The word "possesses" possesses more S's
than any other word possesses.
This is Bill Friedkin, day one, take one.
Everything has to do with the mystery of fate or faith.
And "The Exorcist" is about the mystery of faith.
The only film that influenced me
in the making of "The Exorcist" was Dreyer's film "Ordet."
There were no films about possession that I knew about.
There were no religious films
that weren't really sappy at the time,
like "The Ten Commandments" was largely spectacle.
"Ordet" is a simple, elegant film.
It's so beautifully staged and photographed,
and it contains elegant simplicity to show
what amounts to literal resurrection in the film.
I can't watch it without bursting into tears.
You totally believe it.
There is no question that this is happening.
It's not a cinematic trick.
I asked "The Exorcist" audience
to believe in what they were seeing.
I'm a strong believer in fate, that it's very difficult
for anyone to control their own destiny.
You can do certain things,
but in many ways, I think biology is destiny.
I don't know how I ever got into the film business
coming from where I came from.
I lived in a one-room apartment in Chicago
with my mother and father.
My mother took me --
I don't know how old I was, 7 years old, maybe --
to a movie theater called the Pantheon,
which was on Sheridan Road in Chicago.
We go in this large place, a lot of people around.
I don't know what they're doing there.
I don't know what's gonna happen.
All of a sudden, the lights went down.
The lights went to complete darkness,
and I heard what turned out to be the parting
of a gigantic set of curtains,
and then a light appeared on a screen
with some titles on it, and I screamed.
It was sheer terror of the process.
I think it was a film called "None but the Lonely Heart"
with Cary Grant, a Clifford Odets story.
Love me, son?
Disgraced you. Disgraced you.
Disgraced me, ma?
No, ma, no, didn't disgrace me.
This is your son Ernie Mott,
the boy who needs you, loves you, wants you.
I was in my 20s,
and I was working first in the mailroom
at a television station in Chicago
right out of high school. I never went to college.
A friend of mine casually mentioned
there's a movie playing at a theater called the Surf.
"What is it?" "'Citizen Kane.'"
And I went to the noon show,
and I stayed there for the rest of the day.
And I was just flabbergasted.
When I left the theater around after midnight,
I thought, "I have no idea what this is,
but that's what I'd like to do."
Charles?
Yes, Mommy?
Mr. Thatcher is going to take you on a trip with him tonight.
"Citizen Kane" is about the mystery of fate
and how fate took this little boy away from a poor cabin.
And because his mother was left a worthless deed
to the Colorado Lode,
he became the richest man in America.
This was an act of fate.
The meaning of "rosebud" is the biblical idea
of what shall it profit a man
if he should gain the whole world...
But lose his own soul?
The "rosebud" moment is profound and in a class by itself.
Kubrick did it in "The Killing."
The great expense of stealing all this racetrack money
and $2 million floats up into the air.
That's a great "rosebud" moment,
as is the moment in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"
when all of the gold bags are cut open by the bandits
who steal them because they think they're water.
It's an underlying statement about the futility,
the futility of everything.
Throw that junk in.
And this incredible idea of a lost pure...
love is burned up.
What a profound statement, and what an incredible idea.
And there's not a day in my life
that I don't feel like a fraud.
I mean, priests, doctor, lawyers --
I've talked to them all.
There's serendipity connected with all of the films I made.
But nothing like "The Exorcist."
I feel to this day as though there were forces beyond me
that brought things to that movie like offerings.
The whole picture was put together
by the movie god, from Blatty sending me the novel
after we had not seen each other for years.
The studio didn't want me to direct the film initially.
I went on to win the Academy Award,
which was a longshot.
I wasn't even a member of the Academy.
All of it.
It's fate.
Yeah, fate.
I only can make a film if I can see it in my mind's eye,
and in a very short time,
the whole film popped into my head from his novel.
I knew exactly how I wanted to make it,
what I wanted to keep from his book,
what I wanted to leave out.
I didn't want any backstory, no flashbacks,
just a straight-ahead story
that was done as realistically as possible.
After I was finally hired to direct the film,
Blatty came to me with a little envelope, and he said,
"I've got a surprise for you.
I've written the script."
I didn't know that. He gave me the script.
It was about this thick.
I felt it was a travesty of his novel,
and I told him that.
It had flashbacks, it had red herrings.
I said, "Bill, this -- your script is not the book.
I really want to shoot the novel."
So I marked up my own copy of the hardcover,
the first edition.
I mark things in, out, in, out.
I cross things out.
Go from this sequence to that.
I literally marked it up so that mostly,
he could see what I wanted to keep from the novel
and what I felt we didn't need.
Blatty had omitted the prologue
in the first draft of his script,
and I told him his worst enemy would not have...
done this to him.
Everyone, including his publisher, said,
"You don't need this prologue."
They didn't understand it.
I said, "Bill, we have to open in Iraq."
That opening chapter...
that started my skin crawling when I read it,
and I didn't know why.
I'm sure a lot of people to this day are puzzled,
"What the hell is that?"
But it is the introduction, and the -- to me,
the very solid underpinning for the whole piece.
We got permission to go.
I knew basically where I wanted to go,
which was in northern Iraq,
the little town where we wound up filming,
which is Nineveh in the Bible.
It's called al-Hatra, or al-Hadr, H-A-D-R,
to the Iraqis.
There happened to be a German archeologist
working there with a German crew
and Iraqis that were doing a dig there,
and I met with him and asked him if we could film this actual dig
and have Max von Sydow walking around while it was going on.
And so that's what we did.
It was an actual dig,
and the stuff they were coming up with
were the severed heads of statues
because it turned out that at some point before Christ,
the city of Hadr had been sacked by the Sasanians,
I believe it's 80 B.C.
They cut off the heads of everybody living there,
and they cut off the heads of the statues.
And this is what the archeology team was coming up with,
along with other artifacts, which I show in the film.
Jack Nitzsche rubbed his hand over a wine glass,
and that makes the opening sound of "The Exorcist."
And then it segues from that to something we recorded in Mosul,
which is the muezzin's call to prayer in Arabic.
The words "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,"
"God is good" in Arabic.
"God is great."
Those are the first words of the film,
the first words in Blatty's novel, northern Iraq.
That's where it took place.
You couldn't go out into the Mojave Desert and shoot it.
There was no CGI in those days.
You had to go there.
There's one side angle that I made especially
because in the background of von Sydow, not too far away,
is the tomb of King Nebuchadnezzar,
which is built on top of the tomb of the prophet David.
That's where we were.
The movie opens with a bright sun.
When we got into the color-timing room,
I decided to open the film with a black and white sun
that slowly bleeds into color.
I don't think
there's any conscious meaning behind my choices.
