The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  In Webb’s original draft he set the story in a fictitious Middle East country. When I asked him where such a scenario was most likely to occur, his instant response was Yemen.

  In several big cities around the United States, demonstrations were organized outside theaters where the film was playing. I was concerned for a number of reasons. I believed our scenario was plausible, but I had misgivings about bringing shame or hardship to one of the poorest countries in the world. So I called the Yemen Embassy and asked for Ambassador al-Hajri. I told him I was the guy who defamed his country and I wanted to meet him, apologize, and explain my position. He invited me to the Yemen embassy in Washington, D.C., the following week. His Excellency, the brother-in-law of Yemen’s then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh, was educated in Cairo and Washington, D.C. He was his country’s top representative in the United States for three years.

  I apologized for the discomfort to the people of Yemen, and he permitted me to show him my research, proving that Yemen was harboring terrorists. The Ambassador studied the articles carefully, then set them aside. “Mr. Friedkin,” he said quietly, “you made a powerful film. I’m just sorry you chose Yemen as the setting. It will do irreparable harm to our tourism.” He invited me to Yemen as his guest and told me I could film anything I wanted there without restraint. Various dates were scheduled, then broken, because of the worsening situation in his country that led to the 2012 overthrow of President Saleh.

  Not everyone found the film offensive. Many soldiers, prominent military men, and even the National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, told me how powerful and realistic they thought it was. Colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated officer to come out of Korea and Vietnam, wrote several columns praising the film. “Hack” called his cousin Jim Webb and told him that the film was terrific, and he should at least see it. A few days later Jim called to tell me he was proud of the film, with one caveat, the scene where Childers shoots a captured Vietnamese soldier in the head. We were friends again, and in 2006, when Jim was elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia by a narrow margin, Sherry and I were invited to his swearing-in and a very small after-party, attended mostly by Marines he had served with. At the end of his brief remarks, he said: “Anyone can become a U.S. Senator, but not everyone can be a Marine.”

  The Hunted was based on the exploits of Tom Brown Jr., a wilderness tracker and survivalist. Though never having served in the military nor killed anyone himself, he claims to have trained the Delta Force, the Navy Seals, and the Special Ops to track, kill, and return to safety. He told me he was shown long-distance aerial photos of Iraq and was able to determine what roads were being used for heavy transport and missile installations, simply by viewing their tracks.

  He also said he could come into a room and, by examining a rug, determine how many people had been there in the previous few hours and what emotions they might have experienced, just by examining pressure points left by their footprints. He claims he learned his skills at the age of seven from an Apache shaman named Stalking Wolf, whom he called “Grandfather”; it’s the spiritual and mythological claims he makes that most disturb his critics.

  His exploits were open to question, but I thought he was a fascinating guy. I went to work on a script with a promising young writer, Art Monterastelli, who had written only for television. The story tells of a former special ops instructor, L. T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), called in by the FBI to apprehend his gifted student, Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro). Bonham had trained Hallam to be an assassin. The film was structured as a cat-and-mouse chase with the cat and the mouse constantly changing places. I shaped it as a modern riff on the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, wherein Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his own son as a test of his faith.

  Tommy Lee and I developed a trust that enabled us to work quickly and efficiently. He was always “ready” and in character, though he was skeptical of Tom Brown Jr. and distanced himself from him. Benicio Del Toro, then thirty-six years old, had won all the major critical awards and an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his role in Traffic. His process was different from Tommy Lee’s, and their scenes were a contrast in styles. Benicio worked on the “inner life” and back story of his character and would immerse himself in what he felt was Hallam’s state of mind. Tommy Lee was Bonham.

