Interview: William Friedkin, director of Killer Joe

William Friedkin has always shown people torn between competing moral demands, and his new film – which opens next month’s Edinburgh Film Festival – goes to blackly comic extremes

THE dark side of human nature has always fascinated The Exorcist director William Friedkin. And, as his latest film illustrates, he has now found a like-minded collaborator in actor and playwright Tracy Letts.

Eighteen years ago, Letts’s play Killer Joe won a Scotsman Fringe First award (see panel, right). Now the story is coming full circle, as Friedkin’s movie version opens the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Killer Joe is a blackly comic tale of greed, betrayal and murder, featuring a revelatory performance by Matthew McConaughey as Joe Cooper, a Dallas sheriff-cum-hitman, who is employed by a wildly dysfunctional family when the drug dealer son (Emile Hirsch) decides that the way to clear a debt with the local Mr Big is to have his mother – who got him into the mess in the first place – killed for her insurance money. Unable to pay Joe upfront, he agrees to give him his seemingly naïve sister, Dottie (rising star Juno Temple), as a “retainer”. Inevitably, the plan goes bloodily awry.

Friedkin and Letts last worked together on a 2006 film of the latter’s play Bug – an intense and mountingly crazed study of paranoia, showcasing two extreme turns by Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. The filmmaker regards Killer Joe as the signature work of the Pulitzer-winning Letts.

“It’s an amazing piece of writing,” he says, following the film’s world premiere at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. To Friedkin, Letts is the most important dramatist currently working in America. “He has a unique way of capturing sides of human nature that you don’t often see honestly portrayed without judgement, and he and I are on the same page with our worldview.”

Good and evil, light and dark, have always coexisted in Friedkin’s characters. Poor tortured Regan in The Exorcist, for example, switches between sweet, virginal 12-year-old and sexualised demon, while The French Connection’s detective Popeye Doyle routinely breaks laws. In the 1987 courtroom drama Rampage, a question mark hangs over the sanity of a serial killer – much as it does that of mass murderer Anders Breivik today – and therefore over whether he should be executed. Friedkin’s first big breakthrough, The People Versus Paul Crump, moreover, was an explosive documentary about a convicted killer-turned-model prisoner, which, although never aired, contributed to the commutation of Crump’s death sentence to life in prison.

“I don’t think there is a clear division between good and evil in this world,” says Friedkin, whose energy belies his 76 years. “I believe there is a constant struggle in the soul of each one of us for the better angels to prevail. So all of my films are about the thin line between good and evil, between the policeman and the criminal, that’s embodied in the same person.” 

Literally both lawman and murderer and, by the end of Killer Joe, both creator and taker of life, McConaughey’s coolly homicidal Southern gentleman is Friedkin’s worldview writ large.

“My original inspiration to do work like this came from seeing Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party [in San Francisco in 1962, according to biographer Nat Segaloff], and thinking it was absolutely outrageous,” says the director. “I thought it was an incredible passage for a writer to take, to go down that path of ambiguity to such an extent, and yet with very brilliant and very clear and concise writing.” Pinter’s “comedy of menace”, with its shades of grey and rictus grin, changed Friedkin’s life, and, he says, “influenced the direction that I took with most of the rest of my films.”

Although London had initially proved hostile to The Birthday Party, the city was the making of Killer Joe in 1995. The play had been “reviled” for its violence and twisted sexual content when it was unveiled in Letts’s native Chicago; but in London, it was “shockingly well received,” he says.

“It was actually considered part of a movement – Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane were all writing plays at that time – and ran for a good long while,” says Letts. “It was a big deal for me. I’m an actor, and that was my first play, and I didn’t necessarily know I was a playwright, I don’t think, until we got to London and the play struck.”

Friedkin’s version, “re-imagined” by Letts with a few additions by the director, opens up the play, in order to show more of the shabby world that the blue-collar characters inhabit. The performances are edgy and daring, a fact that can be partly attributed to the director’s aversion to multiple takes and overly precious thespians. 

“I’ve worked with actors who, you know, have to ‘find it’,” he sneers, “and they do it just the same. It’s bullshit, really. So I always ask the actor to imagine they’re on stage and they have one shot. I don’t do another take unless a camera falls down or a light falls into the shot and hits someone in the head. “And,” he laughs, “I will even keep going if the light doesn’t hit someone in the head.”

His methods for getting what he wants from actors have sometimes been controversial, and even Friedkin admits taking them to extremes on The Exorcist. When Ellen Burstyn complained that she was being pulled too hard by a wire to create the effect of being flung backwards after she’s struck by the possessed Regan, the director reportedly told the effects man to pull harder. The result, Burstyn allegedly claimed, was a permanent back injury. On Killer Joe, Friedkin used intimidation to try and push Gina Gershon – who in the course of the film is beaten up and humiliated with a fried chicken drumstick – to where he wanted her emotionally.

“I used to scream at her,” he says. “Sometimes I would close the set and say, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’ I would get her worked up because hers, to me, was the most difficult role.” What she goes through is “beyond Shakespeare”, he says, with a mischevous grin. “He never asked an actress to suck a chicken bone off a guy’s crotch. So Gina would always test me: how far was I ready to push her? And I let her know: all the way.” 

The movie ends with the drama unresolved. Could there be a part two? The idea makes Friedkin shudder. “I would never do a sequel to any of the films I have done,” he says. Nor would he choose to watch any of the ones that have been made by other directors. When he saw some of The Exorcist 2 at the laboratory where he was having his then latest film processed, he “thought it was a disaster. It was horrible. An insult. The guy didn’t believe the story. Whoever made the sequel,” he says, presumably knowing full well that it was John Boorman, “was trying to show that the original film was a load of bollocks.”

Friedkin doesn’t know what happens to the surviving characters in Killer Joe, neither does he care. He is interested in raising questions, not supplying answers or making grand statements. For a moment, the dramatic impact of The People Versus Paul Crump had made him think he could change the world. However, time and his own shortcomings disabused him of that notion.

“As you get older, you find that you are either blessed with a vision for the world or you are not, and you are really just one of the anonymous craftsmen. That’s basically what I am.

“My first experience was that I made a film that saved a man’s life, and so I was flushed with the feeling that I could continue to work in film in this way. But most of the time people are not so influenced by film, they just want to be entertained. They just want to escape from the rigours of daily life.”

And anyway, he adds: “There are no answers in life. So why should cinema provide them?” 

• Killer Joe opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 20 June and goes on general release on 29 June. www.edfilmfest.org.uk