Mark Reviews Movies: LEAP OF FAITH: WILLIAM FRIEDKIN ON THE EXORCIST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 18, 2020

William Friedkin could talk for hours about movies, either his own or any others, and remain engaging. The filmmaker probably did talk for hours when he sat down with director Alexandre O. Philippe for Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist, a documentary in which Friedkin explains the process of making his seminal 1973 horror film. The documentary's main takeaway is that Friedkin is a great salesman—not for the merits of his film, but for his own significance.

To be fair, Friedkin has earned the right to gloat at least a little, especially about this particular film, and his dissection of and anecdotes about the production don't fall into the details and stories we've heard so many times before (There is, for example, not a single reference to pea soup). Philippe wants his subject to dig a bit deeper—into Friedkin's philosophy about stories, the inspirations for his approach to this film, the meanings behind certain images and motifs, how he directed his actors, and some of the more gossipy tidbits of off-screen conflicts.

Philippe, who's fast becoming an intriguing filmmaker for his feature-length dissections of famous movies and the filmmaking process, lets Friedkin talk at length, with gusto, and sometimes into a corner. The early parts of the conversation are vaguely fascinating, such as Friedkin's assertion that every story is basically a matter either of fate or of faith. Near the start, he insists that he made The Exorcist exclusively through instinct—that people's interpretations of certain images as foreshadowing are sound but weren't intentional on his part.

It's a good soundbite, for sure, especially when Friedkin later argues that he made the film as a faithful believer (The idea, perhaps, is that everything here came into place, not because of fate, but because of divine intervention in the disguise of coincidence). As he goes deeper into certain elements, though, it becomes clear that Friedkin doesn't even believe his early, primary assertion. He made distinct choices early and often, while fighting for things exactly as he wanted them.

These ideas don't gel, except in one way: Both of them point to Friedkin as a genius. That's what he wants us to take away from Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist, and based on his inability to understand the climax of his own film, maybe it's sometimes better to let a film speak for itself.

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