Director William Friedkin couldn’t help but wonder how he was able to pull certain things off in his ‘70s crime classic The French Connection. On the 50th anniversary of the film, he spoke to EW about the risky manner in which they shot the iconic car chase, and revealed why he probably wouldn’t want to make a cop movie today.
The French Connection, which starred Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as morally ambiguous NYPD detectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo, is considered one of the greatest crime movies ever made. It established Friedkin as one of the foremost filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement.
The moral questions that the movie raised about policing are still as relevant today as they were back then, but Friedkin said that if he were to remake the film, it “wouldn't be much different,” as he was only trying to capture the gritty reality of what he was seeing around him.
Asked if the current cultural climate — particularly the conversations about police brutality — has made him reconsider his opinion about the movie, and Hackman’s antihero character, Friedkin said:
“It was a different time. What those guys were doing back then was largely an act to stay alive in the street. If they didn't act like the bullies that they appear to be, they wouldn't be alive. All of their cohorts on the police department had to act that way, especially in the narcotics areas. Today it's somewhat different. Cop are still often out of control. But these guys were not bigots. They were acting that to stay alive.”
But Friedkin was quite clear about never wanting to work as carelessly as he did when he shot the film’s famous car chase, which was conceptualized over an afternoon, and filmed without proper permissions. It was a miracle, he said, that nobody got hurt. He recalled:
“Shortly before 20th Century Fox okayed the film, Dick Zanuck, who was the head of Fox, said, 'This looks like a documentary, and we've got to find something that's going to take it out of that realm. I like the documentary style that you've achieved, but we've got to have something else or it will look like a documentary.’ We didn't have a chase one week before we started, and my producer and I decided to take a long walk in New York from an apartment I was renting at 86th Street. We decided to keep walking various streets until [something] occurred to us. And that's what happened. We walked through 55 blocks. We watched all of the things that were happening in the city — the smoke coming from the streets, the rumble of the subway beneath our feet — and we sort of spitballed the chase scene. I went out and shot that scene that we had just made up in one afternoon. There were a lot of accidents, a lot of things that happened that we didn't think about, and it's a miracle that nobody got hurt. I wouldn't do that today. It was very dangerous. I can't tell you how much. At one time we were in the car at 90 miles an hour for 26 blocks, and we paid no attention to green lights or red lights. We just blew through traffic, as you can see.”
The French Connection swept the 44th Academy Awards, with Friedkin and Hackman winning Oscars for Best Director and Best Actor, respectively. The film also won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Friedkin returned just two years later with an even bigger hit, the horror classic The Exorcist. His last narrative feature film was 2011’s Killer Joe, but his last release was the documentary The Devil and Father Amorth. You can watch part of The French Connection's car chase scene below: