INT: Now, in BUG, making the distinction between reality and not, I'm curious because part of what you said was what you do with the audience. I remember that wonderful image you just said about putting the wet--[WF: Cold hand on the back of the neck] Okay. Now, there's a moment in terms of dealing with what's real and not real, when you're near, very near the end of the movie, when the husband comes back, the ex-husband comes back, and I'm curious whether you, how conscious you were of us, the audience now, in the sense that inside in that silver room, now the entire room is shaking, the camera is shaking, everything, the noise, all of it is shaking, but the cut to him outside, it's not. And I'm curious whether that was “I'm now telling you a division of real and unreal, and you've got the choice now?”

WF: Yes, what the work is saying to me is that they are living in some private universe inside the walls of that house, and outside the walls there's somebody else who is not sharing their particular experience, the husband, who's trying to get in, who is the threat to them both. And within the house they have created their own private world. You see it--there's a new film that just came out as we are doing this interview, a film called THE SOLOIST. [INT: I saw it.] Which is a wonderful film about depicting various states of reality and irreality, and it goes really into the mind's eye of one of the characters who hears voices constantly. [INT: But the difference here is that that movie--] And he's in his own world. [INT: Right. But we know that, and the filmmaker creatively tries to get us to experience it, which I really appreciate in that movie, by mixing the soundtracks, although we're hearing many, many voices at the same time, and sometimes visual points of view of what he sees, but we know that's him seeing it. There's a distinction. We are secure in that “We're Robert Downey, Jr., we're sane, and this guy is not, and we're experiencing what his "not" is, which is cool.” Your movie does something else. In that particular moment, you have a choice to say they're right inside. What's happening to them is in fact true, and that guy outside is in our reality, another reality. But it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the one that's more true. At least, I think you're playing with us as “We don't have a secure place to be.”]

WF: What BUG does, which is a great piece of writing by a young playwright [Tracy Letts], who subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for playwrighting, for his play AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, what it does is it suggests that none of, nothing that's happening is real outside of the room, that these other characters don't even exist except in the minds of the two characters who are at the center of this experience, that everything outside is a figment of their imaginations. That's what the movie suggests and doesn't answer the question but allows for the possibility that that's true. And to me that's the equivalent of the great scene that ends BLOW-UP, the imaginary tennis match, and that the photographer, played by David Hemmings at the end, when these two hippies are playing tennis with imaginary racquets and an imaginary ball, and one of them hits the ball out of the tennis court, and Hemmings who was a photographer, he's a guy who's faced, looked reality in the face. As we meet him, the first scenes we see of him, we see he's capturing life as it is among miners, coal miners. Now, at the end, one of the players beckons him to throw the imaginary tennis ball back in. [INT: And he does.] And he goes over slowly, and he throws it back in. And then, and there's a beautiful eye angle shot of him on the grass--[INT: Last shot movie.]--and then he disappears. He wasn't, now, what is Antonioni [Michelangelo Antonioni] trying to tell us? He's trying to tell us a lot about a lot of things, including film itself. It's not there. It's an illusion. It's an allusion of depth that is provided only by height and width. That's what the movie screen is, an illusion of depth that is suggested only by height and width. And yet, if it becomes real for the audience, they can enter completely into that world.

INT: Okay. Now, but I want to go back to this because of your knowledge of both what you're doing as a craftsman and a storyteller, and how much you want to let the audience--like THE SOLOIST, we're clear who's insane, who isn't. In your movie, we're not clear who's sane and who isn't, and it's brilliant in that way, and there's clever things that you do all through it; for example, that first time when we actually see the head of whatever that green bug is that you give us, those incredibly fast cuts, I mean, they might, may be two frames or even less, I don't know, ‘cause it's so quick, that very first time when we suddenly get exposed to. And we can't say that isn't true because you've shown it to us, and you've given us no hint that that's imagination.

WF: Well, I, the whole movie is hints. I don't know what's real and what's imaginary in that film, as in CRUISING, where, you know, it continues to be debated by thousands of people on the web, what does the ending of CRUISING mean? Is Pacino [Al Pacino] the killer, or not? And then there was an interview that Pacino gave not long ago that was sent to me where he said, "Billy Friedkin never talked to me about this character. He never told me if I was the killer or if I wasn't the killer." And I looked at that, and I was being interviewed by the guy who wrote that, and he's given this to me to read, and I said, I laughed, and I said, "That's fantastic." I didn't realize how much he had entered the world where he didn't know if he was the killer or not, and I couldn't help him, because I didn't know either because I was making a film about a series of unsolved murders and where there were copycat killings. And we're finding out now that a number of high profile murder cases, like the Boston Strangler case, the Hillside Strangler, and a number of others that aren't as familiar turned out to be copycat murders. There was a lot of questions about whether--

INT: Now, did you know when you were directing him, now here's, because you just said, which I love what you just said about how each of us perceives reality differently, when you and D’Antoni [Philip D’Antoni] were talking about remembrances of making FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION], different perceptions of what had happened. Now, here's this particular Actor [Al Pacino] saying, "Billy Friedkin never talked to me about it." I suspect you did, but he remembers what he remembers.

WF: I never told him that he was the killer or not the killer, but there's the last shot of CRUISING, or next to last shot, shows him shaving in a mirror after he's come back home to his fiancé, and I told him to look slowly into the camera lens so that his eyes go from himself in the mirror directly to the audience as he stops shaving. And I knew that him looking at himself and at the audience in the mirror was going go speak volumes, but it was going to speak different volumes to different people. And I've always said that the ideal situation for me as a filmmaker is that what you as an audience, as an individual in the audience, bring to the film is so important to me. That's what you're going to take out of it. What you bring to it is what you will take out of it.

INT: Wait a minute, don't you think you also shifted a little bit for us? I may go into THE EXORCIST and say, "I don't believe in this stuff at all," and the way you do it, because of the way of you're making it so realistic that I'm going, "Well, I'm not sure any more." So, you shift this.

WF: Well, perhaps, perhaps, but the point about that film is, if you believe in the possibility of demonic possession as regards a human being, then you're going to be reinforced in your, in that opinion if you watch THE EXORCIST. It was made so vividly and graphically that if you believe that coming in, or you're on the fence, let's say, you'll be reinforced. If you think it's all a bunch of bullshit, you're going to be reinforced in that. I mean, THE EXORCIST has produced that response to, yes, it's an immensely popular film around the world to this day. It has resonated with several generations now, but they each take from it what they bring to it. You become--this is a very important point I want to make, a lot of people become what they behold. In the films I've made about cops, like THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., you have to remember that cops are often portrayed as brutal and racist and violent, because that's the world they see. I'm telling you that black officers that I used to ride around with, you know, in patrol cars in L.A. and Chicago, in New York, would refer to various black people as niggers. [INT: Well, that's where you did this. You picked this up and did it in your version of 12 ANGRY MEN. That character was a white character in the Henry Fonda version, is a black character with a little, almost like Muslim Black hat on his head, but he's the most racist person in the entire picture.]

INT: All right, two things, one little quote that I want to give you, and then I want to continue this and get specific about the affective movies. The quote I want to give you is a Hitchcock quote, which I ran into two days ago. He said, "When you make a narrative film, the director is God. When you make a documentary, God is the director." I just like the quote. Now, what I want to talk about is the ability of the film to actually shift somebody in that audience. You got three kinds of people in any audience. You've got the choir that already agrees. You've got the people who absolutely say there's not a fucking chance I'm going to believe this, and then you have that group in the middle, that transitional group, who is usually the majority of people who, “Well, I don't know if I believe in exorcism, but boy, I've seen this movie [THE EXORCIST], and I think it certainly could be possible.” Or “I don't know how I feel about what I would have done in the situation of shooting quote 'innocent people,' but, you know, I might have made that decision that he just made as the, you have that the North Vietnamese general and that piece RULES OF ENGAGEMENT to do that.” So, what I'm asking you is this, sometimes you're making movies that thrust in us the possibility of we don't know, like BUG, in a way, what's real, what's not, other times you make movies in which you show us something that we may have not seen before. One of the brilliant parts of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, for me, is those two is those two guys, ‘cause I didn't know, ‘cause the cops I knew, are cops I knew from movies. These were new. These were different. They had a whole--I think--I'm running on, I hope I'll get back to about my question. But in JADE there are three cops, I think, and there's one older guy, who's an older cop, in that group [WF: He's an actual San Francisco cop.] Of course, he is, ‘cause it's so, I mean, it's just like I said, “Oh, this is pure Bill Friedkin, ’cause this guy is real.” It was so interesting. So, one of the things you, because of your own understanding of the way you can use film in the documentary tradition that you have, that knowing it come from, you bring that reality to your movies. FRENCH CONNECTION showed us a new way of looking at cops, which I actually think was one of those things that really shifted, I mean, obviously, the chase scene underneath, is one of the great scenes of moviemaking, but that was a whole new way of seeing, and I think that people in the audience shifted.