These are instinctive things that don't...
translate into a how.
It looks like, in retrospect, I knew what I was doing,
but I was just following my instinct.
And I believe that's what happened
throughout the entire film.
This is from Bill Blatty's novel "The Exorcist."
It's the beginning.
"The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat
from the old man's brow.
He kept his hands around the glass of hot,
sweet tea as if to warm them.
He could not shake the premonition.
It clung to his back like chill wet leaves."
So that paragraph is about one word -- "premonition."
And so he looks around, and he sees various things
that add to the premonition --
blacksmiths who are pounding, bending steel,
and one of them turns and looks at him
and has an eye missing,
similar to the way the demon looks when she's levitating.
And a lot of people think that it foreshadows something.
I had no intention of foreshadowing anything
that I shot there.
I just shot what was of interest and put it in the film,
and over the decades, it's been interpreted and reinterpreted.
Some of the interpretations make sense to me.
They were never intended.
The clock stopping.
I don't know what the hell it means.
I never thought about imposing...
metaphor or meaning, other than the St. Joseph Medal
that is falling in Father Karras' dream
that was the medal that was found in Iraq by Father Merrin,
and he scratches around further
and comes up with a small head of Pazuzu
attached to some mud that's embedded itself on it.
And he scrapes away the face of it,
and he -- you just see his face react to the image of Pazuzu.
And he right there gets the premonition
of -- of the whole movie, of everything that's to come.
The opening in Iraq does set the tone
and the mood for the entire film,
the atmosphere of dread and an ancient supernatural mystery.
Without saying anything about what I just said,
it brings about the appearance of the Abyssinian demon Pazuzu.
It shows the character of Father Merrin
as an archeologist priest, and it lingers over...
more than an hour's worth of film
before you ever see Father Merrin again.
He had performed exorcism before.
That comes out later.
Don't you think he's too old, Tom?
How's his health?
He must be alright.
He's still running around, digging up tombs.
Besides, he's had experience.
I didn't know that.
10, 12 years ago, I think, in Africa.
The exorcism supposedly lasted a month.
Heard it damn near killed him.
Then he gets a premonition that you, the audience,
have to sense that he's going to face this ancient enemy again.
So to me,
it's every bit as important as any scene in "The Exorcist"
to set the mood and set off the idea...
of the supernatural in our midst.
That whole idea of...
building a mood as well as a story is gone.
I will tell you that in most of my films,
but especially "The Exorcist,"
I was strongly influenced by music.
And I've always...
been consciously and unconsciously influenced
by music that builds layer upon layer,
things like Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring,"
which is a slow build.
Stravinsky said it starts quietly
because if you start with drums, you have to end with thunder,
so he started with a solo instrument
playing a very quiet melody.
It then builds into one of the most powerful
and in a way terrifying pieces of music ever written.
I love films that build layer on layer,
like "2001," like "Psycho."
That's all about maintaining a tone and a mood
and creating it from a dead start.
The mood of a film changes.
There are moments of extreme brightness
and happiness in the early parts of "The Exorcist."
Oh, I love you.
I love you.
The tone is the same almost throughout --
an overriding sense of dread that inhabits the entire picture
and that audiences were and are usually aware of
before they go to see the film.
You really don't want me to play, huh?
No, I do.
Captain Howdy said no.
Captain who?
Captain Howdy.
Who's Captain Howdy?
You know, the mood goes from
wonderful mother-daughter relationship
into an extreme alteration of a 12-year-old's personality.
Lick me! Lick me!
In many of the sequences, even earlier ones,
seem to foreshadow what's to come.
I was very conscious and aware
that by the time people started to see the film,
word would get around what it was about.
I knew that people would be aware
they were coming to see a film about demonic possession,
not a girl who had a problem with her brain.
It takes a while to get to the possession,
as well it should.
Mom, you should've seen.
This man came along on this beautiful gray horse.
You have to see what this young child was like
before her appearance
and her behavior altered completely.
And of course, the possession scenes had to top one another.
It starts very early with just a bed shaking
and no dramatic changes in the girl's character,
and it builds to complete personality change,
superhuman strength, and horrible actions by the girl
that a 12-year-old would be incapable of committing.
There is a concept that I was aware of at the time
called expectancy set.
If you're walking down a dark street at night
where there has been a crime recently or a murder,
there's something that occurs within you,
where you get butterflies.
Mother?
What's wrong with me?
And that works on audiences.
They come in wanting to be scared,
and you can -- you can play on that.
It's just like the doctor said,
it's nerves, and that's all.
Okay?
Burke Dennings, good Father,
was found at the bottom of those steps leading to M Street
with his head turned completely around,
facing backwards.
I remember when I was growing up
and I used to walk to high school in Chicago,
and I would walk through a neighborhood
where there had been a brutal, vicious murder,
where a young girl in a house along the way...
had been taken out of her bedroom window and decapitated.
And the body parts were lying on the lawn
and in the streets outside the house,
and I remember consciously
walking past that house of horrors
every day on my way to high school
and thinking about that brutal crime that took place there.
I have an idea before I shoot a scene
of how I think it should look,
and then when we're filming the scene,
I might see something that makes me want to have another angle
or a different -- a closer angle or have no coverage whatsoever.
In "The Exorcist," we were often in cramped settings,
you know, in very tight spaces, and it was difficult to get...
either a second or multiple cameras.
Or it was a play,
and in many ways, he filmed it like a play.
That's the simplicity of it.
Today, cinema, even widescreen cinema,
even action-adventure films, rely on the close-up.
If you see a film as powerful as "Ordet,"
you realize it's a cop-out.
I can't think of any close-ups in "Ordet."
Look, there is nothing more powerful
than a close-up of Steve McQueen.
Not the greatest landscape you could film,
not the Taj Mahal, has the power of a close-up of Steve McQueen.
You could tell what McQueen was thinking without words.
Dreyer's film of Joan of Arc
is built on close-ups of the main character
going through her suffering and her passion at the stake.
When you see a play on the stage, like "12 Angry Men,"
you make your own close-ups.
In cinema, the director makes that decision for you.
In the film "Ordet,"
Dreyer did not make that decision.
The best way to do anything is with simplicity.
Hitchcock usually found the simplest solution,
even in complex situations, like what was it like for a guy
to be stabbed and fall backwards down the stairs?
Hitchcock's films are about the possibilities of cinema.
As an observer who happens to be a film director,
you have to look at something and decide how to film it.
So you have to envision first what is the event
that's gonna take place in these different locations?
And they're speaking to you while you're doing that.
Some inner voice is saying, "What about this?"
