With the writers and actors on strike, well, who the hell knows what’s going on? You may not hear from any actors, writers or hell, even directors who are not doing press in solidarity. So, in a bid to still continue making things interesting for you and for us, we’re reintroducing an old Flashback Friday or Throwback Thursday feature and just calling it “Flashback”: a fun excuse to highlight old interviews, old stories, classic movie stories and more.
On a classic episode of “George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight,” a talk show that ran from 2005 to 2014 on CBC Television, the Canadian host talked to legendary director William Friedkin on keeping Gene Hackman angry during the filming of “The French Connection” (1971) and why he decided to slap a priest to get what he needed for “The Exorcist” (1973).
Friedkin was always notoriously candid and old-school in his methods, not afraid to get under an actor’s skin if it got him the performance he wanted. In this clip, Stroumboulopoulos asked if Gene Hackman was easy to work with on “The French Connection,” and as Wes Anderson would tell you more recently, he was not.
“No,” Friedkin said plainly when asked if Hackman was an easy man to work with. “Gene did not really want to go to the dark side of that cop because Gene is very liberal, he didn’t take really well to using the N-word, and beating up suspects and all that, which was the truth about that cop. And Gene didn’t want to go there.”
Friedkin said this led to a fractious relationship between them on the set of the classic cop movie. “Gene and I had a constant tug of war,” he continued. “Where I had to get him angry and he’s angry throughout that picture.”
It’s also amazing to see and hear interviews in the past where subjects are far less protective of their image than they are now. Asked if he ever physically attacked people he had worked with Friedkin candidly said, “there have been occasions.”
And unprompted he shared a story of slapping a priest on the set of “The Exorcist.”
“He was not an actor, he was a priest,” Friedkin admitted. “And it was four o’clock in the morning, we were freezing and he had to give the last rites to his friend who had just plunged from a top of a flight of steps.”
The filmmaker said the crew was freezing, they did 20-35 takes, but the priest wasn’t getting it, could not land the emotion of it and shared that he had read that other great directors, John Ford, George Stevens, has slapped people to get the proper line reading out of them, so he did. And it worked.
“I asked him if he loved me and if he trusted me and he said, ‘You know I do, Bill,’” he remembered. “And I told the cameras to get ready and I hit him as hard as I could across the face, I [called action], and he went right into this scene, the shock of it brought forth the tears and afterward he embraced me and thanked me.”
Suffice to say, that doesn’t really go down well in Hollywood anymore. Check out the clip below.
