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I always said that you take all these elements,

sets and landscapes and money,

it all goes into the camera and it goes into light.

And at the end of the day, you're just left

with a light flickering on a wall.

And that's so ephemeral.

People are very nervous about turning their money

into light, because you're then faced with the problem

of turning light back into money,

and very often you can't do it.

Paul Rassam, the very gloomy French producer,

I said to him, once have you actually analyzed

how many films succeed and how many fail?

And he said, well, it's like this.

He said, in human births, 95% of human births are healthy,

4% have a minor flaw, and 1% die.

With films, it's the other way around.

It's a very precarious business, but it has a romance about it.

It's a sort of spell is cast over people

to make movies.

I mean, David Lean said to me once,

"John, you know, we all make failures.

Try not to make famous one."

And this became one of the most famous failures

of all time in the cinema.

This is the life of a filmmaker

is that you're always challenged between what you want to make

and what they want you to make,

and how you can live with yourself.

I've often described

filmmaking as a kind of joyous slavery.

In some respects, it's completely ruined my life.

I'm always at its beck and call.

I'm always waiting for the actors to read the script,

or the studio to consider whether to make it,

and there are always so many reasons

why a film should not be made,

and only very rarely a few reasons why it should.

The elements you have in your hand,

you have a screen.

A light falling on a screen.

And you try to get the audience to forget

that it's two dimensional.

And with a movie, you're allowed to stare at people.

In life, what do you do?

You look and then you look away.

You know, you can't stare unless you're in love.

This notion of identification comes into it.

The leading character,

you become that person to some extent.

You experience their experiences and you go through things

with them that you wouldn't be allowed to do in real life.

So this is the part of the film experience.

This is what we're trying to do.

At least, some of us are.

In the early 1960s,

the Hollywood film industry was in a state of crisis.

Nothing like this has come in to Rome since Romulus and Remus.

Hollywood is starting to struggle.

The box office starts to plummet

and studios make bigger and bigger and bigger movies.

A legend that sweeps across the screen!

They start to spend extravagant amounts of money.

Big titles, big budgets, huge stars.

Barbra Streisand as "Dolly"

Julie Andrews…

It's the once in a lifetime entertainment!

And those films started failing.

♪ You've never seen anything like it in your life ♪

By the time the low budget youth comedy

"The Graduate" became the number one movie of 1967,

Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.

Hollywood knew it had to change.

Studios didn't understand really

how they were going to get an audience back

from television.

We don't want nobody telling us what to do.

We don't want nobody pushing us around.

And they thought these young directors

might have an idea about it.

This is grass.

You mean marijuana?

They were giving chances to filmmakers

who they didn't really understand…

…and it led to a lot of really interesting movies.

Hey! I'm walking here!

These films pump fresh blood into Hollywood.

Younger filmmakers who had radical new perspectives.

It's this explosion of incredibly inventive,

distinct and original filmmaking.

No!

Really imaginative filmmakers.

They took chances.

But the chances that they took made money.

If they move, kill em!

Let's take the day off!

-You want to? -Yes!

-You sure? -Yes, sure, quick!

John Boorman's directorial feature debut

was a film called Catch Us If You Can.

It was to the Dave Clark Five

what a Hard Day's Night was for the Beatles.

We're trying to shoot a TV commercial for meat.

Very surrealist.

It was about the packaging and the selling

of the Dave Clark Five

and the way that they were being treated like a commodity.

Advertising is total war.

That's actually kind of a more bleak media critique

than A Hard Day's Night.

But is she selling meat?

You know, it just wasn't as fun.

And I gotta be honest,

the Dave Clark Five

are just not the most charismatic stars.

One of the things to come out of this new wave in Hollywood

was that you didn't have to tell a linear story

the way Hollywood always did.

Point Blank presents a story

in a completely non-linear fashion.

It was a wild experience.

It's a revenge picture, but it's highly stylized.

Incredibly violent, incredibly intense.

It's basically Lee Marvin saying "Give me my money!"

You're a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man!

Why do you run around doing things like this?

What do you want?

I want my money.

Lee Marvin had cast approval, script approval, final cut

and he defers it all to John Boorman.

He basically gave Boorman total power,

which is why John Boorman is able to make

such a crazy movie.

Point Blank was my first color film.

I really would like to have made it in black and white,

but it had to be in color

and I had to struggle to develop a relationship

with color.

And so, I shot each scene in one color.

It was monochromatic.

And the head of the art department at MGM

wrote a memo to the head of the studio saying

this film will not be releasable.

You've got a scene here in a green office

where you've got seven men, all in green suits

with green shirts and green ties.

He said it would be laughed off the screen.

The girl was Walker's sister in law!

Of course, nobody objected to it because some of those greens

merged towards yellow and others merged towards brown, shades.

What it does is it gives you a harmony, a strength.

You're a pathetic sight, Walker,

from where I'm standing.

Chasing shadows.

Film is much closer to dream than it is to reality.

So after Point Blank,

Boorman makes Hell in the Pacific with Lee Marvin

and Toshiro Mifune.

It's an intense, beautiful film, almost wordless.

It was an incredibly difficult shoot.

It was shot on location in the Pacific.

The film is not all that successful,

but winds up becoming kind of a "Dad Classic."

Leo the Last is a very peculiar, almost fairy tale kind of story

starring Marcello Mastroianni.

I want to help you!

All of you!

It's an essential pivot for Boorman.

It was his way to go even more out there than Point Blank.

Leo the Last wound up not being financially successful

or even at the time, critically successful.

People just saw it as kind of a flop.

It was Boorman's next film

that really changed everything.

Deliverance was this meteoric event.

This is gonna be fun!

Four friends go on a backwoods canoeing adventure

and are waylaid by the natives.

He got a little pretty mouth, ain't he?

It's a movie about fear.

Male fear.

And that the potential for violence is possible in all men.

Boorman went to great lengths to make this terrain

look as vivid and as hostile as possible.

They created this kind of desaturated look

to make it look otherworldly.

Deliverance is ultimately a horror movie.

I would say Deliverance is a horror movie.

It's a relentless horror movie.

Even its ending is a horror movie ending.

No!

One of the final shots of the movie

has been ripped off by horror movies.

It's one of the first shock endings.

It was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing.

Deliverance is a financial smash, a critical smash,

and it puts John Boorman on the A-list.

I'd just made Deliverance for Warners.

Then John Calley, who ran Warners,

asked me to read the book of The Exorcist

to decide if I wanted to make it.

I read the book.

I was rather horrified by it.

As a father of daughters,

it seemed to me to be a book about torturing a child.

So I declined.

Instead, John Boorman used

his newfound clout

to write and direct a totally original film.

The gun is good.

-The gun is good. -The gun is good.

The penis is evil.

I don't really know how to describe the plot

of Zardoz.

Your aim is to destroy me, isn't it?

Yes.

Would you kill God?

Sean Connery goes from a group called The Brutals

who have nothing except raping and violence

to keep them occupied.

He's lured into the highly advanced

highly intellectual group called The Vortex.

And he's there into fulfilling

their own subconscious death wish.

What is your purpose?

I'm just an exterminator.

Zardoz, I made that picture for $1 million

and it had lots of effects,

and of that million, $100,000 went to Sean Connery.

You are the one.

So I didn't really have quite enough money to make it, but

I succeeded in getting Fox to make

a $1 million negative pick-up.

In other words, I had to borrow the money,

and when I delivered it, Fox paid me back the million.

Zardoz is absolutely one of the most out-there

studio releases of the 70s or any decade, really.

The image that everybody knows is Sean Connery in the man-kini

with the long braid, which is-- it looks totally stupid,

but when you see it in the film, somehow it works.

I want the truth.

You must give the truth if you wish to receive it.

That's part of the Boorman magic,

is that he just invites you into this fully imagined world.

This place is built on lies.

This has a big "fuck you" energy.

The tabernacle is indestructible and everlasting.

In France, it did well,

but in most other territories it failed miserably.

So that was a disappointment, but

I was very fortunate to make Zardoz.

It was very much the film I wanted to make

and I got away with it.

In my experience,

successful movies have one thing in common.

And that's luck.

Is there someone inside you?

Sometimes.

The original Exorcist is, I think

one of the more frightening films ever made.

It had a unique presence.

It's a brilliantly manipulative movie.

Who are you?

It tapped into a fascination with the devil

and with the concept of demonic possession.

None of these are new ideas

but none had been displayed like this.

It felt so real.

Friedkin had managed to take a deeply supernatural story

and make it feel utterly grounded.

-I'm Damien Karras. -And I'm the devil!

Well, I thought it was well made.

The swiveling heads and the vomit and everything

was a bit excessive.

Amen.

But it was made well.

I cast you out!

And then of course, it was a huge success

and made oceans of money for Warners,

but I didn't enjoy it.

The Exorcist scored the biggest opening day gross

for a single theater in the history

of Los Angeles motion picture houses.

The Exorcist was a juggernaut.

The word of mouth created lines around the block.

I'm Harry Francis,

manager of the National Theater here in Westwood.

I've been in this business 40 years now,

and I have never gone through anything like this.