Then you're trying to figure out how to put it together
so that it becomes kind of seamless
because it's all made up of separate shots
in a -- the way a Jackson Pollock painting
is made up of dots
and the Monet impressions are made up of just brush strokes.
"The Exorcist" and "The French Connection,"
many parts of them look like a documentary,
but I had made documentaries and so I knew the approach to that.
When you make a documentary, as you're doing now,
you don't know what the subject's gonna say,
and so you roll with the flow.
And it has often rough edges.
I like the rough edges.
I had this great camera operator on a number of films,
but he started with me on "The French Connection."
His name was Ricky Bravo.
He photographed the Cuban Revolution at Castro's side
from the Sierra Maestra mountains to Havana,
and Ricky could do anything with a handheld camera.
I wouldn't let Ricky be on the set
while Owen was lighting the set.
When we were lit,
I'd say, "Okay, Ricky, we're ready to shoot,"
and I'd let him go and find the scene.
And I would say to him, "Don't ever cut.
Just keep the camera rolling and just find the shot,
as you did with Castro."
So I'd set up a scene,
two guys walk into a room, as in "French Connection."
They go over the desk where a guy sits down.
The other two guys flank him, they move around,
and Ricky's finding the scene like it's a documentary.
And sometimes, he would cut,
and I said, "Ricky, I told you never to cut.
Why did you cut?"
He said, "Oh, this fellow was completely blocked.
He was blocked by the other guy."
I said, "Ricky, is that what you said to Castro
when he was in the mountains up there?
Did you say, 'We got to do it again, Fidel,
because you got blocked?'"
In most people's mind,
a feature film is different from a documentary.
A feature film is like a play,
and it's all set up and lit and composed.
I don't look at it that way.
I'm more interested in spontaneity than perfection,
and you don't get spontaneity on take 90.
William Wyler was --
his nickname was "90-take Wyler."
His films are great,
and whatever his technique was --
I wasn't there.
"The Best Years of Our Lives" is as good as anything.
He did a lot of takes,
and he used to shoot around the clock, setups everywhere.
But they were his insurance policy.
He felt that need,
and I know that Kubrick is said to have done 90 to 100 takes.
I'm a one-take guy.
I don't believe in take two.
Von Sydow was great until he got to a point in the scene
where Father Merrin has to declaim at the demon,
"I cast you out, unclean spirit, in the name of the father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,"
and that had to be done powerfully by a man
who we have established
is taking little nitroglycerin pills for his heart condition,
is on the verge of death.
But he had to come up with this powerful reading,
and for some reason, Max couldn't do it.
It wasn't powerful enough.
The scene needed, you know, brass, not strings.
And I said, "Max, what is wrong?
I'll do anything that you suggest to get you to do --
we'll fly Ingmar Bergman in here to direct this scene."
And he said very calmly, "No, no, no, no."
He said, "This is -- This is not a matter of Bergman.
I guess what it is is that I just don't believe in God."
I said...
"But you played...
Jesus in the movie 'The Greatest Story Ever Told.'"
He said, "Yes.
I played him as a man, not as a god."
What is your name? Jesus.
That's a good name.
Thank you.
I said, "Well, play this guy as a man."
And he said, "Okay.
Give me a little time."
We left him alone in the dressing room,
he came out, he went in front of the camera and did it,
and that's what's in the film.
I cast you out, unclean spirit!
Shove it up your ass, you faggot!
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is he who commands you,
he who flung you from the gates of Heaven
- to the depths of Hell! - Fuck him!
- Be gone... - Fuck him, Karras! Fuck him!
...from this creature of God!
I don't understand that.
I don't know what happened there.
That's one of the strangest things
that happened to me as a director,
and his reason for not being able to do it
was so foreign to me
because what -- what is an actor doing?
Acting!
Years later, Blatty and I talked about that.
Blatty said to me,
"I think he just didn't want to do it that way."
Max's strength and power came from understatement as an actor.
The main thing about getting what you want as a director
is how you cast the picture.
If you've miscast it,
you'll never get what you want -- ever.
Blatty wrote himself as Father Karras.
He drew on his own feelings, his own experiences.
He set the film in Iraq
because he had been to Iraq as a correspondent.
Now, I'm going to confess something
that I don't think I've ever said before in public,
and that is the fact that Blatty wanted to give me
his entire percentage of profit of the movie
to let him play Father Karras.
And I didn't see him as Father Karras.
I saw a play called "That Championship Season"
by Jason Miller.
It turned out that he had gone
to Catholic University in Washington,
studied for the priesthood for three years,
had a crisis of faith, and dropped out,
and then he put all this lapsed Catholicism in his play.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
So I told him I was making the film of "The Exorcist."
I told him how much I loved his play,
and about a week or so later,
I got a call in California from Jason in New York.
And he said, "Hey, you know that 'Exorcist' book
you were telling me about?"
He said, "I read that book."
He said, "I am that guy."
I said, "Well, you're not that guy.
We've signed another actor."
Before I ever met Jason Miller,
we signed an actor named Stacy Keach to play that part.
No man is just because he does just works.
The works are just if the man is just.
He said, "I want -- Why don't you screen-test me?"
I said -- I got angry.
I said, "What for?
I told you, I've cast the part."
He said, "I'm telling you,"
and so I said, "Okay, you want to shoot a screen test,
I'll set up a test for you, and after it's over,
I'll take the film out of the camera
and give it to you and you can show it to your grandchildren.
You come out here on your own nickel,
knowing that we've cast the part."
We set up a dolly track on an empty soundstage
with just lights, no set.
I called in Ellen Burstyn, who I had cast...
to do a scene with Jason,
the scene where she's walking along a path
in Georgetown and tells Father Karras...
It just so happens
that somebody very close to me is...
is probably possessed and needs an exorcist.
Then I had Ellen interview Jason about his life,
where I put the camera over her shoulder and just studied him,
and then I made a shot of him, an extreme close of him,
saying the -- the mass.
The next day, I saw the rushes of that scene,
and the camera just loved him.
I went to John Calley at Warner Bros.
I said, "I'm gonna hire this guy."
He said, "He's a complete unknown.
He's nobody.
You have Stacy Keach."
I said, "I don't care.
This is the guy.
I don't have to direct this guy.
He is the guy."
And we went with him.
I wasn't proud of it,
but we had to pay off Stacy Keach.
Paid him in full, his salary.
And they did think I was nuts,
but I had what has been described by Fritz Lang
as a kind of sleepwalker's security.
I personally think...
that I made my films
with a kind of sleepwalking security.
I did things...
which I thought were right.
Period.
That's what I had when I made "The Exorcist."
I felt that every decision I made was the right decision,
and I didn't question my instincts.
And I had the power...
then to do that.
