The car chase William Friedkin conceived specifically to top ‘The French Connection’: “I was terrified”
On February 25th, 1963, an exhausted William Friedkin was driving home from a wedding in Chicago. At the time, he was a young documentary filmmaker trying to transition to making features in Hollywood. He’d go on to helm defining classics like The Exorcist and Sorcerer, of course, but if that fateful night had gone slightly differently, none of his success would have come to pass.
Friedkin was so tired that he fell asleep at the wheel, waking up to find himself driving against traffic on the wrong side of the road. In a panic, he narrowly averted disaster by swerving off the highway – and then spent 20 years pondering how to turn that hair-raising experience into a thrilling cinematic car chase.
By the time he found the correct movie that facilitated the addition of his death-defying car chase idea, though, he’d already blown people’s minds with one outrageous sequence. In 1971’s The French Connection, he threw caution to the wind and endangered the lives of his actors, crew, and hundreds of innocent New York bystanders by shooting that Oscar-winning classic’s legendary chase under an elevated train.
For years, it seemed like Friedkin was happy to let that chase be his defining contribution to what he called “the purest form of cinema, something that can’t be done in any other medium, not in literature nor on a stage nor on a painter’s canvas.” However, that heart-stopping idea of a chase set against the flow of traffic wouldn’t ever leave his mind – and on the set of 1985’s To Live and Die in LA, he floated the notion to his stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker. He told him that he’d only commit to doing another car chase if it could feasibly top The French Connection – and Hooker rose to the challenge.
For the last six weeks of shooting, Friedkin and Hooker enlisted 40 stunt performers and their two lead actors, William Peterson and John Pankow, for a chase that would be legitimately frightening. Amazingly, the film’s director of photography, Robby Müller, refused to be involved because he felt it was too dangerous. So, Friedkin simply roped in the second unit cameraman, Robert D Yeoman, instead.
The sequence runs eight minutes in the film, with an extensive section of Peterson and Pankow speeding through the streets of LA before they explode onto the freeway in the wrong lane. Peterson revealed, “I was able to do a lot of the driving stuff, and I wanted to do all of it. It got to the point where it was much more fun to be doing the stunts than it was to be doing any of the acting stuff.” His co-star Pankow didn’t think the experience was “fun,” though. “I didn’t really have to act,” he admitted. “I was terrified a lot of the time.”
For the freeway section of the chase, the production rented and blocked off a portion of the Terminal Island Freeway near Wilmington, California, for three weekends and filled it with 900 vehicles to give the impression of rush hour traffic. Interestingly, while this portion of the chase is most fondly remembered, it was the only time Friedkin acquiesced to making it less dangerous for everyone involved.
In the movie, it looks like Peterson and the car he is pursuing are driving against traffic, but the opposite is actually true. In reality, he was driving in the correct direction, and through Hollywood smoke and mirrors, the rest of the traffic flowed backwards on the wrong side of the road.
Amusingly, Hooker confessed that Friedkin might not have been primarily motivated by making sure everyone made it through the chase in one piece. Instead, he noted, “There were these beautiful oil refineries with all the lights, and it was a dusk shot. Friedkin wanted to see that in the background with the cars going, and the only way he could do that was to reverse the flow of the traffic.”
Ultimately, it’s debatable whether Friedkin topped the French Connection chase – arguably the greatest of all time – with To Live and Die in LA‘s bonkers backwards demolition derby. However, they’re probably neck and neck, meaning he made two of the greatest car chases ever committed to celluloid, which isn’t bad going.
