The celebrated director William Friedkin, who died Aug. 7 at age 87, will have a last hurrah of sorts at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Earlier this summer, the fest announced it would screen out of competition Friedkin’s latest and now final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, starring Kiefer Sutherland, from Paramount and Showtime, as well as a restored version of his classic The Exorcist.
The auteur was no stranger to Venice, where he brought such films as Jade — the crime drama starring David Caruso, Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri was unfinished when it screened there in 1995 (“It’s a risk, but Venice is the best festival in the world for getting focus on your film,” he told THR at the time) — and 2011’s Killer Joe, in which Matthew McConaughey played a cop/hitman hired to kill a drug dealer’s (Emile Hirsch) mother to cash in on her life insurance.
In 2013, Friedkin was awarded the fest’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Festival director Alberto Barbera praised Friedkin for having “revolutionized the popular genres of the crime film and the horror film, basically inventing the modern blockbuster with The French Connection.” The festivities included screening a restored version of Friedkin’s 1977 thriller Sorcerer — about a group of fugitives who risk their lives driving two trucks filled with unstable dynamite up a mountain in order to escape a South American village. Afterward, he met with the press and, as reported by Variety, said the movie, though it originally opened to mixed reviews, came “closest to my vision,” adding, “Of any film I ever made, the result is the way I first saw it in my mind’s eye.”
Friedkin also marked the occasion by offering advice to young filmmakers: “If you are in film school, leave immediately. Go out, get a small camera, make your film, edit it at home, put it on a website, and do it yourself. Don’t worry about criticism, just let the audience see your work, free of any critical appraisal.
“Nobody can teach you how to make movies,” he continued. “It is something you learn by doing and by seeing. Because cinema begets cinema. My films are passable because of what I’ve seen in the works of others. All a young person has to do to learn how to make a film is watch the films of Alfred Hitchcock.”
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