19 OCT 2005: WTF? I just noticed that our link to the full-size pics has actually led to our dial-up pics. I suppose it would have killed you guys to mention this to us. (Bitch, bitch....)


What follows is an excerpt from a Moviehole.net interview with William Friedkin.. For the entire interview please go to:

Interview with William Friedkin


Interview : William Friedkin
Posted on Mon, 25-Nov-2002

It’s been an uncultivated couple of years for Veteran director William Friedkin. An acclaimed master of thrills and trepidation, as voted by his peers and pane, he’s been treated to an almost impromptu second coming with many of his premature classics in receipt of the all too infrequent re-release treatment. First his paramount and easily most lucrative film, “The Exorcist” was re-released – albeit in it’s directors cut structure – to much acclamation; and recently, he was lucky enough to have one of his minor classics, the thriller “Sorcerer” – now screening in it’s re-issued form in selected cinemas across Australia – unleashed to Australian audiences the way he intended it to be before the film’s distributor took a pair of scissors to it some 19 years before. We talk to the illustrious director about an unparalleled bonanza career, the aforesaid “Sorcerer” and his upcoming “The Hunted”, one of 2003’s most anticipated thrillers starring Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro.
The story of four convicts voluntarily surrendering their services to deliver nitrogenised bombs across some jagged jungle terrain, “Sorcerer” initially did nothing on it’s release – Director Friedkin says he partly blames that on the Australian distributor at the time, CIC. “The original version, the way I made it, never played Australia. It was cut at the time by a guy who was running distribution for CIC – which is now U.I.P – and he was subsequently fired for doing the same thing to a number of films. He was re-editing them to shorter running ti he could get more screenings in and he’d said ‘this film’s two hours, we’d make more money if we could take say half an hour out of it’ – and didn’t matter if you had final cut we didn’t even know this was going on until later”.

“I still don’t know the extent – I understand they quit the first half of it but I only found that out about a year ago when Jim Sherlock started to talk to me about re-releasing it over here (in Australia) in it’s original form.

“Sorcerer” was made at a time before computers – so Friedkin says audiences may appreciate they hand to do it all perfunctorily. “There were no any effects or optical’s in those days. It was extremely difficult and hazardous. If I knew it would be such a hassle – endanger people’s lives and my own – and then meet the sort of fate that it met in some parts of the world I wouldn’t have done it. But it is the favourite of all my films”, says Friedkin.

One possible reason “Sorcerer” may not have been successful at the outset is it’s disingenuous title. “The Sorcerer is an evil wizard and in this case the evil Wizard is fate, it’s more a film about fate and about the mystery of fate. The fact that somebody can walk out of their front door and a hurricane can take them away, an earthquake or something falling through the roof or something. And the idea that we don’t really have control over our own faits, neither our births nor our deaths, it’s something that has haunted me since I was intelligent enough to contemplate something like it”.

Friedkin says there’s nothing about the movie he’d like to change but he dearly wished his first choice, Steve McQueen, had headlined the film. “We’d sent him the script and he read it and called me back and said ‘this is the best script I’ve ever read – let’s do it’. Unfortunately, McQueen had just begun a relationship with Ali McGraw at the time and didn’t want to re-locate to South America where the film was to be shot. Although Friedkin said McQueen was quite welcome to bring along his new actress girlfriend for the shoot – McQueen wanted more: he wanted his girlfriend to receive an associate producer credit on the film. Friedkin says he superciliously discarded the command – and lost McQueen. “I think Scheider (Roy) is terrific. I think he’s wonderful, but McQueen is a genuine movie star that could have made the film more…user friendly?”