In his new book “The Friedkin Connection,” director William Friedkin recounts his work on such memorable films as “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection.”
And he also tips his hat to his greatest inspiration – Orson Welles.
Friedkin, 77, writes of his reaction to seeing “Citizen Kane” for the first time.
“I went in at noon, and I watched it five times that day,” Friedkin said. “And I couldn’t believe it. When I came out, it was like standing in front of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt. That’s the effect it had on me.”
He added, “I didn’t know what the hell it was, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
In his memoir, Friedkin also details the extreme effort Welles pal Mercedes McCambridge put in to creating the memorable voice of the demon in “The Exorcist.”
“She wanted to sit in a position of being tortured. She wanted to drink raw eggs. She wanted quantities of Jack Daniels and cigarettes,” he recalled. “It must have taken about a month at least to record one word at a time, one sentence at a time.”
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