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William Friedkin:- It was 666 Fifth Avenue. As a matter of fact, that's where the editing was done.
(Laughing) 666... I'm glad I didn't know that at the time.
You remember it now.
I do now. And I recall standing up in a moviola in this office, and I was just blown away. I was staggered by it. I thought it was so glorious. I wanted to pick up the phone immediatly and call Leo Greenfield who was the head of...
Distribution
Distribution, and say Leo (the big picture up to then was The Godfather) you're gonna give this a Godfather distribution pattern aren't you? "Of course, yes, certainly". I mean he thought I was raving mad, but I'd just seen the film.
But at that point I hadn't yet shown the film to any Warner executives. The only audience I had in mind up till then was you, Bill, and I felt that if you were happy with the film, then I had achieved what I had set out to do. But that first cut was about two hours and fifteen minutes, and frankly it bothered me that it was so long. Generally speaking if a film goes on over two hours people tend to tune out. They give up. Your mind may be going with it, , even your heart may be going with it, but your ass gets tired! I always felt that with this kind of story, which dealt with unusual supernatural elements, that the best thing to do would be to get in and out as quickly as possible, and not let the audience think about what they're watching.
That is exactly what you told me at the time. And I remember vividly some time after the film had opened I asked you, 'Why did you cut those fifteen minutes out?' And you said, 'Bill, I didn't know it was going to be a hit'.
That's true. We didn't know what we had then, and I just didn't think people would sit still for it. So after I'd shown it to you, I ran the film for the Warner Bros. executives. And John Calley, who was head of production, made three suggestions; to reverse the order of a few scenes; to lose one of the meetings with the doctors because the audience already knows that this is not a sick girl, it's a possessed girl; and to cut the ending. He said the conversation between Dyer and Kinderman didn't work because they had no history, so the scene had no weight. For him, the movie ended with Dyer looking down the steps where Karras had died. Well, I was even more arrogant then than I am now, so I thanked Calley for his comments and then dismissed them thinking, "Who the hell is this guy to tell me what to do with the film?" But over the next few days, what he said started to prey on my mind. So I went back into the cutting room and looked at it the way he suggested, and I must say it felt better that way. So I re-cut it. And of course there was other material that I cut on my own intuition, like the 'birthday trip', where Regan says, "Mother, why do people have to die?" That was a beautiful scene, but I took it out because I felt it was too much.
Well, here's the importance that I think that scene has, particularly since you took a lot of stuff with the doctors on John Calley's advice. What we have now is a film in which I am given no clue that anything's wrong with Regan before Chris's party. As a matter of fact, on the night of the party we see Regan smiling, laughing, walking through the crowd. The next thing she's urinating on the carpet and asking her mother, "What's wrong with me?" and Chris tells her, "It's nerves, just keep taking the pills like the doctor said." Now, even if you forget the first doctor scene, if you just had the scene in which Regan asks, " Mother, why do people have to die?" we could have seen that there was a problem with this child. Even if it's just a fit of the blues, we're at least focused on this girl not being the happy-go-lucky kid.
But I think we did achieve that in the wonderful scene where we hear Chris attempting to talk to her ex-husband on the phone in Rome. She's cursing the international operator, using foul language, for the first time, and then the camera pulls back to reveal that Regan is listening to this, dejectedly. So in that one scene we've established that there is a conflict between Regan's father and mother, and that she is maybe internalising that conflict. Also it sets up that she's hearing this foul language and perhaps later on she's mimicking it. To me, it's all there in just that one beautiful, simple shot. That feeling of the blues that you're talking about, the dejection that the child feels as a result of overhearing the conflict between her parents. I thought that scene psychologically set up what happens next, and for me a picture is worth a thousand words.
That is a point well taken, and I will also grant that I have never heard the complaint that I have just made from any member of any audience that has ever seen The Exorcist. Nobody has ever mentioned it. But my problem is simply that of the carpenter saying, "Look, there's something wrong with the carpentry of the story here, it needs another piece."
I have total sympathy with that feeling, but as I said I edited the film in order to make it as commercially acceptable as possible. And in fact we shot other material like the 'spider-walk' which of course we never included in any cut of the film.
As I recall, Chris has just come back from the doctors office and she knows now that they've got to get a psychiatrist. And then, Chris has found out that Burke is dead, and then in the novel Sharon gasps and Chris turns and looks and down the steps is Regan, contorted backwards, looking all intents like a tarantula. I don't know if we actually shot it this way, but in the novel and in the script she gets to the bottom of the stairs and she licks Sharon's ankle, at which point Chris screams, "Jesus, get the doctor now!"