The studio had offered it to Stanley Kubrick,
Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols.
Those three guys passed.
They didn't know how to make the picture,
but I did know how to make the picture.
And they sensed that.
And Jason's great in the film.
He shouldn't have been in that picture.
I accidentally saw his play.
I accidentally was moved by it, another gift from the movie god.
Look, it's very difficult for an actor, even a great actor,
to produce an emotion in front of a camera.
Behind the camera may be dozens,
if not more, people standing right behind the camera,
walking around, milling, reading the newspaper sometimes,
eating lunch.
I met Father Bill O'Malley,
who plays Father Dyer in "The Exorcist,"
through Bill Blatty, and I met him.
And I could see and hear instantly that he was Dyer,
but he wasn't an actor.
He is a priest, and I just turned him loose...
My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub
with me as a headliner for all eternity,
and they love me.
...until we came to the scene where he has to come to tears
as he's giving the last rites to his good friend who's dying,
and O'Malley couldn't do it.
And I took O'Malley aside and I said,
"Bill, do you love me?"
He said,
"Yes, of course I love you, Bill.
You know that."
I said, "Do you trust me?"
Said, "Of course I trust you."
I said, "Okay," and I turned away
and then I hit him full in the face.
I smacked him in the face, and I pushed him
in front of the camera and I said, "Action."
And afterward, he hugged me and thanked me
because there was no other way he was gonna ever get to that,
but I don't think I would do that again that way.
Techniques like that would -- would not go over today.
That wasn't something I invented.
That was done by directors like John Ford
and George Stevens to produce that emotion.
Ford and Stevens -- they do whatever technique worked.
I remember seeing a story in Life magazine,
a photo essay on the production of the film
"The Diary of Anne Frank," directed by George Stevens.
So they had a big set built of the top-floor apartment
where the Frank family was hiding,
and they were in abject fear
when the Nazi sirens would go by in the streets of Amsterdam.
And there's a picture of George Stevens
sitting on top of the set on the crossbeams with a rifle,
and he used to shoot off a rifle
to get a reaction from the people in the room.
And I did that all throughout "The Exorcist" film.
There's the one shot I remember in particular.
It's a tight close-up with Jason Miller
is working at the desk in his room,
and then a phone rings.
I didn't play a phone.
I shot a rifle.
There are many ways in which you work
with the actors and the crew.
There's no one technique.
With someone like Ellen Burstyn or Max von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb,
one of the greatest American actors who ever lived,
you don't give them a lot of direction.
You talk initially before you shoot the film,
make sure you're on the same page,
and then they go out and they do it.
And if you need or want to correct anything,
you'll say something to them,
much as the conductor of a symphony orchestra
talks to the members of the orchestra.
That section a little softer or a little louder
or faster or slower,
and that's basically all you'll adjust
with -- with a great actor.
Might your daughter remember, perhaps,
if Mr. Dennings was in her room that night?
My favorite scene in "The Exorcist"
is a scene where Lee J. Cobb, who plays Detective Kinderman,
is at the opposite end of a table from Ellen Burstyn,
and it's a very quiet scene where very little happens
in which he suggests to her without saying it
that her daughter might have pushed a man
out of her bedroom window.
Just two setups --
one over her shoulder, one over his --
that moves toward each one of them,
just pulling the audience closer.
All interior,
and I remember saying to them, yes, just interiorize that.
Ellen, you know what he's saying,
but you can't show it.
Don't show him how this is killing you inside.
Suppress that emotion throughout,
and she played that scene so beautifully.
That's the way she wanted to play it.
Same with Lee.
As the tension is relieved,
the camera almost imperceptibly moves away from that.
The scene I've just described is...
one of the most tension-filled in the film
because of what's being said.
She's sitting there at the table.
She says to him, not knowing what to say...
Would you like some more coffee?
...hoping that he'll say, "No, I'm fine," and get out of there,
and he turns and says...
Please.
Oh, my God.
That moment on her is devastating.
And he calmly suggests to her...
You might ask your daughter
if she remembers
seeing Mr. Dennings in her room that night.
Look, he -- he wouldn't have any reason
in the world to up to her room.
Oh, I know, I realize,
but if certain British doctors never asked,
"What is this fungus?"
we wouldn't today have penicillin, correct?
It's a brilliant dialogue, and he then says...
I-I really hate to ask you this, but...
for -- for my daughter,
could you please give an autograph?
And that completely relieves the tension.
You're a very nice lady.
- Thank you. - You're a nice man.
Wonderful character scene with very few words,
but the tension is totally relieved
because after he goes out the door,
all hell will break loose in the house.
And after he leaves,
I added the sound of a ticking grandfather clock...
which to the audience has the effect of a bomb ticking
before it goes off.
It's a quiet
There is a grandfather clock buried in the shot,
but for the most part, you would not be conscious of it
if you were in the room with it.
And then all of a sudden, there's a scream
that comes from upstairs, which is the bomb going off.
Nothing is more shocking than...
the masturbation scene, and that was Blatty's intent.
And I told him,
and he agreed, that I wasn't going to sugarcoat it.
Here it is. This is what happens.
Let Jesus fuck you! Let Jesus fuck you!
Let him fuck you!
It was...extremely disturbing, that sequence,
both to conceive of and to shoot
because it's probably the only time in any film
where something like the crucifix and the vagina
are brought into the same frame of film.
I came up with this notion,
which I discussed with Dick Smith,
that the makeup should be organic to something
that Regan had done to herself,
and it occurred to me that the makeup should grow out of that.
Dick Smith liked that idea,
and he then created the makeup to grow out
of what appeared to be
gangrenous self-inflicted wounds on her face.
Ensor is one of my favorite artists
who influenced me a great deal,
and the masks in a film I made called "The Brink's Job,"
which is about a famous robbery in the 1950s,
are inspired by Ensor's paintings of masks.
I showed these masks to Dick Smith for "The Exorcist"
just to show
certain expressive things that were possible.
The first makeup test that Dick did was just white face...
dark eyes, red lines under the face,
and I didn't like it.
I thought it looked like makeup,
but then some months later in the cutting room,
the editor, Bud Smith,
showed me the makeup tests again.
He said, "Look at this frame."
When you see just a frame or two of it, it's shocking,
and it speaks volumes.
It's not in the script.
I decided to put it in later,
and then when I did the 2000 version,
I added a couple of more.
I think all of us probably think...
in subliminal perception.
First time I saw it was done by Alain Resnais
in "Last Year at Marienbad" and in "Hiroshima Mon Amour."
And that made a profound impression on me,
and I used it in "The Exorcist."
I've used subliminal cuts in "Cruising"
during the murder scenes
and in "Sorcerer" as momentary mental flashbacks.
