Next Level — William Friedkin on The French Connection

In October 2008 I got the chance to interview William Friedkin about one of my all-time favourite films and how it changed movies for good. An absolute legend. RIP.

Los Angeles 1970. William Friedkin is eating dinner with his then-girlfriend Kitty Hawks and her estranged father, the legendary film director Howard Hawks. The conversation inevitably turns to movies. Friedkin has just released his fourth feature, The Boys in the Band, an artful adaptation of Mart Crowley’s controversial play about New York’s gay subculture. It hasn’t done very well. Hawks is not surprised. “You don’t wanna do films like that,” he advises the upstart director, “you wanna do action pictures. That’s what people want.”

Cut to April 1972 and Friedkin is receiving the Academy Award for best director. His film is The French Connection, a blisteringly raw cop movie that will win five Oscars in total – including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Gene Hackman) – and gross more than $52 million at the box office. According to Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Friedkin’s change in fortunes are directly attributable to the advice Hawks gave him…

“No, no, not true.” Flash forward to October 2008 and Friedkin, on promotional duties for The French Connection’s Blu-ray release, is sitting in a London hotel suite pouring scorn on Biskind’s thesis as he pours himself a glass of organic pear juice. “That meeting did occur, and I remember Hawks saying that, but I didn’t run out and find an action picture,” explains the 73-year-old director.  “I’d never even been a huge Howard Hawks fan. He’s certainly not someone who would lead me on the road to Damascus.”

It’s not hard to see why people are keen to mythologise the origins of The French Connection, though: there aren’t many films that can lay claim to changing the cinematic landscape for the better. But with its hard-edged approach to the police procedural, its hand-held documentary styling, its breakneck speed, its legendary car chase and its anti-hero protagonist, Friedkin’s film can. Fusing the fluidity of the French New Wave with a classic American outlaw sensibility, its success marked the true arrival of New Hollywood, while the immediacy of his visual style (“induced documentary” as Friedkin calls it) proved so influential that even now, 37 years later, it feels more contemporary than ever, its legacy visible in everything from the Bourne movies and Quantum of Solace to a new generation of hard-hitting American TV cop shows such as The Wire and The Shield.

That it has become the benchmark for on-screen grit and authenticity is hardly surprising. Friedkin’s source material was a best-selling book by Robin Moore detailing the biggest drug bust in America history. Though not particularly interested in the book itself (it had been brought to him by Bullit producer Phil D’Antoni), after meeting the rough-and-tough detectives who cracked the case, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso (who went by the respective nicknames Popeye and Cloudy), he quickly became convinced it could be a great movie.

“In those days, the cops could do anything,” remembers Friedkin, who spent months going out on patrol with them while he was researching the film.  “That’s one of the things that drew me to the story. It was intentionally about the thin line between a policeman and a criminal. The most effective street cops at that time lived and thought like the people they were sent out to apprehend.”

To capture this, Friedkin threw away the script and kept Egan and Grosso on set, improvising all the dialogue from their words and getting them to advise stars Gene Hackman and the late Roy Scheider on the technical details of their performances.

That was rough on Hackman, who thought Egan was a brutal racist (he was) and didn't want his fictionalised take on Egan, Popeye Doyle, to go in that direction. “I had to provoke it out of him,” recalls Friedkin. “I’d get in his face. I’d say things that you should never say to an actor.”

It worked, too. Egan would tell everyone on set that Hackman “was more me than me.”

“Gene went crazy,” laughs Friedkin, “he couldn’t stand to be thought of as anything like Egan.” 

Shot entirely on location in the scummier parts of New York over five freezing weeks in the winter of 1970/1971, it was Friedkin’s documentary approach that really made the film stand out. Though Friedkin’s own background was in documentary and television, he insists it was French director Costa-Gavras’s politically charged 1969 thriller, Z, which showed him the way. “What he had done was a documentary-style thriller about the assassination of a Greek politician. It was such a great, visceral, energetic movie and I thought adapting that style would make for a different kind of American cop film.” 

Nevertheless Friedkin did take things to a new level, especially with the high-impact car chase in which Hackman speeds after an elevated train. Added to the script purely for commercial reasons, the director was determined to top the chase in Bullitt, so he did it without permits, on the fly and for real, with stuntman Bill Hickman driving and Friedkin operating the camera in the passenger seat. “We had this siren going and we just floored it,” recalls Friedkin. “We did 90 miles an hour for 26 blocks. All that cross traffic you see was real and the people on the street, they weren’t extras: they were there. And it was dangerous.”

It seems incredible was able to get away with it. “Oh, I wouldn’t do it again. I was much younger then and I didn’t have the reverence for human life that I have today.”

The French Connection opened in the US on the 9th October 1971 and though the studio hated it (releasing it as a double feature in some areas), it quickly took off on its own and had a seismic impact on the industry. In the eyes of the people running the studios, who didn’t understand the European influences Friedkin’s generation were adopting, its box-office and Academy Awards success legitimised this new approach and, for a few years, helped turn the tide away from the clunky, outdated studio pictures Hollywood had been making.

Over the years its influence has continued to grow. The adherence to exhaustive research that lends modern crime dramas their authenticity can be traced back to the hours Friedkin put in with Egan and Grosso. Any modern police procedural featuring flawed, nihilistic, close-to-the-edge cops, meanwhile, can’t help but have a trace of Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in its DNA. As for the impact of its docudrama approach, just ask Bourne director Paul Greengrass, whose documentary-to-movies background mirrors Friedkin’s. On the DVD commentary for The Bourne Ultimatum he readily talks about the “wink” his movies gives the The French Connection, which he not only calls “one of his favourite films” but “probably the great action film of all time.” High praise indeed.

 “Oh, I didn’t know that,” says Friedkin. “I’ve never met him, but he’s made three films that I think are exceptional: the two Bourne films and United 93. And yes, there is a French Connection flavour to them, but they’re totally original in my view.”

 Does he see its influence elsewhere? “I think it’s best left for other film makers to talk about such things,” says Friedkin. “I’ve certainly seen some of the things in other films, but that’s all fine. I was influenced by Costa-Gavras and Jean-Luc Godard. Films beget films.”