive that a crate at least fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, clearly addressed to Baghdad, insured and guaranteed by the Flying Tigers, could be lost for as long as three minutes. When it was finally located somewhere in Australia (!) and shipped to the correct address, we installed it on a mound in Hatra, just outside the excavated monuments.

  The statue was aged to resemble the limestone and gypsum Assyrian structures surrounding it. We weren’t told why the shipment was delayed, but we later learned that the content spooked most of the customs agents along its route.

  A week before shooting, Bill Kaplan, the production manager, took slabs of raw meat up to the statue in the hope of attracting vultures while we were shooting. We also tried to lure packs of wild dogs, to snarl and fight as though “possessed.” The growls would later be mixed with the sound of the demon voice. The vultures never appeared, and the dogs wouldn’t perform. They had been starved for two days, and when cut loose, they ran to the meat, sniffed it, and slumped meekly away. Their handlers told us they had never eaten meat, and obviously had no taste for it. Their diet was a soft flat bread, which we spread around the statue; the dogs fought over and devoured it.

  Rumors went out locally that American devil worshipers had erected a statue of Pazuzu in Hatra and were offering sacrifices to it. This came to the attention of the sheikh of the local Yazidi, an ancient tribe of Kurdish descent in northern Iraq. They are known throughout the Muslim world as devil (Shaitan) worshipers, and suffered severe punishment for their beliefs in past centuries. Thinking I shared their beliefs, representatives of the Yazidi sent word to my Ba’athist handlers, asking if I’d like to meet the sheikh and tour their settlement. The Ba’athists were against my making this visit. They warned me that I would have to pass through Kurdish territory to a dangerous place they couldn’t control.

  The Yazidi were said to practice human and animal sacrifice. C
ustom dictates that you never walk ahead of a Yazidi, because if Shaitan tells him he must kill you, he will do so without hesitation. The Yazidi don’t eat lettuce because they believe the spirit of Shaitan lives in lettuce. Their customs were frowned on by the Arab world as well as by fellow Kurds. Their origins and esoteric practices are unknown to most of the Western world. I was warned that flies circled their encampment; I was to gently avoid them but never kill one, because the spirit of Shaitan lives in flies and serpents.

  For some reason, a Yazidi leaves one pant leg on when he makes love to his woman. I pressed for an explanation of this and was told by Tarik that it was probably so that the Yazidi could be ready to act on the devil’s instructions at any time. The sh sound must never be uttered near a Yazidi, as it would take the name of Shaitan in vain. Since Arabic has many words that require the use of sh—for instance, the common greeting “Chosh kaka” means “Hello, my friend”—the Yazidi have their own language, Kurmanji.

  I found it ironic that the sheikh of the devil worshipers wanted to meet me, thinking I shared his beliefs. Tarik offered to cross the territorial boundaries and bring me to their camp, knowing that if he got caught disregarding Ba’athist instructions, he would be in deep shit. If anything happened to me, if I were captured or killed, Tarik would share my fate.