I did that with sound, as well,
but it's much more imperceptible.
Subliminal sounds like the pig squealing,
which is mixed into the demon voice in places.
A fly that's caught in a bottle with a microphone
stuck down there that's in there.
I'm basically an old radio guy.
My earliest influence was dramatic radio.
Everything was in the imagination, everything,
and it was through not only the human voice and music,
but through sound effects.
"The Exorcist" is an experimental sound museum,
and so when I came into film, I was very much drawn
to trying to continue that kind of use of sound.
The demon voice was sculpted out of various sounds
and the voice of Mercedes McCambridge.
I had this friend from Chicago
that I used to work with who was basically an announcer,
but he was a great experimenter with sound.
His name was Ken Nordine.
Now, in this mound of think,
in my huge, small individual love.
Mine, yours, anyone, anything so related closer than any close,
so close that...
I called him and I said,
"Ken, can you create a demon voice?"
And he experimented for months,
and I started to think, "This -- This doesn't work.
Why doesn't it work?"
Well, it's the voice of a man,
no matter how intentionally distorted, but...
it can't be a woman's voice, either.
So I start to think, "Is there anyone...
who sounds both male and female?
Sort of neuter?"
It popped into my head
from the old days of dramatic radio,
Mercedes McCambridge.
You heard her tell how
they're gonna run the railroad through here,
bring in thousands of new people from the east.
Farmers, dirt farmers, squatters.
They'll push us out.
I show her the film in rough cut...
without any sound, with Linda Blair's voice.
What an excellent day for an exorcism.
But wouldn't that drive you out of Regan?
It would bring us together.
You and Regan.
You and us.
She said, "Do you know anything about me?
I was a practicing Catholic from childhood,
then I became a suicidal drunk, I went through AA,
and I can no longer have a drink, even."
But she said, "In order to do what you need me
to do with this voice, I'm going to have to
put alcohol down my throat, and I'm going to have to
several times a day swallow raw eggs."
And she said, "I want you to tie me to a chair like this,
and I will sit squatting on the chair
so that I feel some actual pain,
and I will smoke again and drink again.
But I want these two priests in the room who are friends of mine
at all times in the recording studio.
You'll have to give them some money for their church.
And let's see what we can do.
Awful lot of smoke.
Awful lot of whiskey.
And we went into a recording studio.
She'd finish a scene, go back to the rear of the sound stage,
where her two priests sat,
and she would collapse into their arms in tears.
She was saying lines like,
"Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras."
Every single line that you see in the film,
Linda Blair had to say.
It sounds a lot different when it's coming out of
the mouth of a 12-year-old, though.
How long are you planning to stay in Regan?
Until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.
She everything that Linda Blair said.
Stick your cock up her ass, you motherfucking
worthless cock sucker.
Be silent!
And sometimes she would simply open her mouth
with a mic open like this.
But out of her throat would come three or four different sounds
because of the booze and the eggs and the smoke
in the way that John Coltrane plays the saxophone,
where you hear three or four notes at one time.
I had not used the name Mercedes McCambridge
since I saw her in a movie called "Giant", and again,
it was an inspiration, a gift from God.
Images stick in my mind's eye.
I'll see something, and it'll like go into
a mental file, and occasionally I'll have use for it.
Most of my films are realistic
because I've never been able to tap into the surreal.
But the surreal is what I admire the most.
Magritte is, to me, you know, the greatest surrealist.
The first thing we filmed with Max von Sydow
was in Georgetown, where he arrives.
That shot came from a painting by René Magritte.
It's called "The Empire of Light."
There's a street very similar to Prospect Street
in Georgetown.
It's a day light sky over a night time street,
and this painting had a profound effect on me,
and I decided to put a figure in it.
Von Sydow, the priest.
And have the light from the girl's bedroom shining
on him, which gave it the surreal feeling
that the Magritte painting had.
It's remained forever the iconic image of "The Exorcist."
I love the paintings of Caravaggio,
you know, which are mostly figures
set against a completely black background, dramatically lit.
Many of them are biblical scenes.
Most biblical paintings of the Renaissance
will lay out everything in the background.
Caravaggio didn't bother to try to recreate
any of the scenes from the Holy Land.
He just put the figures very powerfully in the foreground.
His paintings are strong, emotional, hard edged.
They force you to look at the figures.
And they're almost like Cartier-Bresson's photographs,
moments of truth that he selected within these events
to highlight and isolate.
And so it's the way in which he did these things
that I've often been able to recreate to some extent,
not to his extent.
The light coming from one side,
powerful foreground figures,
and then either out of focus or black background.
I will do that often unconsciously.
And I know it's related to my love of Caravaggio's
incredible figures.
Rembrandt's portraits have influenced cinematographers
and directors forever, since the beginning of film.
What he did basically was take one source light,
so there's a very prominent and powerful light
coming on a figure from one source,
and the rest of the light on the face
is a kind of a soft bounce light from another surface
that is not as strong as the hot source.
And occasionally there'll be a bit of back light,
but it's not emphasized.
And that's the idea of the way I've tried
to shoot faces and portraits.
Wherever I could control the light within interiors,
we shot it that way.
Rembrandt basically created a style of lighting
that still exists and is still relevant.
I would go so far as to say you could almost
throw everything else out, even "The Mona Lisa."
I've also been influenced by 17th century Dutch paintings,
in particular Vermeer.
The most powerful painting I've ever seen
is Vermeer's "View of Delft."
It's just magnificent.
It's one of his few landscapes,
and it's just a group of women on the shore
who are doing their daily shopping
and now they're talking to one another.
In the background is the city of Delft,
which premieres slightly rearranged in his picture,
as El Greco rearranged the view of Toledo that he painted.
And there's a shaft of light
that hits the corner of a building,
a little yellow spot on the painting.
And the painting takes you absolutely back to
17th century Delft.
You're there, you can almost hear the conversations
if you give yourself to it.
Oh, it's such an unexpected little thing.
I find that so simple and yet so profoundly moving.
It's not just a dab of reality at all.
It's a little grace note.
I certainly attempted to have
little grace notes in "The Exorcist."
There's a shot in there that's one of the most
beautiful shots I've ever been involved with.
It's a shot of von Sydow walking through a bazaar.
There were holes in the ceiling where the sun poured in.
And I just thought, "This is so beautiful,"
that I had von Sydow walk through there.
The grace notes are what you remember about any experience,
a person that you've met,
the things that we love about the people we love,
or a moment in a novel or in a movie.
"Citizen Kane" is filled with grace notes.
Filled with grace notes.
Rosebud.
The story told by Mr. Bernstein
to the reporter about how he could remember
seeing a woman.