I don't think you can even really convey to people today

nowadays, not everybody goes to see the same movie

to the degree that everybody saw The Exorcist.

Movies would start in a handful of theaters

in the big cities,

and then spread out throughout the country

and that's what happened with The Exorcist.

The impact of The Exorcist was huge.

The New York Times said the United States

is going to the devil.

Some psychiatrists are calling The Exorcist a dangerous movie.

It wasn't just a box office smash.

It wasn't just a critical smash hit.

People were passing out in the theater.

And once they fainted,

they don't go back into the picture.

It broke into the Academy Awards.

It was up for best picture of the year.

This isn't something that horror films typically did.

The very idea of following that,

to make a sequel to that,

is a radical thought in and of itself.

-Say what? -Your momma eats kitty litter!

Oh, nobody talk about my mother!

For the longest time, sequels are seen

as basically a rehash.

Now, where were we?

You make one movie, it's really successful,

you make another one, that's basically the same thing

but the situation is slightly different.

See, Son of Blob.

But audience tastes were changing

and sequels to big movies were looking more attractive.

Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry

out-grossed its predecessor

and became the second-highest grossing movie of 1973

for Warner Brothers, behind The Exorcist.

Suddenly, sequels are being made from the biggest movies.

I know it was you, Fredo.

When Francis Ford Coppola makes The Godfather Part Two,

it's one of the first times a movie has had a "2" behind it.

Still, sequels to The Godfather

and The French Connection

only grossed a fraction of what their predecessors made.

Making a sequel to The Exorcist was by no means

money in the bank.

It was this incredible risk.

Leave her body and go!

I'm not going anyplace!

But one of the biggest arguments

Warner Brothers had to make a sequel to The Exorcist

was the avalanche of rip offs and exploitation pictures

that were cleaning up at the box office.

The Exorcist had been such a smash,

I think that Warner Brothers felt, well,

you know, we just can't go wrong with this.

But the question was

who would come back to do it?

Ellen Burstyn doesn't want to have anything

to do with it.

She actually had a not great time with William Friedkin

on The Exorcist.

"I turned down a lot of money

for The Exorcist II."

"You can't make a brand out of The Exorcist."

"It's just ridiculous."

Well, why are they tearing the building down?

Shall we summon the writer?

Writer and producer William Peter Blatty

and director William Friedkin

were both publicly battling Warner Brothers

over profits they were owed from the film.

I was asked to write a sequel.

I declined because I didn't have an idea

that was classy enough and interesting enough.

My dad said, why would I do a sequel?

I've already written everything I wanted

in The Exorcist.

The story is over.

And I was thinking at the time, well, for the money?

I didn't say that, you know, but that's what I was thinking.

I mean, don't you do that for the money?

That left it to Linda Blair.

There.

And if you think that I wanted anything to do with that,

you would be wrong.

Were you ever nominated for an Academy Award?

Yeah.

Linda Blair?

You realize I really was a normal kid.

Nobody could have understood that kind of fame.

Hello Linda, how's the head, all right?

Oh, yeah.

- No horns? - No horns.

It launched me into a world that I had…

Do you have a boyfriend?

Not a permanent one right now.

And to be so young, no matter where I went,

you felt like you were the Beatles.

I did several movies.

We did Airport ‘75.

We're happy to have you aboard, Janice.

Thank you.

Then from there, I did Born Innocent.

They held me down and they hurt me.

We did Sarah T. -Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.

Oh, come on, you make me sound like some major alcoholic freak.

And I did Sweet Hostage with Martin Sheen.

-Where are you taking me to? -Xanadu!

So I'm always the victim.

Kinda. You see?

And then Warner Brothers kept talking to me

about The Exorcist Part Two,

and I wanted nothing to do with, like, uh no.

Linda's team told the studio

she wasn't interested in doing a retread of The Exorcist.

If they wanted her for a sequel,

it would have to be something different.

And Warner Brothers agreed and came back with an offer,

a big offer, rumored to be around $1 million,

which at the time would make her

one of the highest paid actors in history.

And Linda tentatively agreed,

but only if she approved the script.

At the time, Boorman was working with John Calley

to develop Merlin Lives,

a three hour epic passion project

about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

But that fall, Calley called Boorman to come to Los Angeles

to read a short treatment of a different project.

Calley came back to me with a two page idea

that was proposed by Bill Goodhart,

and it was about…

…what followed.

Unlike the simple battle of good versus evil

in The Exorcist,

much of which took place in a single room,

The Heretic would be an epic, globetrotting thriller

about a battle for the next phase of human evolution.

It's four years later,

and Regan MacNeil is having nightmares,

which she's working through with her therapist,

Dr. Gene Tuskin.

Father Phillip Lamont and Lieutenant Kinderman

are investigating Father Merrin's death

from the first film.

What happened here?

Doctor Tuskin has invented a machine called

the synchronizer,

which puts two people together in a hypnotic state

where they can see each other's thoughts and memories.

Before too long,

Father Lamont and Regan are hooked up together,

and visions of Father Merrin's first exorcism

in Africa show that the demon, named Pazuzu,

is still around and impeding Reagan's spiritual growth.

It all ends in a climactic, locust-filled confrontation

between good and evil

at the Georgetown house from the first film.

But the inspiration for the central concepts

in the script came from the writings

of a French theologian.

It had this idea about Teilhard De Jardin

the French theologist who proposed that

evolution would bring people together,

connecting them in the subconscious,

and that this coming together of people

would eventually affect the whole human race,

and the whole human race would merge into oneness,

which would kind of become God in a sense.

And so that piqued my interest.

I started to think about it,

and it was an opportunity to make a film about,

really, metaphysics

and to express those metaphysical ideas in images,

and sound and character.

So we read the script.

It was awesome.

It was awesome.

So it was so tempting that I…

…said I would do it.

I recognized that there was…

…dangers in this

because it was a sequel to The Exorcist,

or seen as such.

I understand the studio offered it

to Stanley Kubrick.

Did you ever speak to him about it?

Oh, Stanley. Yeah.

He said to me, "well if you want to do a sequel

to The Exorcist,

you just give them more blood and gore."

And he was right, of course.

With John Boorman and Linda Blair on board,

the film was scheduled for the summer of 1977,

and the reported budget was $8 million.

The clock was ticking.

I always say that screenplays should be badly written.

It has to be the starting point.

A screenplay is a guide.

It's a blueprint that you throw away when you've made the film.

Writer William Goodhart

was an established playwright,

but his only screenwriting credit at the time

was an adaptation of his own play, Generation.

Well, I started working with him.

He had very narrow focus.

He wasn't a visualist.

His scripts were all dependent on the dialogue.

We worked together quite a bit,

and it wasn't really going anywhere.

So I got Rospo in.

I liked it.

But I knew it had to change.

Rospo Pallenberg had worked with Boorman

on an unproduced adaptation of The Lord of the Rings,

as well as on the crew of Deliverance.

The Goodhart screenplay was very intelligent

in a sort of a intellectual sense,

but needed some jolts.

We really dug into it in a way

that was very forceful and maybe unexpected.

We finished the script and I took it up to Bill Goodhart

and I said, look, this is what I want to do.

And he said, okay, that's what you want to do,

but it's nothing to do with me.

So we parted company at that point.

I never saw that we had a duty to overcome the first film,

but I could see how some people might have.

Like John?

Could be, yes.

I could see that.

Then, the question of casting came up.

I wanted Jon Voight.

He was in a Jesuit seminary.

He was going to be a priest.

So he had very deep feelings about religion.

When I was persuading him to do Deliverance, you know,

he has great difficulty making up his mind

and went on and on for weeks flirting with this part,

and in the end, I got so fed up

I got him on the phone and I said

"Look, Jon, I can't go on like this.

You either want to do it or you don't."

I said, "look, I'm going to count to ten.

And if you haven't said yes by ten,

I'll take the answer as no and I'll get somebody else."

And I start to count: one, two.

He said "Wait, wait, wait. Stop! Why-- why ten?

Why not 30? Give me 30. Will you give me 30?"

No, I said "No, no, I'm giving you ten!"

I got to eight.

He said "Wait, wait, wait!"

I said "No, no, no!

Nine…"

"Wait. John.

John, this is ridiculous!"

"Ten!" Boom!

Put the phone down.

And then a few minutes later, he called back and said,

"I'll do it."

And then when it came to The Heretic,

he had the same problems.

God damn it!

He was very conflicted.

And he again couldn't make up his mind.

He wanted to do it, but at this particular time,

he was thinking about becoming a Jew.

Because his research into Christianity

led him to the belief that Christianity

was a heresy of Judaism.

So finally, he said no.

Warner Communications CEO Ted Ashley

argued that the film needed a star.

He proposed Jack Nicholson.

Jack. He was a friend of mine, and we did talk about it a bit.

But completely wrong for this.

Wooh!

My candidate was Christopher Walken all along.

I thought he would be perfect.

You must be one of those hardened criminals

that corrupts the younger offender.

But the studio was insisting on a star.

An old-school movie star

who seemed to be on the precipice

of a major career comeback.

