Sundance ’20: Leap of Faith—William Friedkin on the Exorcist

William Peter Blatty paid extended tribute to the mother who had such a formative influence in Crazy, one of his final novels (which—disclosure—I helped market). It was shared experience William Friedkin could relate to and bond with Blatty over when they collaborated on the celebrated film adaptation of his most famous novel, especially in the scenes depicting Father Karras and his mother. That is the sort of in-depth commentary Firedkin offers throughout Alexandre O. Philippe’s Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

It would be fair to think of Leap as the special Exorcist supplement to Francesco Zippel’s career-survey documentary, Friedkin Uncut, except the director is the only voice heard during Philippe’s film. Arguably, The Exorcist is the only genre film that is sufficiently intriguing and significant to support such a “director’s commentary track” approach, but it is the Exorcist, so it can. Needless to say, Friedkin’s candor and enthusiasm help tremendously.

Friedkin’s deep dive roughly follows the film’s narrative, with quite a bit of time devoted to the prologue in northern Iraq. Even today, some viewers do not get it, but it is what helps make the film so distinctive. During the course of his examination, Friedkin reveals the film almost had two jazz-related associations. Ken Nordine of Word Jazz fame was recruited to create the demon voice, but just couldn’t get it right. Similarly, Friedkin rejected a score composed by Lalo Schifrin, who reportedly was not at all happy about it.

Friedkin Uncut: The Exorcist, The French Connection, Etc.

William Friedkin directed the scariest film of all time and he also survived some of the scariest flops in Hollywood history. Two of the latter, Sorcerer and Cruising have enjoyed an appreciative critical reappraisal in the years since their release (but Jade, not so much). All in all, it is quite a career for the filmmaker and his colleagues to reflect on throughout Francesco Zippel’s Friedkin Uncut, which is currently playing in Los Angeles.

When Friedkin first sits down with Zippel and a cup of black coffee, he offers up an extended riff on how Jesus and Hitler are such intriguing characters because of the extremes they represent. This is the sort of material we would expect from a pretentious English major, but once he settles down, Friedkin has plenty of entertaining anecdotes to relate. Wisely, Zippel devotes the most time to The Exorcist and The French Connection, for obvious reasons. Both films were blockbuster hits in the early 1970s, whose power remains utterly undiminished with the passage of years.

Sorcerer and Cruising probably get the next most screen time after his Oscar-winning classics, partly because of the colorfully chaotic stories making-of stories and partly because so many critics and colleagues have come to respect them, especially the former. Again, this totally makes historical and aesthetic sense. To Live and Die in L.A. also gets its due, since it is a good film and introduced most movie-goers to Willem Dafoe and William Peterson. Plus, we see a fair amount of Friedkin promoting his latest, the real-life exorcism documentary The Devil and Father Amorth, but that gives the film an opportunity to revisit his 1973 masterwork again.

Strangely, Rampage and the financial misadventures that kept in shelved for years go unmentioned. Likewise, the roundly reviled Jade is scrupulously ignored, even though Friedkin himself has defended in the past. Frankly, it is always disappointing when these filmmaker profile-docs do not have its subject dish on the dogs in their filmography (seriously, Friedkin probably has some interesting things to say about Deal of the Century).