William Friedkin named the best movie he ever made: “And I still feel that way”
Pressed to name William Friedkin’s best film, most of us would immediately point to his truly iconic 1973 masterpiece, The Exorcist. A movie that not only terrified audiences worldwide but redefined horror as a genre. It still remains a pioneering achievement, one of the rare movies that continues to be just as terrifying over five decades since its release, which is no small feat. However, Friedkin himself might have begged to differ.
The truth is that directors are more often drawn to the movies that they connect with personally and hold up as their greatest. Those connections can be formed for a variety of reasons: they could be the movie on which they met their future spouse, the picture that got them their first Oscar, or, sometimes, the film that gave them their toughest spot of criticism.
In 1977, Friedkin directed Sorcerer, an action-adventure film in which four men attempt to hide from the law in South America and are offered $10,000 and legal citizenship in exchange for transporting a dangerous shipment. Sorcerer was adapted from a 1949 French novel by Georges Arnaud called Le Salaire de la Peur, or The Wages of Fear, and it wasn’t the first movie made about the book.
In 1953, a French adaptation was directed by the great French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. This adaption was wildly successful and went on to win the ‘Golden Bear’ award at the Berlin Film Festival and the ‘Palme d’Or’ at the Cannes Film Festival—a pretty impressive trove of awards. But Friedkin’s version wasn’t greeted remotely as well, being described as “confusing, pretentious and depressing”.
With the critical response leaving the director a little cold, Friedkin found himself not only upset but perplexed by the reviews. In an interview with Mark Kermode for Sight & Sound in 2017, he described having truly believed the film was great: “Well, I was extremely disappointed because I honestly thought this was the best film I had ever made, and I still feel that way. So, I felt bad that I didn’t get it over to the audience. I didn’t feel like something horrible had been done to me. I just thought I had failed. I absolutely felt that whatever I did that I thought was so brilliant just didn’t work. I thought I had let the audience down, and I just couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.”
Upon its release, the film competed with George Lucas’ Star Wars, and audiences made their winner clear. The mega-hit sci-fi adventure was a cultural behemoth, and Friedkin himself said, “That was the only film you had to see that year.” Sorcerer was both a critical and commercial failure upon its release, but it has since been refigured as “an overlooked gem,” with author Stephen King even calling it his favourite film of all time.
Friedkin reflected on the experience of producing the film, saying that the novel itself “wasn’t great” but that it was “good pulp, which often makes the best movies”. He also said that the author Arnaud was “crazy – a very ornery old guy” who hated Clouzot’s adaption and “hated my film too!” In his interview with Kermode, Friedkin recounts the first time he encountered criticism for the film, he thought was going to be his best work: “There was a great film critic for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin, who had always given my films rave reviews. So I went and got the paper the day after Sorcerer opened in two theatres in LA and two in NY. So I’m walking back up the hill, and I open the page to his review, and it begins: ‘What went wrong?’ And the rest was devastating. That’s when I knew.”
Along with the negative reviews, the production of the film itself was long and difficult, leading Friedkin to describe it as “the most difficult, frustrating and dangerous film I’ve ever made” in his 2013 memoir. Still, there is one thing he made sure to praise: the fact that it was, as he puts it, “‘Acoustic’; it’s not made with digital effects. Everything you see in the film, we had to do!”