Do what you will, Caesar's done it first and done it better,

ruled better, loved better, fought better.

Run while you will, as fast as you can,

you can't get out.

There's no way out.

By the end of the 1960s,

Richard Burton was one of the most written about,

talked about and highest paid actors in the world.

-What do you want? -Your death!

He'd been nominated for the Oscars

six times, never winning.

But by the mid 1970s,

tabloid coverage of his hard drinking,

extravagant spending and divorce, remarriage

and divorce again to Elizabeth Taylor

eclipsed his acting.

Burton was an old school actor trying to survive

in a rapidly changing landscape.

*

He winds up in a number of films

that aren't very good or very successful.

No!

He's in a steep decline.

He was barely 50.

I was up to about two and a half to three bottles

of hard liquor a day, which is a lot.

So he went back to his roots.

Burton had just done a very successful Broadway play.

So he was very hot.

And they wanted him.

They wanted him very much.

When the studio tells Boorman

he has to have Richard Burton, it becomes a completely

different movie.

We were slightly in shock and we had to grow into it.

Burton was much older.

So these notions of his crisis in his priesthood

were not as potent as they would have been

to a younger man.

On the other hand, he had a gravitas

which helped to anchor the film.

And I met with him and we talked about it.

And so…

…we got Richard Burton.

Richard Burton.

Really?

Are you kidding me? What?

For me, that will always be one of the most incredible moments

of my life.

-Mrs. MacNeil? -Yes?

I'm Father Merrin.

Max Von Sydow was very reluctant to come back on.

It's actually only after Boorman says

"I was not a fan of the first film, and I actually think

that we can do something to almost counteract the effects

of the first film."

"The Heretic" will be a beautiful

poetic healing film

bearing the hope of spiritual regeneration.

I do hope you will find it in your heart to do the picture.

I talked a lot with him about what I was trying

to do with the story.

He saw that, and the ideas of it and so he came along.

The supporting cast included Academy

Award nominee James Earl Jones,

Deliverance co-star Ned Beatty

and legendary actor Paul Henreid

who had been in numerous Warner Brothers classics,

including Casablanca.

But then tragedy struck.

William F. Kinderman, homicide.

Lee J Cobb,

who played Lieutenant Kinderman in The Exorcist

died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 64.

He was always very much part of it

and his death meant that we had to change

a lot of things.

The loss of Lee Cobb is a pretty substantial one.

Instead of recasting,

the decision was made to write out the character

of Kinderman completely

and expand the role of a different

supporting character.

-Hello? -In here!

The filmmakers wind up returning to Kitty Winn

who played Sharon,

this assistant character to Ellen Burstyn.

And you also got an invitation.

-What's this? -Dinner at the White House.

You're kidding me.

And that really changed the script quite a bit.

But they were still missing the pivotal role

of Regan's therapist.

I was at a party.

At the top of the steps, I see this woman seated,

and I look at her.

Oh, I recognize her from

Somebody Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

She'd just done One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

you know, Nurse Ratched.

Your hand is staining my window.

So she'd scored heavily there

and the studio were very anxious to bring her in.

It was a very exciting time after Cuckoo's Nest.

I was more bankable, or I could get a part easier.

You know, I was not used to that ever.

First thing I mentioned to John in the morning:

"I've seen Doctor Tuskin!"

"And she's this woman!"

My agent said, would I be interested

in playing a part that was written for a man?

And so I read the script,

but I didn't really understand it.

My part was self-evident.

You know, I was the professional in the room.

I was interested in working with John Boorman,

being a Deliverance fan,

although I couldn't really put those two movies together.

I probably had the same reaction

that a lot of people have when they're making a sequel.

You know, oh, it's the sequel.

Why didn't I make the first one?

I would have been better in the first one!

One of the elements in Boorman's contract

was that he could shoot the film anywhere he wanted.

The script called for scenes in Rio de Janeiro, Ethiopia,

the Vatican, New York City,

and the original house in Georgetown;

and Boorman wanted to shoot the studio work near his home

in Ireland.

But Ethiopia was in the middle of a civil war.

The Vatican would have to approve the script.

They were having a difficult time getting permission to shoot

at the original house in Georgetown,

and shooting in Ireland would keep the studio

from overseeing the extensive project.

I know that John was a great admirer of Michael Powell.

Famous for its startling visuals,

almost all of Black Narcissus

was shot on soundstages at Pinewood Studios in England.

All the things that were done with sets

are done specifically for their unreality,

because there's a level of unreality that is dreamlike.

It was a created world.

It wasn't the world, it was a world.

And that made sense with us

because we were creating a world.

So instead of fighting with the studio,

Boorman decided to embrace recreating nearly everything,

including African cliffs, locust swarms

to the famous Georgetown stairs,

all on soundstages at the Burbank Studios

in Los Angeles.

It takes film out of reality into a sub-reality.

It doesn't live in the real world.

It lives in the world of the film.

The chilling realism of William Friedkin's

The Exorcist would be followed by a fantastical,

otherworldly environment in John Boorman's The Heretic.

How involved was the studio in the script

and the development of the project?

Not at all.

You know, the way the studios were run then was so different.

It was always by the seat of the pants, you know,

it was just how they felt.

When Rospo and I finished the script

and gave it to Calley and,

I don't know if he ever read it, actually

but he certainly had no comments to make.

One of the attractions of making The Heretic was that

I would have a very substantial budget,

and I would be able to do all kinds of things.

Now they're giving me everything that I want, the cars

and the thing and the house and Beverly Hills,

just all of the goods.

My first big paycheck of my life.

It was thrilling.

I was earning money for the first time

with zeros!

It may be the biggest production I ever did.

I think I just wanted to be in a big studio movie…

…where they were going to spend a lot of money.

♪ Make me believe in you ♪

♪ Show me your love can be true ♪

♪ Anything you want me… ♪

There was a press conference before we started the film.

There was like 500 people in a room.

You got Linda Blair, you got Richard Burton,

you got John Boorman, and so on.

And we're talking about The Exorcist Two.

It was a big deal.

The 15 week schedule was the longest

of Boorman's career,

with a projected September wrap date

and a national release on June 17th, 1977;

just over one year away.

So Richard and I are there answering questions.

What I remember from it was just laughing my butt off.

Rospo Pallenberg's wife,

Barbara was hired to write the film's making-of book.

We were going to try to do original things

on an epic-scale picture,

a film with a clear, fully worked-out esthetic attitude

within a big-budget, Hollywood studio milieu.

A terribly difficult thing to pull off,

because the bigger a movie gets,

the less original it tends to become.

This was completely original.

Taking Regan in a whole new light

and all of these different things,

I just remember that it was like, wow!

This is really good.

This is really good!

This is awesome!

Instead of this girl obsessed by a ghastly evil,

she's made into something greater, better.

And after months of pre-production and rewrites,

Boorman and his team gathered in Burbank

to commence principal photography on The Heretic.

I think that precision and planning

is the key to ambitious filmmaking.

You have to plan very carefully,

because there isn't time to experiment

when you're on the set.

You've got to have it all worked out.

The way I work is that

I give the cameraman and the AD

a list of shots on the first day of the week,

and so it allows everybody to plan.

They see what they have to do and what's involved

so when we come to shoot it, everyone's ready.

And when they're not,

that's when I do get a little upset don't I?

Boorman chose William Fraker

to be the film's director of photography.

I saw some things Bill Fraker did at that time.

I quite liked his work.

And Richard MacDonald,

who worked on Day of the Locust and Jesus Christ Superstar

was hired as the film's production designer.

He had some interesting ideas of excluding blues and greens.

The colors of life, of optimism really.

So the whole film is in these yellow and grays.

It has a visual harmony.

If I wanted to wear a blue dress,

it would have to wait until another time.

We were all very enthusiastic.

Everybody's attitude on the show,

everybody's spirit, was really positive.

I'm working on a huge show,

my first show as a first assistant cameraman

with John Boorman and Bill Fraker.

It was intimidating.

The idea that I could be behind the scenes support the director

was just so appealing to me at that time of life.

When I read the script for The Heretic,

I thought, it's a sequel to The Exorcist

and we have all these great elements.

Well, this could be just as good or better.

The first memory I have of John Boorman

is at the read through.

We did at some place at Warner Brothers,

and Richard Burton was late.

And he didn't arrive and he didn't arrive.

And finally, they decided we'd just start without him.

And we were halfway through when he did arrive.

He apologized profusely and said

he had an upset stomach that he always got when he traveled.

So he sat down and he began to read with us,

and then he would jump up and run out of the room

to go to the men's room…

…and come back and apologize.

We finished without him, as I recall.

And then about five years later, we went out to dinner.

He said that he just had his read through that day

and he managed to be there only like a third of the time,

that he always pulled this thing of being sick to his stomach

when he had to go to a read through

because he hated read throughs.

He didn't see the point of them.

"What do they want to see, that we can read?"

Debbie.

Debbie. Can you hear it?

No?

I'll turn it up.

Last few years, there's been an explosion

of research into these areas of ESP

and thought transference.

In our script, we have

what is really a logical extension of this research.

Very close to what is being done.

It's called synchronized hypnosis.