INT: So, what I'm asking you, are you conscious of the idea, having just said, you become what you behold, that there's the shot of, “Okay, I can shift people with the media that I’m making”?

WF: Well, Jeremy, the fact is I don't give a damn what they think about what they take from my films. It's like Carlos Kleiber, who I described to you, stops conducting and turns to someone in the audience and says, "You see, they play better when I don't conduct." I'm interested only in engaging in the argument, but not in telling you how you should think. The worst thing that I see in films, whether it's today or yesterday, is where the Writer and the Director and everybody else involved is pouring down your throat how you should feel about this character, or this situation, or that, and I honestly don't care. And that goes back to I don't give a damn if Pacino [Al Pacino] thought he was the killer or didn't think he was the killer [in CRUISING] because I don't know, and what, the reason I made the film is because I don't know. And the film is almost an investigation, it's an inquiry on my part into what is real and what is imaginary, what is true and what is false, and as I sit here at this point in my life, you know, after having directed for over 40 years, I know less and less. Now, I know more and more about the technical aspects of moviemaking, but I'm no longer employed to fulfill those technical aspects because the technology has gone way beyond both my field of interest and the field of interests of the people who produce these films, you know, specifically, comic books made for $200 million and more. I don't want to make those, but they tell you for the most part who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, how you're supposed to feel about the good guy, maybe there's a nod toward making them more human, you know, as they did with Tony Soprano brilliantly in THE SOPRANOS. You know from the very first show of THE SOPRANOS, if you're willing to pay attention to it, that Tony was loathed by his father, never thought he could live up to his father, and his mother hated him. Boom! What more motivation does a character like that need to pick up a gun and decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, or order other people to do it. It's very clear. But there'll still be a lot of people watching the show thinking, I like this, why do I like this guy, and why don't I care about what he's doing? Why am I not being judgmental? Ah, that's the transformation of art. You're not being judgmental, because the artistry is giving you a wide palate from which to choose, a massive feast of things to pick and choose from yourself, and that's what I'm trying to do as a Director. There's a whole big buffet here from which you can choose what you will, but don't expect me to tell you to eat the little mini hamburgers, or the salmon pate. That's up to you. [INT: But you still as a crafts artist know how to set us up with--I get what you just said, you said, "I'm not going to tell you what's right and wrong. That's not my job."] Or who did what to whom. [INT: Okay. I get that you said that, but--] Unless I know. [INT: Okay. But as a craftsman, I definitely am going to be able to put you in a situation where you're going to have to do some work.] Well, the greatest films to me are those--I've named some of them for you. I named my most favorite of all, which is CITIZEN KANE, and then I put in BLOW-UP, which is some 25 years after CITIZEN KANE, and yet deals with the same thing, ambiguity, and those are the films that have attracted me the most. And so with the great music that moves me, it's music that does not lead me to any conclusions, but it makes me think about everything. [INT: But then it brings you in.] Well, it involves me.

INT: Okay. But I'm looking at BUG again. The choice of actually showing us on this big close-up of the head of that bug. In the script, in your mind, why choose that particular bug? I'm curious what went on because that's one of the moments that just, it's like you punch us.

