The French Connection director William Friedkin says, 'I don't think I'd make a cop film today'

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle is practically the prototype for the good "bad cop" that has dominated depictions of policing in pop culture.

The French Connection character, memorably played by Gene Hackman and based on a real NYPD narcotics detective, has no qualms about doing whatever it takes to get the job done and mete out what he considers justice — even if that means throwing around racial and ethnic slurs, roughing up perps, or shooting a suspect in the back.

A masterful study in moral ambiguity The French Connection, which turns 50 this fall, doesn't celebrate the dubious tactics of Popeye and his partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Rosso (Roy Scheider); instead it interrogates them, letting the audience decide if there's any such thing as "good guys" in the gritty world of drug trafficking and detectives it depicts.

That's why director William Friedkin says that if he were to remake The French Connection today, not much would change. His goal was to portray policing as he saw it and leave it to audiences to decide for themselves, not to valorize or critique it. Still, amid national conversations about police reform and police brutality, he wouldn't be eager to tackle the subject matter again.

"I don't think I'd make a cop film today," he tells EW. "But if I did, it wouldn't be much different. And I would try to capture the action and the dialogue that persists and exists today. You'd be amazed how very close it is to what it was."

"I don't celebrate that behavior," adds Friedkin, who won the Oscar for Best Director for the film. "But I'm fascinated by it."

To mark the 50th anniversary of The French Connection, Friedkin will join Turner Classic Movies on Nov. 13 for a conversation. TCM will air a double feature of the film and another Friedkin police thriller, To Live and Die in L.A. But first, we called up the celebrated director to talk all things French Connection — from that famous chase scene to behind-the-scenes myths to his seeming obsession with stairs.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The French Connection was extremely well-regarded upon release and won multiple Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. Did you ever anticipate or hope while making it that it'd be something people would still be celebrating and avidly discussing 50 years down the line?

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: Oh no. In those days we couldn't think about 50 years on. There was no real television for movies, there was no streaming. The networks were making their own films, for the most part. And there was no Blu-ray or DVD. We had all these other platforms between now and when we started.

You have quite the impressive body of work, but would you say it's the film you're proudest of?

No, there are several that I like very much because I was able to achieve what was in my mind's eye when I did them. The French Connection would certainly be one of them, but not necessarily the most. But it was the film that got me going.

The famous story goes that you decided to make the film at Howard Hawks' urging to do a chase scene better than any that had come before.

That's a complete lie.

Really?

I met Howard Hawks. I was living with his daughter Kitty Hawks. She hadn't seen him for 16 years. Last time she saw him she was a little girl, and now she's a woman. She gets a wire that he'd love to see her. So the two of us made a trip out to California. I saw him for lunch once, and we didn't discuss film at all. I don't know where the fellow who wrote that got that, but I doubt that Hawks told him that. Hawks gave me no advice whatsoever.

So how did you decide to make the film?

It just came along. The producer, Phil D'Antoni, had the rights. He had seen some of my earlier films, especially the documentaries, and he decided to ask me to make the film and that's how it came about. In those days the stories would somehow come to you. You didn't have to go and seek them out. D'Antoni and I used to work out at the Paramount gym, and we would talk and one day he told me he had the rights to this story. He told me the story. I went from California to New York and met the two original cops, and that was that. Nothing from Howard Hawks. I don't mean to diss Howard Hawks, but I don't know that he ever said that. Somewhere along the way — because I did meet him, I was living with his daughter — somebody assumed something like that. But it was not true.

Some Liberty Valence printing the legend there. How essential were the real cops, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, to the making of the film?

Totally. I had never read Robin Moore's book. I've never read it. I just met Egan and Grosso. I was so fascinated by them and their dynamic. I would ride along in police cars with them when they went off on their rounds, and I would see all these shooting galleries everywhere in all the neighborhoods of New York at the time. It was really disturbing, but the way they handled it was so unique and original and fascinating to me that I made the film really about them more so than the case, and everything in the film is something they said or did.

We can't discuss this film without talking about the iconic chase scene. How did you first conceive of it, and how much of it was planned versus the luck of things that happened as you were shooting?

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.

Do you think any chases since have rivaled it?