  We filmed in Portland, Oregon; Mount Hood; and in many parts of the Pacific Northwest wilderness. The sequence that introduces Hallam was filmed on a vacant industrial lot in Portland. We re-created the burning of Kosovo during the Bosnian-Serbian War, where in addition to the horrors of ethnic cleansing there were also NATO air strikes. Hallam is sent on an off-the-books mission to kill a Serbian commander who has murdered Albanian citizens. He’s awarded a Silver Star but is tormented by nightmares of the violence he has seen and performed. When Hallam returns home and commits other savage killings, Bonham is sought by the FBI to find him. Bonham lives alone in a cabin in British Columbia, where he works for the Wildlife Fund. In a scene filmed during a snowstorm on Mount Hood, we introduce him as he’s tracking a wounded white wolf caught in a hunter’s trap. Bonham heals its wound with wet, grassy earth pulled from beneath the deep snow.

  When I asked Academy Award–winning cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to shoot The Hunted, he was reluctant. I had a reputation among cameramen for being hard to work with. For whatever reason, perhaps curiosity, Caleb decided to do the picture. His compositions and lighting set the naturalistic mood and captured the emotions in every scene. We never had a disagreement, and we brought out the best in each other. We have a bond of friendship and respect that continues to this day.

  Tom Brown was our technical adviser. He taught Tommy Lee and Benicio how to make knives from raw stone and rusted steel, and with Mark Stefanich, a former member of Seal Team 6, taught them the techniques of military assassination. One of the best lines of dialogue came from Mark: “Once you’ve learned how to kill mentally, the physical part comes easy. The hard part is learning how to turn it off.”

  Tom brought two expert knife fighters to the set, Tom Kier and Rafael Kayanan, who also trained Navy Seals and are acknowledged masters of the Philippine Sayoc Kali combat style, evolved over hundreds of years. It became the basis for the fights in The Hunted, which were skillfully executed by Benicio and Tommy Lee. I use “doubles” only for extreme long shots and tight close-ups. The knife fight in the forest, in which Tommy Lee is unarmed and Benicio has a hand-crafted metal knife, was the last scene to be shot. It was going smoothly until, with only two setups left to complete the film, both dove to the ground to retrieve the fallen knife. Benicio fell on his wrist—and broke it. He had to be helicoptered to a Portland hospital, where he underwent surgery, losing the use of his right hand for six months. It was a simple move they had rehearsed and perfected for weeks, and it seemed to hold no prospect of danger. We had to shut down, with only a few shots left to finish.

  Benicio held his anger in check and worked to rehabilitate his hand. We went back to Oregon with most of the same crew and finished the sequence. (If you see it, you will have no idea where the interruption of six months occurred.) I still admire the film’s energy, tension, and spontaneity. It embodies themes that continue to haunt me: guilt, obsession, the breakdown of social order, a man’s inner conflict over his own actions.

  The four films I directed for Paramount aspired to realism, but realism was no longer in favor. If Star Wars in the ’70s was a tidal wave that washed everything else away in its wake, the 1990s were an earthquake. In the competition for audiences between fantasy and reality, fantasy was the clear winner. With the digital revolution, it became possible to create images on a computer, changing the way films are made and the way people see them.

  In July 2006 Sherry and I stopped in London on our way to Africa for a camera safari. I took her to meet Harold Pinter, the year after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He chose a simple Italian restaurant just outside Chelsea. He was waiting when we arrived. He had been in pain for s
everal years and undergone an operation and chemotherapy for esophageal cancer. He had difficulty walking and had lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. Sherry was nervous about meeting him because of his reputation for abrasiveness and his intolerance of American foreign policy. It’s also intimidating to be around a Nobel Prize winner.

  But Harold was charming. He gave her a personally autographed copy of his bound book of poetry. He had been married to the writer Antonia Fraser for twenty-six years, and Sherry asked how they met. “Funnily enough, it was after a revival of The Birthday Party early in 1975,” Harold said. At a dinner party he and Antonia sat at opposite ends of a long table. She got up to say good night to Harold, and he asked, “Must you go?” She thought for a moment and answered: “No, it’s not essential.” He drove her to her house and stayed until 6:30 the following morning. She was married with six children; Harold had been unhappy with Vivien for many years. He told us of a recent screening of The Birthday Party in his honor at the British Film Academy. He said he thought it played great and he was proud of it. “It’s really a wonderful film,” he said. I was moved not only to hear this from him but also to see these two people who meant so much to me, forty years apart, getting along so well.