One day back in 1896, I was crossing over
to Jersey on the ferry.
And as we pulled out,
there was another ferry pulling in.
And on it, there was a girl waiting to get off.
A white dress she had on.
And she was carrying a white parasol.
And I only saw her for one second.
She didn't see me at all.
But I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since
that I haven't thought of that girl.
That's a grace note that tells you something profound
about the human experience.
We all have such things,
and they're much more important than the larger events.
When Ellen Burstyn walks home from the movie within the movie
that she's shooting, you see two nuns walking,
and their wind just takes their habits
and blows them in kind of slow motion,
and she notices that moment.
She notices some children running by in Halloween costume,
which is a kind of quiet precursor
to what's to come -- children in disguise.
There's nothing in those scenes that move the film
one inch forward, but they're grace notes
that I tried to add to the whole experience.
A routine I have when I go to Chicago is
I'll walk down the street to the Art Institute
and spend an hour or two looking at the same paintings
over and over again.
To go back and look at these paintings is like
visiting old friends.
The Monet collection is unsurpassed,
especially "Morning on the Seine near Giverny",
which is probably, if I have such a thing,
it would be my favorite painting in the world.
And it's nothing but a very soft collage,
whites, blues, grays,
just harmoniously together, nothing loud.
Everything in the painting is soft, almost imperceptible.
It's a pure, quiet abstract.
It's like Ravel's music or Debussy's music on a canvas,
especially the "Quartet in F" by Maurice Ravel.
So there is a symbiosis for me between art and music.
There are great quiet sound effects
all over the movie, and I didn't want the score
to drown them out, so I didn't want a loud score
or a rhythmic score or a boisterous score.
For the most part, I don't like to cue the audience
on how they're supposed to feel.
I like them to find that out for themselves.
There are exceptions to that, like "Psycho",
where the score tells you exactly how to feel
at all times, and it's great.
When I finished editing the film,
I went to the great composer Bernard Herrmann,
who was living in London then.
He had had a score rejected by Alfred Hitchcock
and Herrmann left America and moved to England,
became an expatriate.
Tell the cookie she should put that down.
I screened the rough cut of "The Exorcist"
for Bernard Herrmann.
He came out after the screening, and he said,
"Well, I think I can save this piece of shit
if you leave it with me, and I'll mail you a score."
Get rid of that first scene in the desert out there,
wherever the fuck you shot that.
You don't need that.
It doesn't mean a goddamn thing."
And by now, I'm a little upset.
And I said, "Can I ask you, what do you have in mind?
How would you score this?"
He said, "Well, there's a church
somewhere outside of greater London.
It's called St Giles Cripplegate.
And they have the greatest church organ
that I've ever heard.
The sound is magnificent."
And I said, "You want to use a church organ
in 'The Exorcist'?"
Do you have any idea why he wanted
a church organ?
Hell, no.
It seemed like a cliché to me, and I knew I was talking
to the greatest composer who ever lived.
I stood up and I said,
"Well, thank you for letting me meet an interesting person."
And I left.
I didn't give a shit if he was Bernard Herrmann
or Ludwig van Beethoven.
I was too close to that film to give it to anybody
to add as key an element as music.
This is one of the worst disappointments of my life.
So I then took the film back home,
and I started to use what we call temp score.
I put existing music that I had been listening to.
I was not looking to have the score drive the movie.
I was looking for a piece of music
that was like the cold hand on the back of a neck.
And so I was listening to music like Krzysztof Penderecki.
Polish composer.
Anton Webern, who wrote the quietest music ever written,
a piece called "Five Pieces for Orchestra",
in which the music never rises above this level.
When I touch your forehead, open your eyes.
He was a student of Schoenberg,
sort of created 12 tone music or serial music,
which is not melodic and often not even rhythmic.
I scored the film
primarily with recordings of those pieces of music,
and I then took the film with my choice of music
to a composer I had known called Lalo Schifrin,
and I said, "Lalo, I want the music to be a cold hand
on the back of your neck.
I don't want anything loud or noisy
except maybe in a couple of places just for accent.
Like where the little girl shows writing on her chest."
He said, "I got it, I've got it."
And I walk into the recording studio at Warner Bros.,
and there's 80 or 90 musicians, and they're all electrified,
and he plays the first cue over the Iraqi desert.
And the music was blasting and blaring and screaming.
And I had all these wonderful sounds of the guys
digging from a distance and from medium and close up.
And the music wiped everything out.
It's a very complex and interesting score,
but it was loud and rhythmic and wrong.
And, um, I hated it!
I said, "Lalo, this stuff is wrong.
Can you change it?"
And he said, "No, I can't change it."
So I said, "It's over, the session's over."
And he was a good friend of mine,
and we haven't spoken since.
The music director of Warner Bros. took the tracks
that I selected off 33 1/3 LPs and had them re-recorded
in London by a pick up orchestra.
That's what's in the film.
I still wanted something that sounded like or vaguely
like Brahms' "Lullaby", and it goes something like this.
I would listen to one piece after another.
Needle drop out, needle drop, two seconds, out.
10 seconds, out.
Hundreds of pieces and up comes something called
"Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield.
There's no label on it. It was handwritten on a label.
It's not that unusual to have a score done like that.
You have the opening and incidental music of "2001."
"Thus Spake Zarathustra"
was conducted by Herbert von Karajan
with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
Those were existing recordings that Kubrick used
after he had commissioned a score by Alex North
and rejected.
And the score didn't match up to the temp track,
as was the case with me.
All of those things, the paintings and the music,
went a long way in influencing how I made this film.
They all sort of creep into your imagination,
which feeds your ideas for a film.
I couldn't be a film director if I was a skeptic.
I did not approach "The Exorcist"
as a nonbeliever or a cynic.
I approached it as a believer.
And to direct the film like that, I had to separate myself
and my own emotions from the act itself
and take the actors into a mental environment
where they could separate themselves from
what was being portrayed.
Blatty and I never talked about a horror film
or effects in a horror film.
To me, it's more of a chamber piece than spectacle.
Most of the stuff takes place in one room,
in the little girl's bedroom.
We set out to tell this story
that deals with the mystery of faith and good and evil,
both extreme sacrifice and goodness and love.
Jesus Christ, won't somebody help me?!
No, see, you don't understand. Your daughter --
Could you help her? Just help her!
As I sit here now and talk about this film,
probably in the mind's eye of the people watching this,
they're wondering, do I believe that there is such a thing
as demonic possession?
I have no idea. It's one of the mysteries.
Do you have any religious beliefs?
- No. - What about your daughter?
No. Why?
You ever heard of exorcism?