I don't know. I can't speak about that. Steve McQueen was a friend of mine, and he had done Bullitt a few years before. I would see him socially and often he'd be in the room before I got there, and he would always say, "Here comes the guy who made the second-best chase scene in movie history." We had a friendly attitude about it. They're extremely different and hard to rate one over the other. But the greatest chase scenes ever were made in the silent film era by Buster Keaton. I don't know how he did them. They were impossible, and he conceived and wrote and directed and starred in them, and they're amazing. They are really works of art. I fortunately never saw one of his chase scenes before I did The French Connection. I saw them after and I thought, "Had I seen these I never would have done a chase [because] I never could have come near what he has in his chase scenes."

What was the most difficult part of the film? The chase, or another aspect?

No, it was the chase. That was very difficult. Because we did it without permission and without control. We had permission to use those particular areas, but not the chase. I just went out and stole it, and I went all over the city first to select the places and I made my own version of New York.

There's quite the list of actors who were purportedly considered for Popeye besides Gene Hackman. But I'm most intrigued by the idea of Paul Newman. Why was he someone you thought would've been a good fit?

We talked about him, but then we didn't have enough money. He was making in salary what it cost to make our picture. The only people that were considered were Jimmy Breslin, a writer, he was a friend and I tested him for a week. One day he would be great. The next day he would forget what he did on Monday, the next day he'd show up drunk, and the next day he'd show up contrite. On the last day, Friday, I knew I had to get rid of him. But he came to me and he said, "Is there a car chase in this movie?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, I promised my mother on her deathbed I would never drive a car, so I don't know how to drive." I said, "You're fired." We stayed friends. The guy that we really wanted was Peter Boyle, who had made a film, Joe, where he played a bigot with a baseball bat. He said to us, "At this point in my life, I'd rather just do romantic comedies." He looked in the mirror and saw Cary Grant, and Mel Brooks saw Young Frankenstein. But he turned us down, and every day for the nine years or so that he was on Everybody Loves Raymond, he would tell everybody that he turned down The French Connection.

Going back to Jimmy Breslin for a second, where did that idea come from? Had he expressed an interest in acting to you?

No, he had no interest in acting, but I saw him as the character.

This film aligns with a prevailing theme of the 1970s, which is this sense of surveillance and people constantly watching and stalking each other. Was that something you were cognizant of at the time and actively wanted to comment on?

No, I wasn't a part of the conversation. I had my own set of friends, most of them outside the business. I had no concern then, nor do I now, for the film business in general. I had my own vision of the films I wanted to make. I didn't care about the awards. Although there were many. I was very fortunate being able to make a lot of films that I really wanted to make. But I wasn't competing with anyone. Some of the friends I had — Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich — we were very good friends. We met, but we seldom talked about film.

What did you talk about?

Many things: music, things that were going on in the world. We did have discussions about things like whose films would survive, Federico Fellini or Jean-Luc Godard? Two completely different styles, and all of the young filmmakers that I did meet and talk to, including Francis and Peter, that stuff would come up. Because those were our heroes in those days.

Stairs and falling down them seem to be a major motif in your work. Why is that an image that holds so much fascination for you?

Stairs? I'm not aware of this. You may be on to something of which I'm not aware.

They play a prominent role in at least two of your major works.

You're talking about The Exorcist steps. The Exorcist steps are iconic, of course. There's now a plaque on them, it has my name on it. They're now officially designated as The Exorcist steps.

And in The French Connection the chase ends on the subway steps.

Yes, there is that. That just sort of happens. Those sequences that you're talking about are very important to those films. But I have no particular fascination with stairs.

You really strive to show the moral ambiguity of these men. Popeye is no hero — he's racist, he shoots a man in the back, etc. — but today we're in the midst of a national conversation about police, police brutality, race, and so forth. Does that change your perception of the film and the characters at all?

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.

If you were tasked with telling this story now, how would you tell it differently?

No differently. My uncle was a very famous Chicago cop. His name was Harry Lang. He was the cop who brought in Frank Nitti, who was the gangster who took over for Al Capone when Capone went to jail. And then after my uncle's retirement, he had a bar in Chicago where I grew up and I used to work there, and all of his friends used to come around and I'd hear their stories and dialogue. From that point I formed an opinion about cops that persists to this day. I don't think I would make it much different than now. Now they can't do the kind of things they did before. They went too far. The times have changed around them.

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