You see this?

This is a machine we can use together.

It can put us in a deep state of hypnosis,…

…and you'd be very relaxed.

And then we could look at those bad dreams together

and understand them

and dissolve them.

One of the objects of making a film

is to put the audience into a light hypnosis.

And you use sound and music and movement to do that.

One of the great moments when you're watching a film

is that you lose yourself.

You lose who you are.

The film seduces you.

You enter the film.

The film absorbs you.

And so I always try to find a way to hypnotize the audience.

It started off as a concern.

Would this strobing create an hypnotic effect

in the audience

and then there could be some bad events that could come from it.

We spoke to various hypnotists.

They were utterly baffled, I think, and said no,

but I don't think they knew what they were talking about.

But we decided that it would not create mass hysteria.

When we got into the room with the synchronizer,

I realized

this is going to be nothing like the original Exorcist.

It wasn't going to be as scary as the first one.

It was a different concept.

The synchronizer was like a joke to me.

It looked like a kid's toy.

I expected something more interesting looking.

I was amazed by it

because it looked sort of homemade as it should have.

It did take a lot of hours to set up some of the shots

and there were times when we wouldn't roll

a frame of film until after lunch.

It has taken four hours

to light the first Synchonizer shot,

and Boorman is getting increasingly nervous.

A big part of the problem is that

because of union demarcations,

the man who constructed the synchronizer

is not allowed to operate it on the set.

Is it a prop or is it a light?

So I mean this process,

this movie started off

with not a bang.

At the end of the first day,

production is already a quarter of a day behind schedule.

Deliverance, Zardoz and The Heretic

were all heavy effects pictures really.

Gene? Wake up.

And they all came about before CGI.

Help me to find her.

John Boorman and Bill Fraker decided to do visual effects

in-camera because they had more control.

Figuring out how to get that done?

Wow, it was an amazing technical accomplishment.

Watch the light.

When you make an optical in the lab,

you take two scenes

and you put them together as best you can.

But when you can adjust them both before shooting them,

you can get a marvelous effect.

Ghost glass was a device people used a lot in the past.

I kind of revived it.

No!

Always.

You use the ghost glass at an angle to the camera.

One set is at right angle to the camera

and one set is facing the camera.

Fundamentally, it's making a live optical.

Father, please bring her back.

I storyboarded it with Richard McDonald

to work out the way in which the images melded together.

So you are able to adjust the position of those two sets,

and you can rehearse it until it just looks perfect.

The illusion that it creates is so complex.

In God's name!

It's just one of those moments in the film where you feel like

you really have entered this realm of imagination.

What happened?

Technically, it's an astonishing movie,

and many of the techniques that he uses are…

I've never seen repeated again.

You're in Louise Fletcher's office, and then--

-How do you feel? -All right.

The lights go on and you reveal the rest

of the space behind.

…effects of syncing with another mind lasts a long time.

It's very powerful.

He's working overtime to create

these psychological effects in the audience.

There was a commitment to get it right.

And not just by the director, but by everyone involved in it.

Everybody was a perfectionist, I think, on this movie.

The sequence where Max von Sydow

is crumpled against the wall in the Georgetown house,

and then all of a sudden the camera rises

and you realize you're seeing the stone church that

we've seen earlier.

You had grips pulling things away really quickly.

And it's a really simple effect.

You almost don't even register it.

And yet, you know, the movie is filled with things like that.

By week three, the production had moved

to stage 16

to shoot some of the most technically complex shots

in the film.

I'll never forget when we turned one of the stages

into the desert.

It was an incredible set.

They build this corner of Ethiopia.

They design every rock, every crag, every hut.

It was immense.

It was a giant stage.

You felt like you were in a village.

What I wanted to do was bring the light level up

to where you could shoot at a f5.6 or 8,

which, if you were in the desert,

that's what you'd have to do.

We used 123 arc lights,

more than had been used on any other movie at the time

in one stage.

I had never seen so many arcs, so many,

that there weren't even enough electricians to monitor

each arc.

They actually brought over power from the stage next door,

so we could have enough juice to run all the lights.

30 feet below the rooftop was just a huge cloud of smoke,

and sometimes they would have to stop filming for a short while

and turn off the lights so the smoke could actually exit

the top of the stage.

We had so much light going on that at one point

we had to stop because of fear of setting fire to the whole

stage, it was a wooden stage.

Many of the shots that

were designed to sell the locations worked out very well.

We had the stone funnel where Burton climbs up

the mountain.

It was on its side.

We had the dolly along the side of it.

And then I do remember there was some vertical stuff as well,

where we had the crane,

and the crane had to go up and down with the actors.

John was tough on camera.

If you didn't do your job exactly the way

John wanted it done, he'd let you know about it.

Bill Fraker used to have a bottle of

Mylanta or Pepto-Bismol on the dolly,

and then by midday, he'd be swigging away at it

because John had beat him up so badly.

They went and tried to find actual Ethiopians in Los Angeles

to cast for this film.

A lot of retakes, a lot of retakes, because these people

aren't established actors and they need more direction.

So it takes a take after take after take.

I love moving the camera,

but I did not want my results

to be anything but Hollywood smooth.

I thought there has to be some way to isolate the camera

from a moving person, and I started chasing that.

Kubrick sent us a telex immediately:

"Steadicam should revolutionize the way films are shot"

"You can count on me as a customer"

I was reading this telex as if it had arrived from Valhalla,

you know?

Amazed!

John Boorman hired Garrett Brown and his Steadicam

for not just 1 or 2 shots, but several major sequences,

including one near impossible shot.

What do you have to do mentally to become a locust?

It's a Pazuzu point of view,

just running through the African village.

Garrett's got that Steadicam tight

and people are jumping out of the way.

All bets are off when you're a creature like a locust.

Who the hell knows what a locust sees?

I concluded that a locust would bank around corners

and that a locust would look at stuff with a great deal

of decision.

And we go right into Kokumo, and he opens his mouth.

It's a pretty good locust POV!

A close up of a locust.

How are we going to do that?

Well Oxford Scientific Films,

what they discovered was that if the locust's feet

are not on the ground, it automatically flies.

All they did was put a pin round

and attach it to a wall and they would fly away happily.

And so we'd get these great close ups of the flying locusts.

Albert Whitlock.

He was one of the greatest effects men that's ever been.

I said, well, I'm trying to do this swarm of locusts

and I don't know how to do it.

That sort of piqued his interest.

He was the one who devised putting these iron filings

on a piece of glass,

and then with a magnet underneath the glass,

move them around and impression of a swarm.

He was incredibly inventive.

African locusts were an important part of the film.

I had just gotten my master's degree

from Cal State Long Beach.

I had never worked on a movie before,

and this was a huge movie.

Initially there were 3000 African locusts.

They contracted for 10,000.

They only got 3000

so I don't think they could get any more.

The locusts were shipped in little vials.

I found myself looking at 3000 locust butts

one at a time to make sure that there were all males

because male and females looked different.

We found nine females.

And the reason that is important is because

if the females got out and laid eggs,

we could have locust swarms in Beverly Hills

and I don't think that that's a good idea.

We put them in 8x8 foot cages in the Warner Brothers gym

and we had to grow 80 flats of ryegrass.

So every day I would go in with trays of grass

that the locusts would mow down.

That was kind of mind blowing for somebody

who just got their degree in entomology.

So.

In the script,…

…John has written in that Regan tap dance.

Well, that wasn't anything that I was interested in doing.

Did ballet, modern dance, gymnastics.

It was the only art form of dance that I didn't like.

So that was war.

I personally didn't think that it needed to be in there.

So that was the only thing that John and I were like

"Don't you just love it?"

And I'm like: "No!"

She was fun!

You know, the crew loved her!

Especially the boys.

She was pretty good with her lines.

She knew what she was doing.

She did a terrific job.

Oh, she was easy.

Always cheerful.

Telling secrets?

Very professional.

Linda came prepared.

What you got with Linda was late.

Late.

Linda Blair was late.

You're right on time.

Go on in. For once!

This is one thing you don't do.

Even Richard Burton was on time!

I mean, come on, man.

Don't you trust me?

But I do.

I do.

She's very sweet.

And during the day, I'd forget how mad I was at her.

I didn't hold a grudge after about 9:00 in them morning.

But at seven?

You know, when I had to get up?

I had no intention of making this movie.

So it's on my terms.

One of the stipulations of her contract

was Linda would not be featured in any extensive makeup

like she was in the original Exorcist.

She had top billing and would be the face on the poster.

It's an incredible pressure position to be in.

Because truly, as an artist,

you better have your shit together.

You better do your work.

What's the matter with you?

I think Linda Blair's performance is good.

You know, I think she doesn't get the credit she deserves.

I'm autistic.

How do you mean?

A lot of people look at that performance and kind of

laugh at it?

I was possessed by a demon.

Oh. It's okay.

He's gone.

You know, oh ha ha.

Like it's-- the line doesn't quite--

you know, maybe it doesn't quite hit.

But she brings something to it that I just find…

…so fresh and moving.

What did you do?

Nothing.

I just started talking to her.

First she was talking inside,

and then she started talking outside.

