An interview with William Peter Blatty (Taken from Fear Magazine June 1990) (Steve Biodrowski, interviews) (Page 1)
Before
the Publication of his novel, The Exorcist, in 1971, William
Peter Blatty had an established career as a writer of comic
novels and screenplays, including 'A shot in the Dark', the
second in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series starring Peter
Sellers.
The
phenomenal success of The Exorcist changed all that. A
bestseller, the novel was adapted into a controversial film in
1973, directed by William Friedkin, produced and written by
Blatty. The $10 million Warner Brothers production grossed
over $100 million at the box office, earned ten nominations from
the Motion Picture Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay.
In 1977,
Warner Brothers paid for the rights to proceed with a sequel
without Blatty's involvement. The result was John Boorman's
The Exorcist 2: The Heretic, which Blatty once suggested should
have been titled Son Of Exorcist and sold as a comedy.
Meanwhile, Blatty adapted his novel The Ninth configuration into
an unfairly neglected film, which he produced and directed in
1980. Although not a horror film, The Ninth Configuration
wrestles with a question of faith raised by The Exorcist, namely:
"in a world so filled with Violence and horror, how can man
believe in a benevolent God?" In an entertaining and
dramatic context, Blatty provides a possible answer which
however, raises another question: "if God Exists, then why
does he allow such evil?" Answering this question
would provide the premise of Legion, a screenplay which Blatty
translated into a bestselling novel in 1983 when he encountered
difficulties getting the project off the ground.
Now,
seven years later. legion ( which Blatty describes as "the
true sequel to The Exorcist"), finally makes it to the
screen, under the expanded title The Exorcist 3: Legion.
(Previous titles have included Exorcist 1990 and The Exorcist:
The Next Chapter, apparently in an abandoned attempt to avoid
numerical continuity with Part 2.) Written and directed by
Blatty, the new film stars George C Scott, replacing the late Lee
J Cobb as Lt William Kinderman, who investigates a gruesome
murder case bearing an uncanny resemblance to the work of a
serial murderer who died fifteen years ago. Brad Dourif
portrays the dead Gemini Killer, and Jason Miller returns as
Father Damien Karras, who plunged from a window at the conclusion
of the first film.
Having
completed principal photography last year, Blatty found time in
his busy postproduction schedule to conduct this interview, just
as he was starting four weeks of special effects shooting for a
new exorcism scene, featuring Nicol Williamson as a priest.
SB: Before the Exorcist, you
were more established as a comedy writer.
WPB: Totally. I love
comedy.
So how did you make the
jump to writing about possession? I've read you were
inspired by an authentic case in Washington DC.
The 1949 case. I was a
graduate at Georgetown University at the time. It stuck in
my mind. I thought, 'If I ever do go ahead and write, I'd
like to write about this, non-fiction.' But I never wrote a word
Instead, you went to
Hollywood and wrote comedies, including several for Blake Edwards
There came a time when comedy
dried up in town, and I couldn't get work. People would
say, 'Blatty --- dramatic? He not only writes comedy --- he
writes off-the-wall comedy.' So I had nothing else to do, and I
thought this could be the time to demonstrate that I can write
something other than comedy. The immediate result was that
my entire body of work as a comedy writer and comic novelist was
obliterated, gone. I know a producer, with whom I had done
a comedy or two, pitched an idea at Paramount for a comedy, and
they liked it, but when he proposed my name, they said
'Blatty---Comedy?' So it's a complete circle.
I must say
I enjoyed writing comedy infinitely more. When you write a
funny line, there's an instant gratification, an immediate
reward: you know it's funny
Half Million Dollar Lunch
The Exorcist was released
back in 1973. this isn't your first attempt at a sequel.
In the early 1980's, Billy
Friedkin and I were going to do it together. In fact, we
had the famous half million dollar lunch. That's a droll
story. At long last I came up with an idea that i thought
was credible and worthy of the original. Billy loved
it. We went into partnership with Jerry Weintraub.
Literally everyone wanted it. All the studios who had bid
were going to give us --- back then it was $15 million to go away
and make the movie. Nobody knew what the story was.
Warner Brothers offered the best deal of all, but they said:
"Boys can't we have lunch in New York, and at the lunch tell
us anything you want about the picture? Anything: one
line, ten lines. And if it sounds right, you have the deal
--- its official. And if we dont like it --- for some
impossible reason --- we'll give you $500,000 for coming to
lunch"
Everything
was fine. I flew into New York for lunch, and I presented
Billy with a synopsis of exactly what the three of us had agreed
upon. The night before, Billy told me he didn't want to do
this story. He came up with a dozen reasons for not doing
it. That really aborted it. We went to lunch and got
our half million dollars, but eventually we all gave it back.
What happened at the lunch?
I said, "Billy, I'm not
saying a word. We don't agree on anything. You tell
them." Billy began by talking about opening in a field
where mutilated cattle are discovered. I shot him such a
look --- what did that have to do with anything? --- but I looked
around the faces at the table, and they were eating it up.
Sometime later in the day, I just blew the whistle. I told
Warner Brothers, "We don't agree on anything." I
don't know how they would have voted, up or down; they seemed
pretty set on up.
