William David Friedkin (August 29, 1935 – August 7, 2023) was an American film and television director, producer, and screenwriter closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s.[1][2] Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he directed the crime thriller film The French Connection (1971), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director for himself, and the supernatural horror film The Exorcist (1973), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director.
Friedkin was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 29, 1935,[5] the son of Rachael (née Green) and Louis Friedkin. His father was a semi-professional softball player, merchant seaman, and men's clothing salesman. His mother, whom Friedkin called "a saint", was an operating roomregistered nurse.[5] His parents were Jewish emigrants from Ukraine.[6] His grandparents, parents, and other relatives fled Ukraine during a particularly violent anti-Jewish pogrom in 1903.[7] Friedkin's father was somewhat uninterested in making money, and the family was generally lower middle class while he was growing up.[5] According to film historian Peter Biskind, "Friedkin viewed his father with a mixture of affection and contempt for not making more of himself."[5] According to his memoir, The Friedkin Connection, Friedkin had the utmost affection for his father.[citation needed]
After attending public schools in Chicago, Friedkin enrolled at Senn High School, where he played basketball well enough to consider turning professional.[8] He was not a serious student and barely received grades good enough to graduate,[9] which he did at the age of 16.[10] He said this was because of social promotion and not because he was bright.[11]
Friedkin began going to movies as a teenager,[8] and cited Citizen Kaneas one of his key influences. Several sources claim that Friedkin saw this motion picture as a teenager,[12] but Friedkin himself said that he did not see the film until 1960, when he was 25 years old. Only then, Friedkin said, did he become a true cineaste.[13] Among the movies which he also saw as a teenager and young adult were Les Diaboliques, The Wages of Fear (which many consider he remade as Sorcerer), and Psycho (which he viewed repeatedly, like Citizen Kane). Televised documentaries such as 1960's Harvest of Shame were also important to his developing sense of cinema.[8]
As mentioned in his voice-over commentary on the DVD re-release of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Friedkin directed one of the last episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, called "Off Season". Hitchcock admonished Friedkin for not wearing a tie while directing.[19]
Friedkin's later movies did not achieve the same success. Sorcerer (1977), a $22 million American remake of the French classic The Wages of Fear, co-produced by both Universal and Paramount, starring Roy Scheider, was overshadowed by the blockbuster box-office success of Star Wars, which had been released exactly one week prior.[21] Friedkin considered it his finest film, and was personally devastated by its financial and critical failure (as mentioned by Friedkin himself in the 1999 documentary series The Directors). Sorcerer was shortly followed by the crime-comedy The Brink's Job (1978), based on the real-life Great Brink's Robbery in Boston, Massachusetts, which was also unsuccessful at the box-office.[citation needed]
In 1980, Friedkin directed an adaptation of the Gerald Walker crime thriller Cruising, starring Al Pacino, which was protested during production and remains the subject of heated debate. It was a critically assailed financial disappointment.[23]
Friedkin directed the 1985 music video "Somewhere" for Barbra Streisand. He appears as Streisand's interviewer (uncredited) on her video "Putting It Together: The Making of the Broadway Album".
The action/crime movie To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), starring William Petersen and Willem Dafoe, was a critical favorite and drew comparisons to Friedkin's own The French Connection (particularly for its car chase sequence), while his courtroom drama/thriller Rampage (1987) received a fairly positive review from Roger Ebert.[citation needed] He next directed the horror film The Guardian (1990) and then the thriller Jade (1995), starring Linda Fiorentino. Though the latter received an unfavorable response from critics and audiences, he said it was one of the favorite films he directed.[25]
In 2000, The Exorcist was re-released in theaters with extra footage and grossed $40 million in the U.S. alone. Friedkin directed the 2007 film Bug due to a positive experience watching the stage version in 2004. He was surprised to find that he was, metaphorically, on the same page as the playwright and felt that he could relate well to the story.[26] The film won the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Later, Friedkin directed an episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation titled "Cockroaches", which re-teamed him with To Live and Die in L.A. star William Petersen.[citation needed] He directed again for CSI's 200th episode, "Mascara".[citation needed]
The moving image collection of William Friedkin is held at the Academy Film Archive. The material at the Academy Film Archive is complemented by material in the William Friedkin papers at the academy's Margaret Herrick Library.[75]
In regards to influences to specific films on his films, Friedkin noted that the film's documentary-like realism was the direct result of the influence of having seen Z, a French film by Costa-Gavras. Friedkin mentioned the film's influence on him when directing The French Connection:
After I saw Z, I realized how I could shoot The French Connection. Because he shot Z like a documentary. It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening. Like the camera didn't know what was gonna happen next. And that is an induced technique. It looks like he happened upon the scene and captured what was going on as you do in a documentary. My first films were documentaries too. So I understood what he was doing but I never thought you could do that in a feature at that time until I saw Z.[78]
While filming The Boys in the Band in 1970, Friedkin began a relationship with Kitty Hawks, daughter of director Howard Hawks. It lasted two years, during which the couple announced their engagement, but the relationship ended about 1972.[87] Friedkin began a four-year relationship with Australian dancer and choreographer Jennifer Nairn-Smith in 1972. Although they announced an engagement twice, they never married. They had a son, Cedric, on November 27, 1976.[88] Friedkin and his second wife, Lesley-Anne Down, also had a son, Jack, born in 1982.[82] Friedkin was raised Jewish, but called himself an agnostic later in life.[89][90]
Friedkin died from heart failure and pneumonia at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on August 7, 2023, at the age of 87, 3 weeks before his 88th birthday.[91][92]
導演威廉佛烈金曾獲威尼斯影展頒發終身成就金獅獎。（美聯社）
威廉佛烈金（右）因執導《大法師》，讓他的導演生涯攀上巔峰。（翻攝自IMDB）
威廉佛烈金執導新作、翻拍自《凱恩艦事變》的《The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial》，將於今年威尼斯影展登場。（翻攝自推特）
.jpg)