Now, I filmed what purports to be an actual possession
and exorcism by the Vatican exorcist,
Father Gabriele Amorth.
What I saw was extremely harrowing and convincing.
But do I know what this was? No, I don't.
There are people who say,
"Well, I don't buy into any of this stuff.
I don't believe in possession. I don't believe in the devil."
But they're watching it, you know?
The truth is none of us know anything, Alexander.
We don't know anything.
From the greatest thinkers and philosophers
the world has ever known, from St. Augustine to
Stephen Hawking, we don't know anything.
I'm sorry.You're sorry?!
Jesus Christ!
88 doctors, and all you can tell me
with all of your bullshit is...
All we know is we had nothing to say about our birth,
we'll no doubt have nothing to say about the time or place
or means by which we die.
Life is so ambiguous, which is why my films are.
So much of our lives take place in our mind's eye
and later could become inseparable from reality.
Every one of us lives with a separate reality.
So I leave the question open for a long time in the film
as to, is a lot of this what's actually happening
in the real world, or is it the outcome of
an extremely unusual event
that takes place in a different way
to the different people involved?
Karras is the only character
who has seen and heard that derelict earlier.
Father, could you help an old altar boy?
I'm a Catholic.
One of the reasons that people could be affected
by that brief scene in the subway is the fact
that the voice of the derelict comes up later in the room
from Regan's mouth.
As he's walking away from her bed,
he hears that derelict's voice.
Can you help an old altar boy, Father?
Or does he?
There's always the question.
In the same way that you have the medal
appearing in Karras' dream that was discovered
by Merrin in Iraq.
The idea of that scene is symbiosis,
the idea that people are going to be intricately involved
with one another at some point,
share images, share thoughts.
It's a St. Joseph medal that's found in the cave.
The question is, what is a St. Joseph medal
doing among all these artifacts from centuries before?
And that's a question I wanted to raise
in the way it's raised in "2001."
We don't know to this day what the obelisk is all about.
It appears at the dawn of man,
and then it appears on Jupiter in 2001.
And then in the finale of the film,
there's the obelisk again.
I thought it was genius using a talisman in film like that,
but that's the sled in "Citizen Kane."
What does all that stuff mean?
It's both obvious and indecipherable.
I added these other shots to the scene
that come out of Merrin's experience
and enter Karras' dream.
The descending medal,
the St. Joseph medal that was found in Iraq,
I added a barking dog running towards the camera,
which is reminiscent of the dogs in Iraq
that are barking around the statue of Pazuzu
when Merrin confronts it.
The clock in Iraq that only Merrin sees,
that Karras has never seen.
His mother emerging from a subway kiosk.
There's a constant motif of ascension in the film.
Which is certainly a reference to Christianity.
Very subliminal.
If I hadn't mentioned it, you might not notice it.
And she's screaming out at him, "Dimi,"
which is what she called him.
His name was Damien.
You don't hear her voice.
And he is waving at her, and he's shouting, "Mama, Mama."
But you don't hear his voice,
They're two separate cuts.
They're never in the same frame together.
He sees his own mother as she's descending
into a subway station, which is telling him the possibility
that she's descending into hell.
Clearly a reference to the idea that he was losing his mother
and couldn't prevent, couldn't stop it.
Mama, it's Dimi, Mama.
Dimi.
Why would you do this to me, Dimi?
Why?
Come on, I'm going to take you out of here, Mama.
Mama, I'm going to take you home.
I'm gonna take you out of here tonight, Mama.
Mama, everything's gonna be all right.
Mama, I'm gonna take you home.
Mama, I'm gonna take you home!
That idea is the source of his guilt.
Oh, Christ.
I should have been there. I wasn't there.
I should have been there.
There was nothing you could do.
His guilt that he devoted his life to the priesthood
and not to his mother's health or well-being.
- You killed your mother! - On this your servant Regan --
You left her alone to die!
- Shut up! - She'll never forgive you!
That's the principal source of his guilt,
so that when we meet him in the film,
he is suffering this guilt and is losing his faith.
I have felt that in my life about my mother.
One of the things that bonded Blatty and me
was a love of our mothers.
Bill has a tremendous --
had a tremendous love and sense of loss
about his mother,
to whom he owes a great deal of his success.
And I still have a tremendous sense of loss about my mother.
And that's one of the things that bonded us over this film
and its overall concept.
Karras is the target of the demon,
not the little girl.
You're not my mother!
Don't listen.
Why, Dimi?
Damien.
- Dimi, please. - Damien.
Get out.
The demon moves right in and is trying to show Karras
that his faith is worthless, useless, ineffective.
That's the purpose of the entire possession.
And this is an act by the devil to show the young priest
that human beings are disgusting pieces of filth at bottom.
Even a young, innocent child is nothing
but a disgusting piece of filth, which is what the devil
wants us to think about each other.
Why this girl? Doesn't make sense.
I think the point is to make us despair.
To see ourselves as...
animal and ugly.
To reject the possibility that God could love us.
Open the door!
Do you know what she did?
Your cunting daughter.
Hitler believed that.
Stalin believed that.
Stalin killed 20 million of his own people
'cause he believed they were worthless.
How long are you planning to stay in Regan?
Until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.
Here's a wonderful scene between Karras and the priest
played by an actual priest named Father Birmingham.
I can't cut it anymore.
I need out. I'm unfit.
I think I've lost my faith, Tom.
That scene is cross-cut with what's happening to Regan.
He doesn't even call his daughter on her birthday,
for Christ's sake.
Maybe the circuit is busy.
Oh, circuits, my ass. He doesn't give a shit.
And you see these two disparate forces
slowly moving toward one another as though magnetically.
The little girl who is being victimized by the separation
of her parents and the anguish of the mother.
And you see the priest, who is losing his faith,
who is called upon to try and help the little girl.
These three characters are all going to come together
and mesh from separate worlds drawn together by fate,
and that's what it was designed to do,
and it was dictated to me by -- from another place.
I believe that we all have such inexpressible,
unexplainable dreams that may come from somewhere else,
that sometimes manifest themselves as déjà vu.
There are so many images and moments in life
that exist in some time warp or in some other place
that are randomly selected by somebody else.
We don't just dream about stuff that's happened
or is happening to us.
We dream about things from elsewhere
and where are they from?
And that is the most important discovery I made
as a filmmaker, that I could take
something from the life of one character
and put it into the dream life of another.
Well, suppose you have a thought.
And suppose the thought is about someone you're in tune with.
And then across thousands of miles,
that person knows what you're thinking about
and answers you, and it's all mental.
I'm not that attracted to ambiguity, but I do love it
when an audience has their own interpretation of a film
that I've made or that someone else has made.