WF: Well, you never see a bug anywhere else in the film, not even when they're looking through the microscope and they seem to see thousands of them under the microscope, and that moment is underlined. But what that close-up of an insect is meant to imply at that moment is the possibility of bugs, subliminally. When you say it's two frames, that's, I guess, about what it is. I'm not exactly sure how many frames, we all know that 24 frames of film equals 1 second of actual time. So, two frames would be a twelfth of a second, and that shot's about two frames. It's a sub--because I very much love to use the notion of subliminal perception, because I think that's going on with all of us at all times. While we're doing this where something else is occurring to us, you know. Our mind is an invisible hand playing out file cards from our mind at all times, while we're driving, while we're watching a play, an opera, a movie, while we're talking here, our mind is suggesting other possibilities constantly. That to me is a perception of life that I have, that there are many things and many subliminal things going on at all times, and so that's all that moment is meant to convey. Did you see a bug? Do you think you saw a bug? Probably that was an insect, but where is it? What is it? It's so big, it's probably in your mind's eye, because you have some idea what this movie is about before you went in to see it.

INT: For you then, are you working off, on looking at that particular moment in that particular film, are you working off what I would say is a kind of instinctive “This is feeling right for me, but I cannot intellectually analyze it, but I know it's right?”

WF: Yeah. That sums it up pretty good. If you have the statement you just made clearly on mic, that would be my answer. [INT: You say it. In your words.] Well, I mean, I can't put it any better than that. Yes, there are times when I will put in a shot or a moment that is just instinctive where I don't know precisely what it means, and, in fact, I don't care. It just seems right.

INT: Now, there are moments though when you suddenly will have to deal with the studio, an executive, who will suddenly say, "What's that doing there?" and want the logical explanation. How do you respond?

WF: Well, I normally, if you get that from someone in the studio it normally means that they don't understand the process, you know? And so you have one of two choices, to tell them to go fuck themselves or to schmuck bait them, you know, and make them think that you've adjusted whatever their problem is, or you give them some cockamamie explanation, because the people who I've worked with that ran studios like in the past were extremely knowledgeable about the whole process of filmmaking.

INT: I mean, do you think then maybe we expected the instinctiveness of the artist that they hired?

WF: Absolutely. Even though most, for example, Darryl F. Zanuck Studio, 20th Century Fox, most of those films represented Darryl Zanuck's point of view and his ideas about life and about women and relationships and men, but they were directed--Darryl Zanuck never directed anything himself. The same with David O. Selznick, who didn't direct GONE WITH THE WIND, he had five Directors, but it certainly is his vision. There are certain films that do represent the vision of a Producer. Now, I haven't worked on any such film, but if I had worked on GONE WITH THE WIND, if I had been one of the five guys who shot scenes for it, I would have been there fulfilling Selznick's vision, and it wouldn't have mattered what my own was. But we passed from the era of the Producer's vision to the era of the Director's vision for the most part, even though Screenwriters try to pull it back constantly, get it back in the box. “Why is this a film by so and so, when I wrote the damn thing?” you know. And now we've passed also, really passed in television out of the era of the Director into the era back again of the Writer/Producer. The Writer/Producer is the guy who really calls the shots of what's on dramatic or comedic television.

INT: I want to go into a subject matter about place because I was thinking about you and a story that you told, place, in terms of how you get place in pieces. The story you told about D’Antoni [Philip D’Antoni] when you were trying to figure out what you were going to do for the chase [in THE FRENCH CONNECTION], and you came up, I think you were walking down the street. [WF: Right.] Now, does he remember that tale?

WF: Not in the sense--he knows we took a long walk. He doesn't remember where it was or what was said. I remember it vividly and graphically, and I'm writing my memoir now, and so I tried to put it in with as much input from him as I can, though I remember it differently. And he remembers how certain of the casting decisions came about much differently from me, and so I'm listening to him talk, and I realize his memory is shot, and he must be thinking the same thing. And this was the case with Jerry Weintraub on CRUISING. I remember moments that are as vivid as though they happened this morning, and he remembers them differently.