  17

  FADE OUT

  I had developed leg pains each time I walked even the shortest of distances. MRI scans showed I had bone spurs clawing against my spinal nerve. In October 2008 I had a six-hour operation for spinal stenosis, which at my age was dangerous. For weeks afterward I had a private nurse to help me walk again. No sooner had I recovered when heart pains recurred. The new diagnosis: congestive heart failure. One of the probable causes was type-2 diabetes. I entered a long phase of physical discomfort, serious illness, and spiritual crisis. It occurred to me that I might die—and soon. I had complete faith in my doctors—P. K. Shah, the heart specialist, Richard Gold, my internist, and Anne Peters, for diabetes—who made me realize that if I didn’t radically change my lifestyle, I would soon be dead. I went on a strict diet and enough medication to cure a small country. But it was Sherry who saw that I had the best care possible, and it was her love and faith that gave me the strength to push back against death once again.

  On Christmas Day 2008, Harold Pinter died of a rare disease in which the body attacks itself. Deep depression, the black dog poised above my head.

  In April 2009, I received a Life Achievement Award at the first annual thriller film festival in Beaune, France, a small town in the wine capital of Burgundy. The award was presented by Claude Lelouch, whose remarks were warm and generous, and my acceptance speech was devoted to my appreciation of his work and that of the French New Wave.

  The next day, like a sudden storm, I experienced a series of sharp stabbing heart pains. We returned to Los Angeles, where the pain subsided. I took three or four nitroglycerin pills a day for several weeks, but otherwise ignored the symptoms.

  As a favor to the conductor Kent Nagano I directed Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat, an oratorio with music and dialogue. Kent brought members of his Montreal Symphony to Los Angeles, and we staged it at a theater in Santa Monica. Afterward I couldn’t go onstage to take a bow. Again, stabbing chest pains. Blood tests and an angiogram showed I needed a triple bypass. Two weeks later I was in the operating room, then in hospital recovery for a week. The operation was a success, and my heart function returned to normal.

  When I got home, my vital signs were stable, but from the incision there seemed to be a constant discharge of reddish-orange pus. Blood samples showed I had acquired a life-threatening hospital-borne infection called serratia, extremely resistant to antibiotics. I was readmitted to the hospital. A midnight CT scan suggested that the infection was superficial and had not spread. The heart surgeon sought my permission to reopen the incision and treat the infection, but I lost faith in him and in the hospital. I remember shouting at him: “You fucked me up!”

  At Sherry’s insistence I was moved by ambulance to another hospital, where I was met by six specialists and another CT scan was performed. The new doctors told me that the first scan had been incorrectly interpreted by the other hospital, and the infection had spread from my bloodstream into the chest bone.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Gravely, one of the doctors said, “If it’s spread too far, we’ll have to remove your sternum.” The sternum is the breast bone, which protects the heart, lungs, and major blood vessels. If it’s damaged or removed, you have a big hole in your chest. It could be replaced by plastic surgery, but only after another chest operation.

  I looked from one doctor to the other. Their expressions weren’t encouraging. Sherry was tearfully stoic. The thought occurred to me through exhaustion and a haze of mind-altering painkillers that this could be my “appointment in Samarra.” The wound was erupting once again like a lava flow. I considered the possibility that I might die without having accomplished anything of lasting value.

  Two weeks after the bypass, I was back in surgery for a partial sternectomy and reconstruction, an operation with less than a 50 percent survival rate. I asked the new surgeon, Dr. Richard Shemin, “Have you ever done this before?”

  “No,” he answered honestly. “But I know how to do it.” He saved my life.