When you set out to make a film,

you look at the problems that it poses

and decide how you can solve them.

These problems can be effects,

it can be the,…

…the acting.

It was horrible.

Utterly horrible.

And fascinating.

What disappointed me was that

the whole time we shot that picture,

Burton never made a single suggestion or contribution

but he always did exactly what I asked him to do.

Evil is a spiritual being.

His voice was the great thing with him.

He couldn't act from the neck down.

He didn't have that kind of balletic feeling that

Lee Marvin had.

Today, wherever I look, I see only evil.

God has fallen silent.

There was limitations with Burton.

So I had to tailor his scenes to those limitations.

Leave her alone!

She belongs to me!

Because he was not happy,

Richard, he didn't really bring himself to the role.

He'd tell me ditties and you know, keep me entertained

but I never really felt like I was performing with him.

I'm sorry, doctor, I won't intrude any longer.

Oh, it's okay Father.

You can stay if you'd like.

He brought his manner,

which is kind of always the same.

I saw him in a vision.

I saw his power over evil.

It's still a little over the top…

…for film.

Evil overwhelms us.

He came unprepared and he would be unreliable.

I've flown this route before.

When was that?

It was…

…it was on the wings of a demon.

Richard was well known, you know, for

liking to partake.

Silencio! Silencio!

Came on the set completely sober.

He invited me to lunch at that restaurant

across from Warner Brothers.

And…

"I'll have a Tom Collins."

"I'll have another one of those Tom Collins'."

After lunch, it was always bad.

He would come disheveled.

He didn't match how he looked.

The grips set up a seat for me under the lens

so that I could feed him lines without throwing his eyeline.

So he would say to me, "Give me the first word."

And I'd say, "I hear."

He's "no no you don't have to give me--just the first word."

"I."

And then "roll."

And then he'd stop after "I hear."

"What's after ‘hear'?"

But then around 4 o'clock, he began to perspire.

And that's why he had that 6 o'clock rule.

At 6 o'clock, it was in his contract,

whether he was on camera in the middle of a scene

or off camera,

he would just get up and say, "okay, see you tomorrow!"

"Good night folks!"

And we'd just be left.

I saw a lot of things on that movie

that I'd never seen before in my life.

And that was one of them.

We've got to fight that demon that's inside her!

I felt that in the end, his performance

was a bit limited.

Don't you ever need a woman, Father?

Yes.

So…

…there we are.

By the end of the fifth week,

production had fallen almost a week behind schedule.

But Warner Brothers was firm on the June 17th release date

of The Heretic

not only because it was their big summer release,

but also because of how the film was financed

through a process called blind bidding.

With blind bidding, a studio could present theaters

with a title, director, a list of stars,

and a short description of the film.

And if theaters wanted that film,

they'd have to pay up front.

Most of the time, blind bidding would happen a year

or more in advance before the movie was finished,

and in many cases, before it was even shot.

These guarantees effectively paid for the movie in advance

and made the studio's risk on its investment

basically nil.

So in 1976, when theater owners were offered the chance

to book the sequel

to one of the highest grossing movies in history,

they jumped at the chance.

Despite steep terms from the studio

and an extremely long 12 week minimum guaranteed run

in their theaters.

But The Exorcist had played on screens in some cases

for over a year, and with Linda Blair,

Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher and the director of Deliverance,

it seemed like a very, very good deal.

Over 700 theaters booked The Heretic,

making it one of the largest releases in history.

Warner Brothers' investment was already paid for.

All they needed now

was a film to release on June 17th, 1977.

Did Father Merrin ever name the demon?

This movie was definitely the most challenging

as far as the different sets we had, the conditions we had,

the wind blowing.

They were shooting on a soundstage

where they had a lot of earth

that they brought down from another place

in California,

and they used wind machines.

And I know that John was not happy

with the color of this earth,

and he had more earth brought in.

I remember him sitting on the back of the crane,

and yet he had to communicate with the actors.

So while we were wearing masks and goggles,

he had to take his mask down a lot.

John Boorman, he was the busiest man on that set.

And I just had terrible, terrible

fear that something bad was going to happen.

You realize what you're up against, don't you?

What am I up against, father?

Evil.

The pain in Boorman's back

has been growing steadily worse all week.

He has already seen the Warner Brothers doctor,

who has prescribed pills,

and now he lies down in his bungalow between shots.

The steroids the Warner Brothers' doctor prescribed

can help back pain, but they weaken the immune system.

Over the bicentennial weekend,

John develops an extremely high fever and a rash

all over his body.

He's given a battery of tests,

but all of the results come back negative.

I went to the UCLA A&E.

I got such a high temperature

that I was in hospital taking ice baths

to stop my body from exploding.

From our point of view as crew, he simply disappeared.

Oh my God.

We were terrified because he was so sick.

They couldn't figure out what in the hell

was the matter with him.

And that closed the picture down.

And it was something called Valley Fever.

John got sick because of all the wind we were blowing

in the scenes to create Africa.

Valley Fever, it lives in sand.

When you stir up the sand, it gets into the lungs.

Valley Fever can attack your organs

one by one until none of them are working anymore.

I remember hearing how he's even sicker.

It was something that I think shook everybody's world.

We were just all keeping our fingers crossed tight that

John was going to be okay.

That's when people began to make jokes about

this movie has a curse on it!

I am Pazuzu.

It almost killed him, this movie.

We had to shut down for five weeks.

Five weeks.

What advice would you give

up-and-coming filmmakers today?

Find a better job.

Even though the stoppage is costing a fortune,

the studio is not considering hiring another director.

Contractually, it could have done so by this time,

but the film is so big and so complex

that there are very few directors

with the technical skill to pull it off.

There are always signs that a production

is entering a period of chaos.

The thing is, chaos is kind of part of the recipe.

So how do you recognize the difference

between the normal chaos of a movie

and the chaos of a disaster?

I don't know.

Even without the five week shutdown,

the original 15 week shooting schedule

was looking very unrealistic.

So while he was recuperating from his near-fatal illness,

Boorman allowed Pallenberg to cut and condense

several scenes.

But the one section they worked on the most

was the ending.

The whole idea of alternate endings

was because of this hiatus.

And so I just drew up alternatives.

I'm gonna write one in which this person dies.

I'm gonna write one where-- see what happens.

See what it gives us.

Just basically to keep busy because it was boring.

Yeah.

I met Rospo Pallenberg probably on day one.

He hung out at my chair.

So I sensed that he was going to be somebody

that I would be working with a lot.

He was the number two guy.

He was very intense.

He was a character.

Absurdly confident.

The only one who used to have conversations

a lot with John was Rospo.

I didn't know what his title was when he was on the set,

except for writer.

Who are you?

It was very informal.

I had the right to go up to him to talk to him

whenever I wanted.

There were no rules.

I didn't dislike him instantly,

but it was shortly after that that I stopped liking him.

I don't think Rospo had a lot of fans from the crew side.

They all thought Rospo was a meddler

that made things more complicated.

I don't know you and I don't like you.

Most people couldn't figure out what in the hell

I was doing there.

Because I didn't have a title.

I said,…

"What does your name stand for?"

He said, "Look it up!"

And I went home and I looked it up

and "rospo" means "toad."

Now…

…tell me, is that his given name?

They started making changes in the script.

Kind of didn't see this coming right away.

That was, yeah, winging it.

That's what working on a film is all about.

Write to the strengths and…

…disappear a bit from the weaknesses.

I know that Rospo had to do with rewriting the dialogue,

and of course

it could only get better, but instead it would

sometimes get worse.

It's about five scripts later, we were pretty upset.

I never felt that anybody else other than John and I

knew what we were doing,

and we didn't really care.

My dear Louise:

Since I emerged from fogs of fever last week

Rospo and I have been doing a little work on the script.

Dear Linda: During my convalescence

Rospo and I have been revising the script a bit--

Dear Richard:

Rospo and I have been doing some revisions to the script

The film was starting to run a little long--

we also have made the ending much stronger--

we have been able to strengthen the ending--

At that point, it came like throwing the dice.

Let's have this person die, let's have that person die.

Let's see what happens.

You know, it was an experiment.

They just kept rewriting it.

Dear Ted: I attach a revised copy of the script,

the tenth version, I believe.

So you've got Warner Brothers, you've got John Boorman,

you got this Rospo Pallenberg,

don't know where he is, don't know who he is,

still to this day.

It had to build up to something huge.

"John and I came up with an idea

we have called The Void,"

A sort of black hole that yawns under the Georgetown house.

The void should be dark.

The walls become rubbery,

liquid, sliding into a pit, a very nightmarish feeling.

We were on a train ride and we had to deliver.

The power.

It's getting nearer.

Even with the expanded ending,

because of the cuts in the rewrites,

when Boorman returns to work,

the film is nearly back on schedule and has a new wrap date

of October 20th.

When John came back, he was not quite the same

force of nature he was at the beginning of the movie.

He was thinner.

You know, he looked like someone had knocked the starch

out of him.

There's a feeling that some filmmakers

have to confront in their careers…

…with certain films, which is, is this the movie that kills me?

