William Friedkin - The Interview
The film? Killer Joe. The venue? The Dorchester. And the subject? The Oscar-winning director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and To Live And Die In LA.
You’ve said that directing is a young man’s game. Why was Killer Joe a story you wanted to tell at this stage of your life?
It’s because I have the same worldview as the writer, Tracy Letts . We view people and their actions through the same prism. We’re both on the same page. And the characters that Tracy writes about I find to be surprising and fascinating and true.
You’ve had great success adapting plays. Often people say it’s one of the hardest forms to adapt for film. What do you think the secret is?
I actually think a play is the easiest thing to adapt. The film Casablanca, considered one of the greatest movies of all time, is a play, Everybody Comes To Rick’s It was an unsuccessful play, but if you look at the film and you look at the script of the play, they’re the same. And like the play, the film is more or less set in one place, Rick’s Cafe Americain. The flashbacks to Paris were produced using back projection. The only major exterior in the movie was Burbank Airport where Michael Curtiz shot the final scene.
So many of the best-loved films started life as plays - A Few Good Men, My Fair Lady, The Sound Of Music. Not only that but the first sound films were almost all written by playwrights as they were the only people with experience of writing that kind of drama. As for me, I’ve done films based on plays, novels, true stories, not to mention my own imagination. But with Killer Joe and Bug, I love Tracy’s writing so adapting those plays was the furthest thing from hard work.
In previous interviews you’ve said that intelligence is the important thing when it comes to casting actors…
Yes, the first thing I look for in an actor is intelligence., their ability to understand what the film’s about and who their character is. That’s the most important thing to me because then we can talk about how we get on the same page in order to tell the story. There are many interesting actors who could’ve played the part of Killer Joe Cooper, but I always come down on my instinct about the intelligence of the actor and that’s why I thought Matthew McConaughey would be so good in that roll.
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