  Ten days later I awoke from a troubled sleep, woozy and disoriented from the antibiotics, the stabbing pain still raging in my chest. I could hear distant, high-pitched children’s voices from a school playground. Then silence. A sudden image of myself pumping a little three-wheeler bike as fast as the wind along Sheridan Road in Chicago when my world was filled with promise.

  I was hospitalized for a month, followed by home care and visits to the hospital for check-ups or half-hour walks in a quiet neighborhood park. This went on for another three months.

  Suspended by a fragile thread, I thought about what I had gained and at what cost. And what I had lost. My body was broken, but I was alive, and with a sense of hope.

  PART V

  FADE IN

  18

  PUCCINI

  Placido Domingo asked me to direct Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, the first two of Puccini’s three-part opera Il Trittico, for Los Angeles Opera in the fall of 2009. There was a caveat, and Placido raised it diplomatically, as was his style; he could charm the mustard off a hot dog.

  “Billy,” Placido began, “your Schicci will always be our production of Schicci. But would you consider another idea?” For years he had been pursuing Woody Allen to direct an opera, and Woody had finally agreed. The only opera he knew well enough to direct was Puccini’s short comic gem Gianni Schicci, the third and most popular of the trilogy and one I had directed twice. I thought it was a great idea and welcomed it wholeheartedly, as I consider Woody the best living American filmmaker.

  The event was announced to great fanfare, and we went into rehearsal in early August.

  Puccini wrote Il Trittico at the end of his career, after La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, Tosca, and other masterpieces. Its three one-act operas are each about an hour long, completely different in character and style. The common themes are death, damnation, forgiveness, and, in Puccini’s words, “The great suffering of small souls.” No composer has written more beautiful melodies or better combined truth and beauty.

  Il Tabarro (The Cloak) is opera noir, a realistic thriller set on the banks of the Seine, involving a barge owner whose wife is having an affair with one of his workers. It combines jealousy, betrayal, and murder; Puccini would have been a great novelist or filmmaker. The characters are finely drawn, sympathetic, longing to change their lives but without the ability to do so.

  In working with the principals—Mark Delavan as the barge owner, Anja Kampe as his sexy, distracted wife, and Salvatore Licitra as her ill-fated lover—I asked them to mine their own experiences of rage and passion in an effort to explore what leads one man to murder and another to become his victim. I directed Il Tabarro in the darkly realistic manner of a Georges Simenon crime novel; clear, concise, an
d ultimately chilling.

  Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) is set in a convent in Tuscany and written for female voices. Angelica is beloved by the other nuns. She was sent to the convent seven years before by her noble family to do penance for having a child out of wedlock. Her aunt, the Principessa, one of the great villains in opera, comes to tell her the child has died. Angelica is driven to madness and suicide, but after taking poison, she begs forgiveness, and in her dying moments, the Holy Virgin appears, to reunite her with her dead child. The apparition is either a hallucination or a miracle, and I chose to interpret it according to Puccini’s direction: “The Angel of Mercy appears.” Puccini was not a pious Catholic, but his sister was a nun, and he first played the piano score of Suor Angelica at her convent, where the sisters were moved to tears. I felt this great opera had the power to produce that emotion in a modern audience.

  Knowing nothing about convent life, I sought the advice of an extraordinary woman, Sister Mary Jean Meier, eighty-three years old, a member of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. I have never known a more vital, life-affirming person. She lived her faith and gave me to understand the nature of her calling. We became friends, and when I was seriously ill, she said prayers for me every day and asked fellow priests and nuns around the world to do the same. I asked her to speak to the principals and the chorus of Suor Angelica at our first rehearsal.

  With her generous spirit and sense of humor, Sister Mary Jean described convent life and cautioned them not to portray the sisters as stereotypes. “We love to gossip,” she said. “We have faults and misgivings and special interests as all women do. So please don’t portray us as outside the norms of human behavior or ‘holier than thou.’ The only thing we all have in common is our devotion and love of Christ.” Her comments, her very presence, were more significant than my direction.