I'll tell you why that shot never made the film; it's because I never shot a reaction from Chris and Sharon. I remember I was having great difficultygetting what I thought was a proper reaction from Ellen Burstyn to the news of the death of Burke Dennings. I never really figured out what the proper reaction should be, because in fact Dennings was pushed out of Regan's bedroom window. So on the one hand she has to cope with the death of her friend, and on the other she has to cope with the fact that the guy was alone in the house with Regan. So she has to entertain those two thoughts simultaniously. And I don't know how many takes we did of Ellen reacting to that news, but none of them seemed to work. Her instinct was to go silent, to just take it all in and not show anything visibly. That didn't seem to work, so we finally wound up with her turning away from the fellow who's brought the news, and pounding the wall with her fists. Now, it seemed to me that, having had a great deal of difficulty getting Ellen to that moment, to react to Burke's death, that I could not then make the trtansition from that to how she would have reacted on top of that to the 'spider-walk'.
Bill, I think it may well have been a problem in the writing, I mean that. Because what you're being asked to do there is deal with a double climax. And in fact neither one is the end of the scene.
That's right. The end of the scene is basically her pounding her fists on the wall, and we fade out.
I just thought of how I should have written it Bill. Actually the moment Chris hears the words 'Burke is dead' there should have been a scream from Sharon instantly, " Chris!" and then before there's anytime to react to that 'boom'.
That would have been great. But it seemed to me that to add the spider-walk then was really pushing it. Plus, at that point we hadn't really seen any of the massive manifestations that were to come.
You're right, and I think you were right to cut it. But there are other scenes, like the original ending, which I do think belong in the film.
Well, I know that there's been a lot of controversy about certain scenes that I cut out, particularly the last scene between Kinderman and Dyer, which I know you love. But my feeling as the interpreter of that material was that it was overstated. Calley said it made the film end with a whimper rather than a bang, and I kind of agreed with him. We didn't need it.
But there's a sense in which we did need it Bill. And you recall that the problem became apparent when, despite adding that shot of Karras actually saying to the demon, "Take me, come into me!" and then going out through the window, audiences still got it wrong. We went through the choreography of every shot in that sequence with one view in mind - to make the audience clearly understand that it was Karras taking the demon out of the window, and not the other way around. But they still missed it. I first realised that we had a real problem in spite of all that effort when I was having dinner with Frank Wells from Warners. I said to him, "You know, one thing I'm really disappointed about is that some people seem to think that the demon is taking Karras out of the window! Can you believe that?" And there was a lengthy silence. And then Frank, God bless him, who was a very honest man, said, "Er...well, I thought that's what happened. You're saying that's not it?" No! We had that problem with a lot of people, and you know what it is? I've thought about this for a long time, and it's not that it wasn't delineated filmically in a very clear way. It's that the audience is so numb with shock at that particular point in the film that they're not noticing the choreography. They're not seeing it, they're not hearing it - all thet're getting is a guy who goes out the window. They're shell-shocked. They're shell-shocked because it's so clear, and yet it's so unclear. So the problem that we created, through no fault of our own, is that many people, to this day, interperet The Exorcist as a downer. And as a result, you and I actually went searching at one point for a new ending that would allow the audience to feel, "Hey, cool it, everything's okay. Everything is alright. The good guy's won." I thought, and I concede that I may have been wrong, that the scene from the novel between Kinderman and Dyer accomplished that - that even without fully understanding it, they would know that Karras does really live on forever. The relationship that Karras had with Kinderman now lives on through Dyer, God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world. Maybe it didn't, but that was my intention, and I think that's something the film could use.
You know, I think you're right to this extent, and I think what we should do with this new version is have you come on at the end and say to the audience, "This film is not a downer folks! This is not a downer!"
[Laughing] I'm ready.
Yeah, "And Karras lives on!" My feeling, even though I just got through a lengthy that will probably be cut, of interpretation and where I varied from the written text, all of that gets put a side I think, because what I really was feeling was that we are trying to tell the audience this very thing that you're saying, and my feeling is that if they don't know, then what are they doing in the theatre, you know, if they can't take a joke then to hell with them. Because this relates to other cuts in the film, the dialogue between Merrin and Karras in a break during the exorcism, which now is just the two guys sitting on stairs but what you had written a beautiful piece of dialogue for the two of them, but I felt that you were explaining to the audience how to feel about this experience, which I always thought was inherent in the story you wrote. That's the difference between your approach and mine. I think that if the film is successful, it succeeds at the point where your approach and mine both end and meet. You really do believe that there is one specific meaning that the audience must understand to have a full experience. My feeling is that there is a specific meaning to these events,that the audience should discover for themselves.