We were shooting up on the top of--

it was actually Warner Brothers' building.

666 oddly enough, was the number.

The shots on top of the Warner Brothers building in New York

were some that I'll never forget.

Okay, so you're going to stand on the side,

there is a net down there, you know,

and I'm thinking to myself,

that's-- that's-- that's the edge of the building.

I had no safety harness on.

Underneath, I remember netting

and that somebody was supposed to be down there to catch me

but we were very high up.

The skyscraper was like, for real, a very dangerous set.

I don't remember exactly how we made it safe.

I don't think we did.

It was Linda on her own, being brave.

I mean, it was as safe as is possible,

but you can look back and say no,

if something had happened or anybody can have anything

where you just lose your balance for a minute.

I'm kind of stunned that they actually had her do that.

I mean, they didn't fake that.

I wouldn't have done it myself.

Dangle me off the side of a fucking building.

I had a harness on

because I was walking backwards in there and--

and at the end of the day, I noticed that the end,

it was supposed to be anchored, wasn't.

I didn't have any of the security that I thought I had.

I could have flown off that building very easily

and landed in the street 37 stories below,

and I wouldn't have had to suffer all that…

…misery of The Heretic's release.

Back in Burbank,

The film's production issues kept escalating.

The Heretic is my first movie ever.

I'm told that a stunt coordinator

was coming in to speak to me.

He says, "so when we put you on fire,

we want you to be protected."

And I'm like…

…"Yes?"

He explains that I need to be wrapped in a asbestos bodysuit.

"Okay."

Then I'm walked through the set.

"So now we are going to light you on fire, Rose,

but we're going to put you out before it gets very high."

There are six men squatting with fire extinguishers,

so "don't worry!"

"You just tell us if you get hot."

And that was when I discovered that when I panic,

I cannot make sound.

Fortunately, someone said:

"Are you hot?"

And I got my head to go…

And six fire extinguishers go out and I'm put out.

And then we hear:

"Who put her out?"

"Who in God's name?"

"Fire that son of a bitch!"

"Who put her out?"

And I'm like this,

and I went…

And the very same voice goes, "I'm sorry, dear.

What happened?"

"I got hot."

Silence.

Mr. Boorman says…

…"All right, then, let's get ready to go again."

Obviously, we thought we'd get it on the first day.

And then I got the call to come back.

And then I got the call to come back.

And then I got the call to come back.

And I'm not really sure how many times I went back.

But, but it even shocked Mr. Burton.

Things were going wrong.

There were just so many things that could happen

on a highly technical set.

Boorman walks out of dailies.

One shot is so dark that about ten seconds

are totally black;

another shot--the only good take of that shot--

has a flash on it…

A painter fell from the Rock Church set

Rospo Pallenberg had been in an accident

shooting second unit in Africa.

They were shooting in a motorboat

and they hit a sandbar going 35 miles an hour.

Pallenberg went through the windshield,

cut his wrist to the bone, and bruised his hip.

The editor, John Merritt, quit the movie with no notice

and went back to London.

And Kitty Winn fell ill with a gallbladder infection

and checked into Cedars Sinai.

Louise Fletcher sent her a note that said:

"There is no Pazuzu."

I thought, oh my God, you know, this picture is beset

with a bunch of really difficult problems.

And other things happened.

Producer Richard Lederer has a coronary bypass

two weeks after being assigned the film.

My husband had open heart surgery.

Yeah, people got sick and I blamed it all on the devil.

People said it was "Oh, well, you know,

you-- you're playing around with evil."

But to me, that was all nonsense.

I never had any feeling that that was connected.

The last two month was a frenzy of activity

as cast and crew came together to finish principal photography

on The Heretic.

This is not an official investigation.

Father.

Father.

Father.

♪ To think of the reason ♪

Bill Fraker very cleverly matched the light

between the studio and the location.

That's very hard to achieve.

The cliffs were 200 feet high and we'd have to put cameras

on the top and shoot down.

He didn't fall there.

He bounced on that ledge and fell there.

I tell you, that's a shot I will never forget.

It looked extraordinary.

It didn't look like any other film.

♪ I didn't got to use ♪

♪ My imagination ♪

I had everything going in my favor.

♪ * ♪

It had its own identity and its own style and imagery.

I had a big budget, lots of facilities,

and I could make something special.

As they were heading into the final weeks

of principal photography.

Richard Burton informed the production that

he must leave for Toronto

to shoot the film of Equus on November 1st.

Boorman announced to his team:

we can never meet all the deadlines imposed on us

if we don't simplify the ending.

I decided to eliminate The Void.

There was just too much, too much to attend to.

Rospo Pallenberg came to me when the changes

came through.

Said, "what did you think of them?"

And I said, "they're awful."

It's not right. It's not good.

It's like a joke.

We've just slipped into another whole level

of people being able to laugh at this.

Warner Brothers approved an overage of $600,000

to shoot a new ending without The Void,

but it had to wrap in early November.

The ending of this film was the biggest destructive scene

I think I've ever worked on in my career.

The doors fly open.

They had a stunt person and yanked him back

against the wall,

and then a close up with locusts on his face.

His skin was rough.

I think Richard Burton's face was a perfect place

to put locusts.

This movie!

At least help Regan!

To do what?

Did I say "Pazuzu?"

To fight this thing!

Name it.

I think I remember I had to say it once.

Pazuzu!

I'm surprised that I could get through it and say it

without laughing.

Pazuzu's Regan is the only Regan.

So they turn me into this sexy demon.

Be joined with us, Father.

The sexy Regan tries to seduce the priest.

The windows fly open, it's like an explosion.

The set was made to come apart

and they had to reset it through all the takes.

Then, the ground starts splitting.

It's moving and tipping

and kind of like being at Universal theme park.

It did take a lot of hours.

Stunt people used to fall down stairs.

There's a lot of dust. There's a lot of smoke.

There's a lot of painted peanuts and cellophane blowing

through the air.

The climactic shot of the movie involves

front projection, ghost glass, wind, smoke, falling debris,

live locusts, strobing lights while spinning on a turntable.

They are throwing friggin' locusts at me.

Can't even imagine.

So of course we were behind schedule.

We had to move faster to get things done.

There was a rush to finish.

Will this movie ever end?

This movie won't die!

The time has come.

An enemy of the human race…

…is subdued.

And be transmitted across distance.

Here he is seen causing a spoon to bend.

So we wrapped.

I went to a dinner party.

I had the best time.

I laughed all night.

At 2 o'clock in the morning, I woke up with a violent pain

in my middle.

Like somebody is putting a knife through me.

And I drove myself to Cedars.

I was in the hospital a week before they figured out

that I needed to have my gallbladder removed.

In the hospital, Kitty Winn sends Louise a note.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

shot for 89 days, over 24 weeks.

Its original budget of $12.5 million

had ballooned to almost 15,

far and away the most expensive film ever produced

by Warner Brothers to that date.

But the studio was convinced their gamble would pay off.

It was a tough picture to make.

It certainly achieved some of the best work I've ever done.

And despite Rospo Pallenberg's request

for a writing credit,

the Writer's Guild, through arbitration,

awarded William Goodhart sole writing credit

on The Heretic.

Boorman returned to Ireland to supervise

the miniature and insert shoots, as well as the edit.

It really came down to working night and day

on the post-production

to get the edit and the sound mix in to make all these prints.

In December, new editor Tom Priestley,

who had worked with Boorman on Deliverance,

presented him with a two hour and 20 minute

first rough assembly.

Boorman remarked, "there's not an ounce of fat."

There was quite a lot to be done.

And of course, the music with Ennio Morricone.

Ennio Morricone's score…

…it's kind of mind blowing.

It's experimental.

A lot of it doesn't even sound like music.

And there's a lot of locust wings beating and stuff

that are kind of folded into the music that make it

very disorienting.

But then, that beautiful theme kicks in.

He recorded all the instruments separately.

So you had 60 or 70 tracks.

You could mix it in all kinds of ways.

I'd say no, it's too thick, you know.

Pull all the strings out.

Try it without the strings. You know.

And it was fantastic.

Marvelous guy to work with.

As editing and miniature shooting continued

in Ireland,

The Warner Brothers' marketing team was just getting started.

Originally, I said it should be called The Heretic

and should not be referred to as a sequel.

But as time got close to the release,

Warners insisted on calling it…

…Exorcist II: The Heretic.

My name is Jeff Kanew.

I directed a number of movies in the ‘80s

but in the 60s and 70s, I was a trailer maker.

There was one particular year

where I got to work on Exorcist II: The Heretic

and at the same time,

Sorcerer, which was William Friedkin's follow up

to Exorcist one.

The dialogue stuff from Exorcist II

was a little strange and didn't come out of context well

like, you know, for a trailer, but the visuals were great.

Four years ago,

The Exorcist shocked the world.

Now, the struggle between good and evil goes on.

Exorcist II: The Heretic.

And then, hard cut to the Morricone.

Lots of fast cuts, no cut was longer than ten frames.

That fast coming at you.

No dialogue for two minutes.

And it was exciting and maybe exhausting.

The music and the visuals built and built

and built to a climax.

