Nicolas winding refn biography of william friedkin

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• Friedkin and Refn are an absolutely magnificent double act; they have an almost Kermode and Mayo quality, where one is a running tap of fascinating, eloquent knowledge and expertise, and the other serves the purpose of bringing the conversation back to earth through inane questioning and snark. Not only is it hilarious to see the two of them winding each other up, their dynamic wraps itself around this 80 minute runtime and keeps things extremely interesting.

  I've never seen Sorcerer (this will change very, very soon) but the content of this interview is almost enhanced by that. Refn expressing his laudation of the film as well as his fascination with its 'Pinkerton'-esque legacy actually works almost as if it were…

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  I’ve had this happen to me with musicians, when their passing suddenly pushes me towards a rediscovery of some of their best songs. Pretty common, isn’t it?

  This is the first time, however, that it happens for a film director and it began by putting a face and a voice to a name I knew full well. This long-winded piece tracking my experience in discovering the world of William Friedkin, through his movies, his book, his interviews will hopefully show you how little I know about cinema and reveal to you the same fascinating guy I came to know in the past few weeks.

  Also, I hope you like prologues.

  a starting point

  “When inom die, they are not gonna say the guy who directed the Sonny and Cher movie just died”.

  William Friedkin passed away on the 7th of August 2023, from heart failure and pneumonia. He is widely known for two seminal films of the 1970s, The French Connection (1971), which won pretty much all the big tickets at the Academy Awards the follo

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Watch: 2-Hour Talk With Nicolas Winding Refn And William Friedkin

In 1974, William Friedkin was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood, having just come off of the two-punch successes of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” So, naturally, he decided to use his newfound clout in the industry to conduct an extended interview with his idol, Fritz Lang, director of “M” and “Metropolis,” and the only man on planet Earth who successfully rocked an eye patch AND sunglasses. The resulting 90-minute interview was as compact of a film school any student of cinema could have asked for.

READ MORE: Watch: William Friedkin Spends 15 Minutes Talking About His Favorite Films Of All Time

Forty years later, during the 2014 CPH PIX festival, Friedkin saw his career come full circle as he became the interview subject for another young director who idolizes him. There’s more than a whiff of “The French Connect