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On the Centrality of Surprise: A Conversation with William Friedkin
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The pictures of Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin offer few simple answers. Whether it is the detective who employs tougher tactics than the bad guys in The French Connection (1971), the priest with his own secret guilt in The Exorcist (1973), or law-breaking cops in Cruising (1980) and  To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Friedkin (right) refuses to create simplistic heroes. We care about his heroes because they must overcome not only the evil around them, but the evil they find in themselves.
Friedkin's subsequent films, such as Rampage (1988), The Guardian (1990) and Rules of Engagement (2000), continue to provoke and unsettle audiences. His trademark use of a hand-held camera in action sequences can be traced back to his early documentary work and a zeal for risk-taking. At this 1994 AFI seminar, Friedkin urged filmmakers to cultivate surprise in their work. |
 he first film work I did was in documentaries. Usually with a documentary, you just picked up the camera and ran around with it. You had to be flexible enough to put the camera and the sound where it would best capture what was going on. I could see that you could use documentary technique to make viewers think they were watching something happening right then, and also that you could create your own reality. |
The screen is a flat medium, nothing but height and width. But the illusion of depth, and something even more than depth, can be created by setting the camera free. It seemed to me that a kind of cinematic cubism was possible with the camera. |
On showing and telling
A lot of filmmaking is show-and-tell. You get a scene where two people are talking and this fellow says to that fellow, "I'll meet you at the restaurant." Then the next scene is at the restaurant. It's all set up and the element of surprise is gone. This was a principle that David L. Wolper [producer and director of documentaries] drummed into our heads: no show-and-tell. |
There's a great phrase from [Serge] Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, who said to his principal dancer, [Vaslav] Nijinsky, "Etonnez-moi!'' which means "surprise me." And that is the best direction a director can give to an actor, a writer or anyone on the crew: surprise me. |
Often, we're not surprised. Often, the viewer is way ahead of the filmmaker. You know where the next shot's going to come from. You know what they're going to say. Why are you watching it? You know this guy's never going to die. |
So, in a few films that I made, I said, "Well, I'm going to kill the hero." You know why? That's life. People die. |
You must try to surprise the audience in every way. |
On collaboration
The best collaboration with a writer is when two people are in the same groove. You just talk about something that may be tangential to the work, and you agree on an approach to it. Then it somehow gets into the script. If you are not in total synch with each other, nothing too good is going to happen. You don't have to agree on everything that's going into the movie, but you have got to have an outlook on life that is pretty close. Wavelength is everything. That synthesis, that vibe, is what's on the screen. |
With French Connection, we didn't have a script. What we did have was months of research about this real cop named Eddie Egan, this other cop named Sonny Grosso and this French connection case with about 75 cops involved in it. |
We basically improvised the picture on the set. I sent Gene Hackman and Roy Schneider out with Egan and Grosso. They would come back with stories, dialogue and scenes, and we would shoot them. |
The whole first scene, where they are chasing down this suspect and then they sort of whack him around, was almost verbatim from an Egan-Grosso interrogation. |
It was the first day of shooting, and I decided to have the scene staged in a car. I realized after we shot it that part of the problem was my staging. I had my actors sitting there just doing lines. When we finished the rest of the shoot, we went back and I said, "OK, you guys know what happens now. Go out and improvise it. Go anywhere you want. Walk anywhere and say anything. You're free." |
Now, when you tell actors they are "free," something happens. They made up all the words. They would overlap, so its rhythms were like life. There was real fear in the actors, because they didn't know what they were going to do and I didn't know what they were going to do. That is heaven on a set. Etonnez-moi. |
My philosophy of filmmaking is the exact opposite of the anti-drugs slogan. I say, "Just say yes." |
Take a chance and surprise me. It won't always be good. But if you can write or photograph or edit or produce or direct pictures that surprise, you'll revitalize the art. |
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