Well, I agree to an extent. I certainly believe that the film as it is delievers a positive message about faith and spirituality and transcendence on the most basic level. There are spirits, good ones and bad ones. It works. I wanted the explanation from Merrin in the film because I thought it would be good to hear him tell Karras, "Look, this isn't about this little girl, we are the target". And that the object is to make us despair of our humanity, to feel that we are vile, putrescent, bestial creatures and even if there were a God, he could not possibly love us. Now, while I feel that that is absolutley true on a theological level, it also has a function which is this: it gives the audience a core, a reason, an explanation of why all this - let's face it - shock and obscenity is taking place. It allows the audience not to despise themselves for loving all that obscenity, the torture of the little girl, the crucifix masturbation. It allows them to enjoy the film for what it is, and not revile themselves for enjoying it. Does that make sense?
Indeed it does. And in fact we did try, years later, to go back and shoot another ending which would achieve more of what you wanted in terms of the film's spiritual message. I suggested to you that we add a shot of Karras coming up the Georgetown steps as Father Dyer looks down, which I thought would enompass, without a single word of dialogue, the essence of Karras rising again, being resurrected. But I couldn't do it because when I went back to Georgetown the whole set had been completly transformed. The steps had been graffitied, people had chipped pieces out of them, and they'ed even ripped all the boards out of Mrs. Mahoney's fence. Now there was barb wire around it, and it just wasn't the same location anymore, so I abandoned the notion. Then more recently we considered the possibilty of shooting a whole new ending in which the film fades out, as before, and then we come up on a shot of William O'Malley walking by the potomac, twenty-five years on.
Actually I had originally set that in St. Andrews on the Hudson, the seminary in New York. And I had Dyer saying his office, when a long comes a jogger, a sort of young Nick Nolte type, who turns out to be a garrulous young guy who wants to engage the priest in conversation. The priest just wants to be rid of him, but then the rough edged young man starts talking about the problem of evil and, indeed, offers a solution to it. He compares it to surgery - you know, when you're under the knife you can hear and see everything that's going on, but you keep forgetting it from second to second, so when you awaken you think you were out the whole time. And this jogger says that maybe that's what pain, suffering and evil in the world are analogus to. From the viewpoint of eternity, it will just seem to us as if we were on the table and we will remember nothing about the operation. At that point, Dyer starts to realise that something is up here, and then, without seeing anything, we hear Jason Miller's voice saying, "Don't you know me Joe?" And Dyer turns, and there's a pillar of light, and he falls to his knees and cries, "Glory be to God!" as this light ascends and joins a hundred thousand other lights. I wrote that ending, and you loved it, Bill.
Yes, I did, but Warners wouldn't do it. It would have cost them about $400,000 to put that one scene on a film that had already made about $300 million with out it, so what was the point? But you know that while we're talking like this, I am put in mind of an anecdote about the French Impressionist painter Bonnard, who in his later years was arrested in the Louvre with a little palette and brush, retouching one of his paintings. The security guards grabbed him and he was shouting, "But I'm Bonnard! It's my painting!" And they just kept saying, "The painting is in the Louvre. It's finished!" And every time I've had an impulse to try and satisfy you, Bill, what stops me is my memory of what the security said to Bonnard. "It's hanging on the walls of the Louvre, pal, it's finished, it's over! Walk away." You know it's flawed, it will never be perfect in your mind or perhaps mine though having seen it recently, I think it is as close to a perfect film as you can make. I'm just thinking about how it's made, the way the cast embodies the characters, and that people actually believed what they saw on the screen. Some of them maybe had a different interpretation of that, that's always bothered you, I've always rejoiced in it.
I don't want them to think the devil won.
But to me it's how could they possibly think that?
Well, the problem is the audience, as I've long suspected.
And I do always come back to the feeling that I have that almost everybody who sees the movie takes away from it what they bring to it. If you go into the theatre thinking that the world is a foul and evil place where the devil triumphs constantly every day, then that is what you're going to get from The Exorcist. If on the other hand you believe, as I do, that there is a force of good which is forever combating evil, then that is what you'll come away with.
This makes me think about Billy Graham again. He felt this power of evil which, in his interpretation, was buried within the celluloid of the film itself. And actually I do believe that there is such a power in the film, not evil, but a power nonetheless. And I don't know the cause of it. And because I don't know the cause of it, I have to confess that I have no concept of what it would do to the emotional chemistry of the film if we were to put back the material that I want. Maybe that power that's spoken of would disintegrate. There would be a danger in any kind of tampering. But it would be interesting to know...
Yes, it would. And you know that at one point I was willing to put everything back in the way you wrote it and we shot it. But they can't find all of it - some of the soundtrack is missing - and I'm absolutley not interest in a partial restoration.
