The notoriously dangerous scene that William Friedkin was lucky to pull off: “I wouldn’t do anything like this today”
As far as car chase scenes go, few movies have managed to top Gene Hackman driving erratically through the streets of Brooklyn in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection.
It remains one of those classic “how on earth did they fucking film this?” sequences, and the truth is as shocking as the moment Hackman nearly runs over a woman and her goddamn baby.
Everyone is talking about that car chase scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Never in the history of cinema have three people driving in a straight line looked so suffocatingly intense. But let’s go back some 54 years and think for a minute about the absolute madness of William Friedkin and his genre-defining car chase sequence. The notorious scene in The French Connection sees Popeye in hot pursuit of a suspect, driving through Brooklyn parallel to the elevated train track. He throws the traffic into absolute chaos and crashes into several cars in the way. Thank god it’s all fiction, right?
Well, no, not really. According to Friedkin, stunt driver Bill Hickman drove 26 blocks at 90 miles per hour, and the only thing staged in the whole scene was the moment Popeye avoided a collision with a woman and her child. It goes without saying that Friedkin had only one chance to make it right – here’s a man who genuinely trusted his crew. It was an absolute miracle that no one got hurt shooting the scene.
In an interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Friedkin revealed that the only thing they had permits for was to shoot on the elevated train, where the other half of the action takes place. While Popeye is driving madly through Brooklyn, hitman Pierre Nicoli hijacks a train. The “permits” Friedkin referred to were the result of a bargain between the film crew and a New York official. The man gave Friedkin permission to shoot on the elevated train in exchange for $40,000 and a one-way ticket to Jamaica. A win-win situation for everyone involved. Well, except for the goddamn poor drivers who crossed paths with Hickman’s runaway car.
The car chase in The French Connection is a pivotal moment in the movie where every character is driven solely by fucking despair. Not a single rational thought crossing their minds. Below is Popeye turning the streets of Brooklyn into hell while Nicoli is fighting to take over the moving train above. They are moving in the same direction, but their destinations are not the same. It’s a strange game of cat and mouse, a twisted version of hide-and-seek, where whoever is found first is shot dead.
Friedkin later confessed that it was pretty stupid to shoot the scene the way he did. However, he didn’t regret it either (classic Friedkin – you don’t become one of the most badass filmmakers in the industry just like that). The stakes were too fucking high, but the final result was priceless. He didn’t want his crew to expose themselves to danger (and all the other goddamn shitstorms that came with it) without him, so he volunteered to operate the camera next to Hickman’s shoulder.
The days of practical stunts were truly something. There’s something beautiful about a film director instructing his crew to shoot an illegal car chase in the streets of New York. It’s this kind of trust in the fulfilment of art that makes cinema so meaningful. After all, nothing is necessary in a movie. Friedkin didn’t have to shoot a car chase this ambitious. But he did – he put fiction and reality on collision course and delivered a cinematic feat for the ages.