And it was good.

It was a good trailer.

In 1974, he directed The Exorcist.

It made history.

Since then, Friedkin has spent over two years

in five countries

on three continents, creating his latest film.

Then we cut into the Tangerine Dream music…

…and lots of cuts of Roy Scheider,

and then this truck called The Sorcerer,

which is loaded with explosives.

And then two minutes of Tangerine Dream's music.

Sorcerer.

So that was great.

I had two good trailers that were almost identical.

That's okay.

Except that they had their world premiere

side by side at the Grauman's Chinese Theater

the same night,

with William Friedkin sitting in the audience.

Okay.

I thought probably they're going to love Sorcerer,

even though it's just about four guys in a truck.

And it didn't work out that way.

The Exorcist II trailer played like gangbusters.

Sorcerer.

And the Sorcerer was a respectful ho-hum.

And so William Friedkin was upset

and I got this phone call thinking that it was somebody

from Universal saying, hey, the trailer played great,

but it was "We're taking the trailer off the screen

because William Friedkin saw it and it didn't play as well

as Exorcist II: The Heretic."

Dialogue looping would continue through March.

The score was recorded in April.

And the first finished answer print

of Exorcist II: The Heretic was delivered on May 30th,

just two and a half weeks before it opened

on over 700 screens.

Days before the film opened, there was one sneak preview

in Pasadena.

Exorcist II: The Heretic was, hands down,

the craziest film screening I've ever been to.

I'm gonna to tell you the story of the first screening

of Exorcist II,

and it was told to me by an executive

at Warner Brothers.

I went with our older friend named Dave,

who was like a really hardcore film fan.

These Warner Brothers executives drove out to Pasadena

in their big limousines, and they went into the theater

which was packed, turn away crowds,

and they went and sat in the last row.

And the lights go down very slowly.

Everyone was being respectful, it was very quiet

and for the first few scenes I was drawn into it.

As the film progressed, I was a little bit confused

and by the time we got to the synchronization scene,

I was totally lost.

Now, Regan, I want you to relax and make your tone go deeper.

I'm wondering, what does it got to do with the first movie

that I saw as a kid?

The theater was really, really silent.

Try and remember Father Merrin just before he died.

I think there was a sort of vibe of astonishment

Was he casting out the unclean spirit?

He is praying.

The vibe changed from respectful and quiet to…

People were beginning to chuckle

and they were popping up all over the theater.

And I was like:

this has got to be a send up.

This can't possibly be by design.

And everyone around me seems to be having

the same reaction,…

…but it hit a crescendo.

No!

Always.

At some point, my friend Dave, he stands up.

A guy stood up.

- Looks around. - And he looked around.

And starts looking for people who might be associated

with the film.

And when he thinks he's got them spotted,

he points his arm out…

-…and says… -And he said…

…"the people who made this piece of shit"…

…are in this theater!"

People in the back of the theater,

they're moving towards the lobby and Dave's moving out

after them.

The heads of the studio, they got up,

they ran out of the theater.

They get outside.

No cars!

The cars are all down at McDonald's!

And they were chased down the street.

Hundreds of prints of the film were in the process

of being struck and shipped.

The studio was out of time.

And on Friday, June 17th, 1977,

Exorcist II: The Heretic opened.

People were lining up to see it.

It was almost a national event.

You had this huge want-to-see quotient.

The Heretic was a "must-see."

There's a huge hit movie, you love it.

The sequel is being directed by

a big director, a famous director.

You see a trailer for it and the trailer is unbelievable.

It is four years later.

What does she remember?

Where will it lead her?

Exorcist II: The Heretic.

We wanted to be there, first show, day it opened,

and we were.

We were.

I saw the picture in Westwood the week it opened.

There was a tremendous amount of anticipation.

We are in New York.

"Come to the opening!"

It was a full house.

Yeah. Sold out.

There's the titles, you know, and it begins…

I pretty much had one expression,

I think, on my face throughout kind of like…

I think they were kind of numb…

…and disappointed.

There were no spinning heads,

it wasn't an out-and-out simple horror movie.

And I'm like, oh my God.

- We were in shock. - Are we really seeing this?

Did James Earl Jones just spit a tomato out of his mouth?

Yes!

The problem with the film I presented to them

was it wasn't what they had a right to expect from a sequel.

We didn't give them more of the same shock and horror.

There's a point in a movie, particularly a horror movie,

where if you lose the audience, you won't get them back.

And the stories start coming back

that there's some problems.

The audience starts jeering.

And then they start laughing.

And my sister in law is like, oh my God, what's going on?

It was hard to process.

It was kind of like a hallucination.

It was chaos. It was a disaster.

Truly insane.

Literally booed off the screen.

What was that?

People were angry.

Talking back to the screen.

There was a palpable sense of betrayal.

Audiences hate this film.

They are demanding refunds.

They're throwing popcorn at the screen.

They're throwing things in the aisle.

They hate this movie.

My dad and I took seats in the middle of the audience

because we just wanted to be in the thick of it.

A few people started laughing

and it just built.

Why is she tap dancing? Why is she walking off the roof?

What's going on?

Afterward on the way out,

it's one of the rare movies that I've had

where telling people on line, "don't go in."

And when the reviews came out,

they were among the most devastating

of any major studio film in Hollywood history.

I was very disappointed that the film was received

the way it was,

because I just viscerally knew what had gone into it

and how much effort and seeing John Boorman every day,…

…how much it meant to him.

I saw it in a theater full of people that

commenced laughing at it.

They were yelling, talking out loud, you know, laughing.

It was…

…it was hard.

No, no, I didn't want to.

I mean, it devastated all of us, I think.

There are so many people who would have adapted it in

a more conventional sequel way,

and this didn't go anywhere near that.

The direction it went in was almost surreal.

It was not almost! It was absolutely surreal!

John Simon of New York Magazine wrote:

"There is a very strong probability that Exorcist II

is the stupidest major movie ever made."

That it was considered dumb

when in fact it was so over-intellectualized

is one of the tragedies, I think, of it.

And Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune wrote:

"Exorcist II is the worst major motion picture I've seen

in almost eight years on the job."

The audiences expected more of the same

and I wasn't giving it to them.

It wasn't a sequel.

It was a riposte, an answer to The Exorcist.

It wasn't what they were expecting,

which was a horror film.

It didn't fit.

Here was a sequel which wasn't a sequel.

Blatty, the author of the book, disowned it.

There was a riot in Westwood.

They were deeply disappointed.

I mean, they threw things at the screen.

They demanded their money back.

People felt utterly cheated, angry,

and all that anger and bitterness was directed at me.

I made a film about goodness.

And that was a film about evil.

I did my part.

Exorcist II: The Heretic opened huge,

breaking studio records.

But the dropoff from its negative word-of-mouth

was so severe,

the film came in second to the undersea thriller The Deep

in its opening weekend.

To try to make it more palatable,

what we did

it was a mistake, really, but, make some cuts.

Using edge code numbers from his own print

in Ireland,

Boorman had the studio edit out the happy ending

and send a new, truncated final reel to theaters.

Warner Brothers informed irate theater owners

they were shipping out a new ending

as soon as possible.

It was a harrowing time.

On Tuesday, June 21st,

Boorman was back in Los Angeles

watching the film with an audience for the first time.

Pazuzu, Prince of the Evil Spirits of the Air,

Take me to Kokumo!

Kokumo.

I spent a lot of time with John Boorman

in the aftermath of the opening,

when he was desperately recutting the film.

The poor man was really distraught

with the audience reaction.

He was saying, "I've got to cut this scene out!

I got to cut this scene out!"

The mystery of who cut the ending

of "Exorcist II: The Heretic"

was solved yesterday when director John Boorman said

it was his decision.

Furthermore, Boorman says he is doing "extensive" recutting

on the rest of the film.

There's this wild beast out there,

which is the audience.

I created this arena and I just didn't throw

enough Christians to it.

The film is about goodness.

It just doesn't deliver the gore and the evil spectacle that

the first one delivered.

It's poetic. It's visionary.

It's a dreamlike film.

But that's not what audiences in 1977 wanted to see at all.

Five days later,

Boorman switches the print at the Village

for a new version of the film that's seven minutes shorter,

with a new beginning and a new ending

with Burton's character dying.

But I am not worthy!

You are a soldier of Christ.

You must make yourself worthy.

Ted Ashley was there.

Calley was there.

Boorman, Lederer.

It was very dramatic.

We went back and saw it a week later.

A lot of moments that we had found funny

during the first time were gone.

Were snipped.

Get going! The girl has to get home!

Boorman had re-edited the ending

so Richard Burton disappears during the destruction

of the house.

It was a different film experience.

It wasn't great, but it certainly didn't play

as an unintentionally funny film anymore.

- It was just strange. - Odd.

It actually went pretty well.

Some people even applauded.

Boorman, Calley and Ashley and Lederer.

I remember seeing them huddled in the lobby afterwards.

They were all shell shocked and they didn't know what to do.

Boorman was trying to persuade them to take his cut version

and put that domestically.

But that would have cost X amount of money

to make new prints.

But the word of mouth was getting around.

