A great American filmmaker has passed away. William Friedkin, director of The ExorcistOscar winner for The French Connection, died Monday, August 7 in Los Angeles at the age of 87. He was one of those artists of New Hollywood in the 1970s with dark, urban films, sometimes shot as documentaries.
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This is one of the most impressive chases seen on the big screen: a car that chases the New York subway at 100 km/h in The French Connection. William Friedkin did not have permission from the town hall to shoot this scene. He did it anyway, in defiance of security, as he confided in the WTF podcast:
” I don’t do it proud. It was dangerous for a lot of people, including me. But actually, I didn’t think about it. Neither did those who worked with me. Today, I wouldn’t do it like that. »
The film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Gene Hackman. The latter was however not comfortable at the start with the character of Popeye Doyle, a tough and racist cop, but a realistic cop, Friedkin insisted.
Read alsoA film lesson with William “the Exorcist” Friedkin
Two years later in 1973, the director broke box office records. After the detective film, it sublimates another genre: horror. After the drug dealers, he studies another version of evil, the Devil himself. The Exorcist traumatizes generations of spectators.
Friedkin’s career was then at its peak. His remake of wages of fearhis thriller Federal Police, Los Angeles in 1985 or Killer Joewith Matthew McConaughey ten years agodo not mark the crowds as much, as successful as they are.
But the poor kid from Chicago, passed through television, documentaries and even opera, a time married to the French artist Jeanne Moreauhas never stopped filming the dark, violent and disturbing face of human beings.