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With The Exorcist and The French Connection to his name, William Friedkin was the director who most successfully straddled studio genre films and more independent work. That was back in the '70s, when such a balancing act was possible. Known both for his portraits of intense personalities on the edge and for his bravura setpieces (the man singlehandedly turned the car chase into an art form), Friedkin was the prototypical thinking-man's action filmmaker. Which is also why some blame his box office downfall (with expensive, underperforming and underrated films such as Sorcerer and Cruising) on the big-budget, kid-oriented sci-fi and fantasy films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Now, Friedkin has returned with Bug, a devastating chamber piece starring Ashley Judd. It's the director's best film in years, and a welcome return to form for one of the most exciting directorial voices of the past few decades. Nerve sat down to speak with Friedkin recently in New York. — Bilge Ebiri

Even though Bug is based on Tracy Letts's play, and Letts himself wrote the screenplay, it really felt consistent with your other films. There's the same attraction to extreme behavior, the same power dynamic between strong and weak personalities.

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I was definitely on the same page with this playwright. That's what attracted me to this story. It really got into this dark view of the world. I saw the play a couple of years ago, when it was off Broadway. In fact, I saw it twice. I felt it had tremendous cinematic capability. The fact is, I rarely go out looking for something. Everything finds me, be it a book, a play, an anecdote, a snatch of conversation I overheard at a party. To Live and Die in L.A. started off with some stories I heard about the erratic behavior of Secret Service guys. It's a bizarre world — you have these guys who are one day protecting the President of the United States, and the next day they're working for the Treasury Department chasing some guy for credit card fraud. The surrealism of these worlds, and of going from one to the other, was what drew me to that film. With Bug, it was the worldview, the reality of these characters.

Do you have to be able to empathize with these extreme, troubled characters to make them work?
If you can't find the characters inside of you, there's no reason to do the film. In Bug, this woman who is very vulnerable, who has had horrible relationships, who is lonely and depressive, meets this guy whom she feels she can trust, and she latches onto his worldview. That has to be believable for the story to work. It happens in real life. Somebody loved Hitler. Somebody was married to Nixon. Somebody was married to Kissinger. These are guys who were ready to blow up the world. I don't know that Mrs. Bush thinks there's anything wrong with what her husband is doing, even though we're feeding the beast of the Iraq War. Many people think they're right.

So do you see Bug as a political film?
I think Bug reflects the climate we're in. There was that poll recently that said that thirty-five percent of Democrats think that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. And fifteen percent of Republicans or something. There are people out there who can be convinced of anything. That's the climate we're in.

What's most heartbreaking about Bug is that, at a certain point, we want this crazy conspiracy theory to be true, because we like these characters.
That's the genius of this writer. He gets you into their heads, into their way of seeing the world. He makes you believe in everything they say — up to a certain point. And we really care about them. Their vulnerability is part of their appeal.

You didn't open up the play to make it more cinematic. We're consistently confined to this hotel room.
If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Inititally, the material has to appear to be cinematic. I have to feel that it's going to be a movie when I read it, or see it. That means strong characters, great dialogue, good suspense. And like I said, it can come from anywhere. The origins of this play were the news stories about Tim McVeigh. Who was this guy, so committed to this belief, who had developed this whole worldview — which to him appeared to be consistent? And who were the people who helped him, and the extremes to which they were willing to take that?

You let the actors pull out all the stops, performance-wise, toward the end. Many contemporary directors, especially when directing something based on a play, would be afraid to allow such big performances.
Well, the performance has to be on the page. I can't encourage them, or make them do much of anything, if it's not there. In fact, more often than not, my job is to hold them back, because the movie screen is not the stage. It records every movement of your face. The medium requires subtlety. But this playwright takes you to that place, where big emotions feel natural. It's inevitable.

The film's final, mysterious shots will provoke some discussion.
Part of the idea is that eventually we have no idea what was true and what was not. It's not clear, for example, that the child is gone. It's not clear that there is a Dr. Sweet. It's possible they don't exist in this story. The film is shot through Agnes and Peter's eyes, and their thoughts. There's probably a third dimension, in which the reality is different. An outside observer might see something totally different. So, I wanted to give a sense of other possibilities, without necessarily spelling it out. It's meant to provoke some sense of unease, some doubt.

It's really all about seeing the world through someone else's eyes. Have you ever sat in a restaurant, or in the park, looked at the people around you and started to think about their lives? You sit there and you think, "What does this guy do?" This can take you to elaborate places. It's what Proust did. He overheard conversations, which tapped into his childhood anguish, his unrequited love. And he recreated his own autobiography. Which, in its broad details, might be like his life, but once you go into its details, much of it is fictional.

A lot of directors have tried to film Proust. Would you?
Proust can't be filmed. It's like The Great Gatsby. It's not the plot that makes it so great. What turns it into a great book is the writing, the voice of the author, and in a film, it's inevitable that you would lose that.

What's the most ambitious film you've made, or have tried to make?
Everything I do is ambitious. Everything I do is kind of a dream project. It's all incredibly ambitious, and incredibly difficult. I have a hell of a time making a film. Everything I've done is a major challenge to me before I do it. And sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail — but that's another story.

Which of your films don't work?
The Guardian doesn't work. The first film I did, Good Times, with Sonny and Cher, isn't very good. Some of my films I didn't think worked particularly well at the time, but later on I'll see them again and think better of them. Deal of the Century keeps playing on TV, and I look at it, and I think, you know, this film is becoming more and more relevant. It was a dark comedy when we made it, but that character [Chevy Chase as an arms dealer who specializes in selling second-rate weapons to Third World countries] is no longer a fictional, comic creation. Guys like that are all over the place now.

Cruising was much reviled at the time of its release. . .
Not universally, but a lot of people did hate it. I understand why it was reviled. It was the beginning of the gay-rights movement. And it was perceived as a film that didn't put the gay community's best foot forward at the time. Any time you make a movie about a minority that's not entirely a positive depiction, you'll provoke a lot of resentment, especially if they perceive that you're not one of them. Look at The Passion of the Christ. There was a lot of Jewish anger at that film, people saying, "This terrible slander, how could he do that?" It's been in the New Testament for two thousand years. It's not meant to be a reflection of Jewish people today, or anything else. And Jesus himself was born, lived, and died a Jew. But a lot of people had problems with that film. I'm Jewish, and I didn't. I just thought it was a film about the mystery of faith.

Cruising was interpreted as anti-gay, but it was nothing of the sort. It simply used the leather bars as background to a murder mystery — and you have to understand that to the vast majority of the audience that was an exotic, strange background, like a foreign country. But the director was perceived as straight, and the film was seen as an attack on the gay lifestyle.

But now it's screening in a restored print at Cannes and coming out on DVD. Do you feel vindicated?
It's not about being vindicated, but I'm glad people will be able to see it again. And the new print looks amazing. It was the most requested film of any that weren't available on DVD. When Warner took over from United Artists, they went to video stores around the country, and sent a list of a number of titles that weren't available, and asked people to pick: "Which of these titles do you most want to see released on DVD?" Cruising came out way ahead of any other film. Of course, it does have a history and a kind of notoriety. So that helps. And it comes out in theaters in September.

As one of the major American directors of the 1970s, do you think we mythologize that period too much today?
Yes. People feel a sense of loss about that period, especially in light of the films being made today. But to me, the real golden age was the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. That's when the real masterpieces were being made. Of the films made in the 1970s, how many can you put in the same category as Casablanca, The Band Wagon, Citizen Kane or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Or for that matter Gone With the Fucking Wind?

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©2007 Bilge Ebiri & Nerve.com


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