In its second weekend,

Exorcist II dropped a disastrous 57%.

The theaters were freaking out because

they were going to lose a fortune on this film.

I vividly remember seeing, on the news,…

-David Sheehan. -David Sheehan, that's right.

interviewing John Boorman.

Towards the end of the interview,

Boorman got fed up and he turned and he said to him,

"What would you like me to do?"

"Immolate myself on Hollywood Boulevard?"

I was shocked by what happened to John.

Just what happens to a great filmmaker

when it all collapses under you?

My heart went out to him. Totally went out to him.

Every single person on all the movies I worked on

did it with all their heart.

They loved making these movies.

I did too.

I was proud of my job and proud of my work.

Nobody was out to make anything but

a great sequel to a great film.

My heart and soul went into this movie.

It broke all of our hearts.

I think I'm safe to say it broke my heart.

We were probably too daring.

Maybe we had committed the sin of hubris.

It was a mistake for me.

A mistake in terms of the audience.

I should have known better that an audience would feel

frustrated by The Heretic.

It was shattering for me.

I--I lost my nerve.

I felt that what I'd done with the film

was of high quality,

and that I'd made it with heart and soul,

and that it could be so, so rejected

was extremely painful.

Boorman continued to recut the film.

By the time of its European premiere in September of 1977,

there were about 125 alterations,

and the runtime was 16 minutes shorter.

Warner Brothers released theaters from their 12 week

minimum run obligations,

and even before its European release,

Exorcist II: The Heretic had ended

its North American theatrical run.

What is success for a filmmaker?

This is an impossible question.

Success for a filmmaker is whether or not,

for the most part,

the story that existed in your head and in your heart

made it to the screen.

So what is failure for a filmmaker?

There are way more answers to that question.

One after another,

celebrated filmmakers from the 70s

were given enormous budgets to realize their visions,

and one after another, they failed.

Even Francis Ford Coppola's epic Apocalypse Now,

which was a box office hit,

barely broke even due to its immense cost overruns.

And in 1980, Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's western epic,

which was initially budgeted at $7.5 million

and ended up costing the studio over $44 million,

all but destroyed United Artists.

Exorcist II was one of those movies,

along with Heaven's Gate, a few others that probably

put an end to a certain era.

I'm not one of those people that says

the good old days were always better.

But I will say that there was more of a willingness to take

risk back then.

Part of art is taking risks.

Perhaps studios will realize that the focus groups

and the market testing and the algorithms

aren't predictive of audiences real desires,

and that perhaps the solution to that is to empower

the filmmaker.

It was a marvelous time for great films

and for great attempts, you might say.

But one film from the summer of 1977

did not fail.

Star Wars just cost $11 million,

and it ended up redefining the Hollywood studio movie.

It changed everything, Star Wars.

Changed everything.

I'd forgotten how much I hate space travel.

To me, I always felt it was kid stuff, you know,

it wasn't serious cinema,

but it turned out to be what people wanted,

particularly young people.

And they're still making them aren't they?

In the next few years, several states

passed legislation making the practice

of blind bidding illegal.

One of the movies they often used as an example

of being misled by studios was Exorcist II: The Heretic

A movie so hated, it inspired legislation.

Well, see, he was ambitious to do something so…

I almost gave up filmmaking

and it took me a couple of years.

Talking to you about it and how it was made,

and there's an element of pain in that,

because it was such a painful experience to have that work

rejected so completely,

and it almost destroyed my career,

and so when we talk about it,

I remember the pain and I remember the scars.

I suppose to a large extent

I've tried not to think about it.

But we're now, you know, talking of, what, 50 years ago,

there's is a line in Excalibur where Lancelot says

"It's the old wound. It's never properly healed."

And so that's true of me and The Heretic.

And the obvious question, I guess, is,

do you regret it?

Well, when it came out and was…

…was such a failure,

Yes. At that time, I did regret it.

I thought, oh, well, I'd made a mistake.

Because I'd had the opportunity and the budget to make a film

that was very, I thought, very powerful and beautiful,

but in the wrong context.

Had that film been released as separate from The Exorcist,

I think it might have had a very different reception.

But it was linked to it and that was a mistake.

And so the all the great work that we put into The Heretic

was lost, really.

My attitude changed after The Heretic.

I became probably more respectful of the audience.

The films I'd made before The Heretic,

I had no thought of the audience.

You know, "who are you making it for?"

was often the question asked and I thought,

oh, I never had to think about that.

I'm making it to please myself.

You know, I remember David Lean saying to me

"Make your pictures please yourself.

And if they don't please an audience,

give up."

So I had to ask myself the question

whether, you know, I should take David Lean's advice

and not go on making them.

And then, of course,

after my fallow period there for a couple of years,

I launched into Excalibur.

After the success of Star Wars,

studios were looking for mythic tales with iconic heroes.

And John Boorman had one.

Once I started shooting it, I felt I was falling into

the same trap.

I'd made these two failures

and here I was making another bold and foolish venture.

Ride!

It was huge.

I mean, you had horses and armor and lots of extras,

and there were times I lay in bed at night thinking

I've done it again.

This is going to fail.

It was a huge struggle.

So I was, if you like, not learning my lessons.

Perhaps it says something about me,

about my recklessness.

With Excalibur, I just about pulled it off.

That restored my confidence.

And I thought, well, maybe I've got another couple

of pictures in me somewhere.

And I went on.

You know, so many films fail.

You know, endless reasons why a film doesn't succeed.

But somehow, a few do and that's what keeps us all going.

Sounds somewhat masochistic.

Yeah.

But you're not a masochist, are you?

I suppose I must be, you know

otherwise I wouldn't be making movies.

In 2022,

Sir John Boorman received a knighthood

for his contributions to cinema.

He is regarded by many as one of the greatest directors

of all time.

But even after hearing all the stories

about this one movie in his career

that nearly destroyed him,

There's one question

I've never been able to fully answer.

Exorcist II: The Heretic…

…is a fascinating film.

It could have been a great movie.

It is not a great movie.

Exorcist II: The Heretic is a great movie.

I don't think it's a good movie, but I think, it was…

…it was a--

Good effort.

I think it's just a great film, a masterpiece.

It works on every level.

I love seeing a film that is a work of visual poetry,

but there's an emotion to it.

Profound emotion radiates through every frame

of that film.

There was wildness to it.

There was ambition to it.

I would call it a brave movie.

Is it a perfect movie? Certainly not.

Is it a movie that works with an audience? No.

Is it artistic and accomplished and…

…and like being in someone's dream?

Yeah.

He was putting some terrific ideas

on the screen in a way that is truly art,

whether it connects or not.

It was full of little grace notes.

And I think you could look at that film more than once

and you could find other things in it.

And so it was rich.

I think that's how I've described it.

It had a richness about it.

What made working on The Heretic special?

John.

Working with John.

Well, I love directors.

You know, if they're good.

And he was a special director.

It was an incredible gift to be able to work

with John Boorman.

It was one of the greatest experiences of my career.

It was brilliant.

Regret's a bad word.

It's a bad word.

Everybody in life has a journey.

Whether you know where it's going to go sideways,

up, down, round about, you do not know.

You will make a choice and you live with that.

Regret it?

No, I got to work with Richard Burton.

I have no regrets in my career.

The bad movies, the good movies, the rejection.

It's just like one great big spaghetti dinner.

I loved it, every bit of it.

Lots of pain, lots of pleasure.

All goes together.

I miss filmmaking.

On the other hand, I'm 85.

Maybe it would be foolish of me to do another one.

- You think? - Yeah.

I would love to see another John Boorman film.

Okay, I'll do one.

He's a real creative genius.

Even if they were on a tiny budget,

he'd be working on something that we'd never seen before.

He was just innovating and playing.

I have this theory that everyone has at least

one John Boorman film that they love.

The older I get, the more I value

people who just go for stuff.

I am much more engaged

by a flawed work of imagination

than I am by something designed to give an audience

more of what it got last time.

And I feel grateful that there's somebody

who would just put these things out there.

Like, I want to put Sean Connery in a man-kini.

Who would--you know--

how many people in the universe would do that?

Apparently, there's only one.

My family,

my seven children and the films I made

are the most important things of my life.

I've often felt

that I've been braver in my filmmaking

and more cowardly in my life.

Perhaps there's only so much bravery you can muster

and I put mine into the films.

I love to play.

And in all the stresses of filmmaking,

you can lose the joy of play.

Regan?

I'm sorry.

I understand now.

The world won't.

Not yet.

It seems to be in my nature to try and explore

and go deeper and try to make my films…

…messages…

…of hope and sharing the experience of life.

I think that my failure is probably to be

over-ambitious in the films I've made.

I'm always trying a bit too hard.

Whereas so many great filmmakers like Antonioni

Bergman.

Hitchcock.

Billy Wilder.

David Lean.

Powell and Pressburger.

Stanley.

Fellini.

Even 8 1/2, where he was trying to express

all these elements and trying to hold them together

into a work of harmony.

Turning money into light into spirit.

I think the great filmmakers have that ability.

To turn film into spirit.

Are you one?

I've tried to be.