And I've always believed that what you bring to a film,
especially like "The Exorcist", what you bring to it
is what you are going to take away from it.
The end did not have to be definitive,
but it had to be satisfying.
Many people look at the ending of the film as ambiguous.
Many people think that the the demon won,
that Karras and Merrin are dead as a result
of the possession and exorcism.
That's not how I approached the film,
and that isn't my belief.
No!
There's a wonderful lyric by Bob Dylan --
"While preachers preach of evil fates,
teachers teach that knowledge waits.
But goodness stands outside the gates.
And sometimes even the President of the United States
must have to stand naked.
And if my thought dreams could be seen,
they'd probably put my head in a guillotine,
but it's all right, ma, I'm only dyin'."
All of that is at play in this last moment
of Karras' death.
Father Karras gives up his life in his mind...
...for the life of this child that he's never known at all.
He knew only the possessed girl,
and there's a great feeling of sacrifice
that takes place in that moment, much like Sydney Carton
in the end of "A Tale of Two Cities."
It's a far, far better thing I do
than I have ever done.
It's a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.
The idea of demonic possession and exorcism
is the idea that the priest calls upon Jesus Christ
through this ritual to exorcise the demon.
And the ending of "The Exorcist"
contradicts what I've just told you.
It's heard by Chris and Sharon
in another room in this novel.
Blatty wrote this entire paragraph
in order to not deal with the manner
in which Karras commits suicide.
We can't cut away.
We don't cut away from them during the exorcism.
There's a break in it where we see Chris sitting,
knitting something.
But during the exorcism, there could be no cutaways.
And I said, "Bill, what happened there?
He went out the window, obviously. How?
Was he possessed?"
"No," Bill said. "He wasn't possessed."
No, he made the conscious decision
to take himself out the window
and killing himself with the demon inside him.
But you're saying to me you want the demon to be gone
when he goes out the window?
I said, "But, Bill, that's suicide.
It's a sin in the Catholic Church."
Suicide is a sin.
It was confusing then, it's confusing now.
First of all, I find it improbable that a character
could call upon the devil to enter him or her.
The devil does what the devil wants to do.
I'm Damien Karras.
And I'm the devil.
Now kindly undo these straps.
If you're the devil, why not make those straps disappear?
That's much too vulgar a display of power, Karras.
Did you do that?
Ah-uhm...
Do it again.
- In time. - No, now.
In time.
If you look at the scene and analyze it,
the demon enters Karras
because Karras invites it to come in,
and he's beating up this little girl,
which is an evil act.
You specifically see that he says...
Come into me!
Goddamn you, take me!
Take me!
Merrin would never do what Karras does, had he lived.
Grab the demon and say, "Take me, come in to me."
That was not in Merrin's wheelhouse.
He's got his hands around her throat,
as Blatty suggests in the novel, and she rips
the St. Joseph medal off of his neck.
Karras looks out the windows,
which are open, and the curtains are blowing.
He sees the face of his mother.
It's a two or three frame cut,
which is not in the book, which Blatty questioned,
but ultimately went along with, with the idea
that perhaps he thinks he's going to join his mother
in the afterlife.
And at that moment, you see for a split second
his features change and become demonic
and sees his hands about to go around the little girl's neck
to strangle her to death,
which is probably the demonic impulse.
And then they unchange.
The demon is not in him,
and specifically at Blatty's request.
And most people don't see or even get that
we go back to Karras as Karras.
I would have kept the demon features on Karras throughout,
and Bill said, "No, you have to go back to Karras' own features
in the act of yelling 'No' so that he makes
the conscious decision to do it.
Otherwise, it's the demon that has triumphed."
But it isn't even clear to me as I sit here
why in the hell that happens.
I defy anybody watching this to tell me
what they make of that scene,
if they really look at it and study it.
Why the demon decides to pay attention to Karras,
leave the little girl and go into him is a question.
But then I believe that the entire possession
of the little girl is directed at Karras' weakness
and potential loss of faith.
Are we to say that he regained his faith
in that final moment with the demon?
That's what Blatty is trying to say.
He confesses his sins in the moment of his death
to his friend Father Dyer,
and is thus forgiven in the Catholic faith.
But it is a sin.
I think if there's a weakness in "The Exorcist", it's that.
I had no alternative,
so I shot it the way he explained it to me.
The moment is a compromise.
It's not often as a director that I've had to film something
that I didn't completely understand.
In fact, but that's the only instance I can give you.
To me, it's a flaw.
It's like scars in fine leather.
Bill, who I love and respect and love like a brother,
and he gave me this magnificent work
that he wrote to realize as a film,
but he was never able to come to terms
with that penultimate moment in "The Exorcist",
and neither was I.
I can't defend that scene.
Doesn't appear to have been a problem
for the millions of people who've seen the film.
They accept what we showed.
It asks for a total leap of faith
on the part of the audience.
I went to Kyoto many years ago when "The Exorcist" opened.
When you come in to Kyoto, it's just another industrial city.
It looks like Long Beach, California.
There's nothing of any note until you get to
the Walled City, which contains 11th century
and even earlier palaces and homes.
And it's like a time capsule of centuries ago.
And people had told me that you must see the Zen garden.
Well, what the hell, I thought, was the Zen garden?
I go there, and there's a piece of land,
and it's a sea of combed sand.
And on it are several rocks.
Each of the rocks is placed somewhere on this sea of sand.
And there's some benches around it where people can sit down,
and they're there to contemplate the Zen garden.
And I sat down.
There were maybe only 20 people there.
They were very quiet.
And I thought, "What is this?
It's a bunch of rocks placed on a sea of combed sand."
And now, if you give yourself to it, this is what happened.
I'm looking at this thing
and trying to figure out what is the attraction.
Why is it so famous?
Nobody knows when those rocks were put there or by whom.
So that begins to occupy your mind.
The next thing you realize is these rocks
are like separate continents that will never come together.
They will always live separately like that.
Like the continents of Earth.
And then you begin to realize they're also like people.
Like families living alone.
And then you start to realize
that this is human nature, that we are all here alone.
No matter how close we are to family or friends,
we are in this world alone.
And I wasn't there for --
it's happening to me now just talking about it.
I wasn't there for 15 minutes before I started to cry.
The tears started to roll down my cheeks.
I was so profoundly moved by this simple image
that indicated the separateness
with which all of us live from each other.
It has moved me to this day.
I'll never forget that experience of Kyoto.
And I'm anxious to have it again.
It was probably over 40 years ago
that I've been there, but there's not a day goes by
that I don't have images of that experience.
You know, I've been all over the world,
and the grace note for me is the little Zen garden,
a garden of nothing but combed sand and stone.