William Friedkin, the director who turned his own exile into a second career

William Friedkin

Photo: Jeremiah Garcia / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 29, 1935 Chicago, Illinois, USA
Died	August 7, 2023 (87)
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer
Awards	Academy Award · Golden Globe · Venice Film Festival Special Lion

William Friedkin made the two most profitable films of his generation, lost everything on his next picture, and spent the following twenty years proving that the industry’s verdict on him was a function of timing rather than talent. The French Connection and The Exorcist launched him as the most dangerous directorial talent in American cinema. Sorcerer, his follow-up, was a masterwork that opened the same week as Star Wars and was effectively erased by the collision. The career that survived this catastrophe — long, strange, intermittently brilliant — is more instructive than most directors manage in an uncomplicated lifetime.

He came to film from a direction nobody expected. Born in Chicago in 1935, Friedkin left high school and walked directly into the mailroom of a local television station. There was no film school, no mentorship, no family connection to the industry. He taught himself to shoot by watching everything that moved, and his early documentary work carried a strange moral intensity that would define everything after. The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) argued that a convicted murderer’s death sentence should be commuted. The sentence was commuted. It was Friedkin’s first film, and it already showed a director who believed cinema could accomplish something in the world.

Hollywood took a decade to know what to do with him. His early features — a Sonny and Cher vehicle, a Harold Pinter adaptation, a film about New York’s gay cabaret scene that was a decade ahead of its commercial moment — formed an unlikely apprenticeship. Then The French Connection arrived. Gene Hackman as Detective Popeye Doyle became the definitive portrait of a certain kind of American law enforcement: vicious, effective, impossible to fully root for. The film won five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director. Friedkin was 36.

What came next should not have surprised anyone paying close attention. The Exorcist (1973) was not the work of a director cashing in on success. It was the work of a man genuinely troubled by the material he was adapting — William Peter Blatty’s novel of demonic possession set against the specific anxieties of a collapsing American certainty. The film earned ten Academy Award nominations, was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture, and generated a kind of audience response — people fainting, walking out — that cinema had rarely provoked before. Adjusted for inflation, it remains one of the highest-grossing films in American cinema history.

Sorcerer followed in 1977. Friedkin had spent four years making what he considered his most ambitious film: a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, set among stateless men hauling unstable explosives through a South American jungle. Tangerine Dream wrote the score. Roy Scheider led the cast. The film opened against Star Wars. Within weeks it had effectively vanished from theaters. Friedkin spent years believing the failure had been structurally engineered; the film’s gradual rehabilitation — which accelerated sharply in the 2010s — vindicated him without restoring the commercial damage.

The decade that followed contained Cruising (1980), an Al Pacino thriller set in New York’s underground leather bars that was protested during production and has never stopped being argued about. The arguments have shifted considerably since 1980 — not to vindication exactly, but toward the recognition that the film was doing something more complicated than its critics initially allowed. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) restored some critical credibility. But by the mid-1980s Friedkin was no longer the director studios called first. He was the director who had been impossibly hot and was now almost entirely cold.

His response was to stop asking Hollywood for permission. From 1998 onward he directed opera — Salome, Aida, Rigoletto — at major houses in Europe and the United States. He published a memoir, The Friedkin Connection, in 2013. And he made Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011), two films that showed a director with no interest in scale, comfort, or career rehabilitation. Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in a room, slowly losing their minds. Matthew McConaughey as a contract killer installed in a Texas trailer park. These were films that no studio would have greenlit at the height of Friedkin’s commercial power, which is part of why they felt more like him than anything he had made in the intervening decades.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, completed in 2023 and adapted from Herman Wouk’s play, starred Kiefer Sutherland and was set entirely in a single courtroom — no flashbacks, no exterior shots, nothing but men in uniform arguing about evidence, authority, and command. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2023. Friedkin had died twenty-three days earlier, on August 7, from heart failure and pneumonia. He was 87. The last image he left with audiences was a room of men in disagreement about whether the truth can be established. It was the argument he had been having with Hollywood since 1977, translated into Wouk’s navy courtroom and left there for the audience to finish without him.