INT: Give me example of either one, from Jerry, or--you spoke about casting, so give me an example of casting for FRENCH CONNECTION [THE FRENCH CONNECTION] and how it was different, for a totally different perception, if you remember?

WF: Well, for example, my memory of how we got Fernando Rey is as follows. I don't know if I told you this story. [INT: I didn't know this story, but tell it.] Tell it again. [INT: It's a great story. Yes.] Okay. So, we had this Casting Director named Bob Weiner, who was not really a Casting Director, he was a critic, a film and theater critic for The Village Voice, a very unusual young man, very self-absorbed, but he knew every Actor and had seen every play in New York, Off-Broadway, out of town, and he kept all his clippings about people that impressed him, and so it was Phil who actually knew him and said, "Let's use this guy to be the Casting Director." [INT: Great idea.] So, I found that Weiner and I had a great sympatico even though he was sort of a very difficult guy to be around. And I remember that we had a shortcut between us. I would say to him, "You remember that guy in BELLE DE JOUR, the guy who was the gangster. He had a several days' growth of beard," and I didn't remember his name, and Weiner would say, "Oh, yes, I remember that guy. That was, yeah, that's Fernando Rey." And I said, "Well, get him. Let's get him to play the Frenchman." So, we go out, we find out he's available. We make a deal, going to be within our budget, and I go out to Kennedy Airport [John F. Kennedy International Airport] to meet with Fernando Rey for the first time and drive him to his hotel. I hadn't talked to him or met him. We've hired him. Now, I'm driving him to his hotel, and I realize that I've seen this guy, but he isn't the Actor I had in mind at all. In fact, he wasn't even in BELLE DE JOUR. And so, and I've seen that he has a little goatee, which is totally wrong for the character who was supposed to be an ex-longshoreman from Corsica [Corsica, France], very rough hewn kind of a guy, like the guy in BELLE DE JOUR. And so now as I'm driving him to his hotel I realize he wasn't in BELLE DE JOUR, but he had made other films with Bunuel [Luis Bunuel], and I'm looking for what to say to him because I realize it's a disaster. And I say, "By the way, your goatee, you know, this guy was a longshoreman from Corsica." He said, "Oh, I, I could never shave my goatee. You don't want me to shave my goatee, I have all these sores on my chin, you wouldn't want to see that." And he said, "By the way, you know, I don't speak a lot of French. I'm Spanish, you know." So, I get him to his hotel, and I get him checked in, and I go to the telephone in the lobby, and I call Bob Weiner and Phil D’Antoni at our production office in New York, and I say, "You stupid asshole," I say to Weiner, "you cast the wrong guy." He said, "What's wrong?" I said, "This is not the guy from BELLE DE JOUR. This is a guy who was in other Bunuel films, and he's got great stories about Bunuel, who cast him the first time when he was playing a corpse in a film, and Bunuel was there to see another Actor, and he said, "I don't like that Actor, but I like the guy who's playing the corpse." But I said, "He's not the guy..." So, D’Antoni and Weiner said, "Well, what should we do?" And I said, "You fire him. Fire this guy and get the guy who was in BELLE DE JOUR. What's his name?" I come back to the office, and I find that in fact the guy we were looking for was not Fernando Rey, but Francisco Rabal, who it turned out happened to be Spanish as well, spoke no English at all and was not available, and that's how Fernando Rey got into the film, backed in. Danton's recollection of it is that we wanted to hire Francisco Rabal, but he cost too much money, and so we looked around and cast Fernando Rey. [INT: Wow.] He has no memory, and Bob Weiner's dead, you know, to settle the argument. [INT: So, we can't check it.] But I remember every word that was exchanged in that whole process, because it indicated to me, early on in my career that I was not a genius, that there were other factors at work here. Gene Hackman was our last choice to play the lead in that film. [INT: What made you decide to keep the beard?] Well, he told me that he had, his face was full of sores, and if he shaved his goatee he would have had red splotches all over his face. [INT: Got it. Yeah.]