We tried
again. We had it set up with Weintraub a couple years ago
with Billy to direct. I went through the same thing all
over again. Billy came to my house, read the script, and
said, "It's terrific --- it goes like a bat out of
hell." So we make a deal with Weintraub, and the Billy
says, "I can't shoot this!" That's just Billy --- and
he's probably somewhere now, saying, "That's just
Blatty."
What made you want to do a
sequel to The Exorcist?
Why do I want to do any
film? I didn't want to do it at the time Warner Brothers
asked me if I would write a sequel, because I didn't have an
idea. When I finally got an idea, naturally I was quite
eager to put it on film.
Whe warner first asked for
a sequel is when we got The Exorcist 2
An amazing film.
It is amazing to see a film
so bad from a director whose other work shows talent.
That's right. I saw it
with a paying audience in Washington DC, where I was living at
the time. I must say, I was the first to giggle, breaking
the respectful silence, and that broke the dam for everyone in
the audience. We roared from that point on --- you'd think
we were watching The producers
Evil Personified
To me, Legion seems an
attempt to expand on the Good Versus Evil theme of the Exorcist.
It is actually. The
Exorcist and Legion --- I'm speaking of the novels ---
slap them back to back they make one story. They're one
book. In The Exorcist , questions were raised
regarding God's providence and goodness and the problem of Evil
in the world. There weren't a lot of answers, you'll
notice. We certainly came to believe in the power of evil,
if not Evil personified. In Legion, the novel, there
is a presentation of a possible solution to the problem of evil
with which I can certainly find --- if you grant my premises ---
no fault. It preserves the goodness of God, while not
denying evil or trying to eliminate it by simply referring to it
as an 'absence of perfection.'
None of
that is translated to the screen, because the theory is a bit
complex.
That struck me about the
novel --- that it presented these philosphical ideas through
Kinderman's interior monologues, which seemed difficult to
transfer to the screen.
They are. I have not
even attempted to translate them. Kinderman remains a
character obsessed by the problem of evil. He finds no
solution to it. What I did --- the film is a pure
entertainment --- was pose his problem as basically one of
'Is there a spiritual world? Is there an afterlife?
Is it possible we live forever?' That he comes to believe
by the time the film is over. Beyond that I couldn't take
it.
The Thematic material had
to be simplified for the film.
Because it is a
thriller. I had higher aspirations for the original
film. Footage was shot which preserved the moral core of
the novel and which I thought should have remained even for
commercial purposes --- because you were given a reason why you
had been asked to sit through the muck and the obscenity and the
shock. That allowed an audience --- this is my opinion ---
to enjoy the film and not hate themselves for liking it.
The point
was, if there is a Satan and he works in the world, his object
principally is to make us despair by coming to despise our own
humanity and thinking of ourselves as so bestial and repellent
that , if there were a God, he couldn't love us. That was
the moral centre. That's why the possession of Regan
MacNeil took place, being a struggle for the soul of Damien
Karras, not the body of the little girl.
Then why was the footage
cut?
Billy is ruthlessly honest
about his own work. The reason he gave me, long after the
success of the film, when perhaps a lesser mortal would never
have confessed, was that when he looked at the first cut, he
didn't think he had a hit, so he got nervous and arbitrarily
sliced it down from two hours and twenty minutes to two hours,
thinking no audience is able to bear any film for more than two
hours. The result is, at least to me, some glaring
construction flaws.
FIREWORKS
When this deal finally came
together, did you go back to your original script, or did you
re-adapt your novel back into a screenplay?
I went to the novel.
I've had many versions, even one where the hero was not Lt
Kinderman --- there was possession, but it had nothing to do with
the characters in The Exorcist
With the title expanded by
Morgan Creek Productions to include THE Exorcist 3, do you think
audiences might be expecting a re-run of the original film?
That they will not get.
But they will get a link, a very strong one. to the first film
--- and some fireworks.
Fireworks?
Not literally. There
will be an exorcism, but it's not what we're building to
throughout the body of the film. It's not the full third
act, but it is part of the resolution.
Why did you wait until
post-production to film this scene?
Quite frankly, at the time we
were shooting [principal photography], I hadn't dreamed up the
scene yet or the effects. So I said,'Until I think of the
right thing, it's not in the picture.' I'm trying for
effects we've never seen before, not the usual. We're
spending a lot of money. A Lot. Over $4
million. We're going to repeat nothing that was in The
Exorcist. The scene will be infinitely shorter; it will be
compacted into a very brief period of time so the effects will
come at you like dum-dum bullets. One of them is quite
wild, I must say. They're all different, but one I find
personally Terrifying.
THE COBRA PASSED
Who is providing the
special effects?
Everybody: ILM, Dream
Quest. There's so many, nobody could get them ready in
time. There's one story I must tell you. There is one
shot during the exorcism sequence in which the room is filled
with a low sea of flame and teaming with cobras, all around the
exorcist. Last Wednesday morning, our effects coordinator
received a call from the owner and handler of a cobra named
'Joe', who said, 'Look, I'm sorry about this. The money is
good, and it's a swell opportunity in every other way, but my
wife and I talked this through, looking at all sides of it, and
we both felt we really don't want Joe to be in an Exorcist film.'
Thecobra
passed! [laughing] What must be the reputation of the
film? I guess people are afraid that their cobra would get
jinxed. Many people to this day have never seen the
original and won't go and see it. I don't know why.
Maybe because it dealt with a child.
How did George C Scott get
cast as Kinderman?
He's the best man for the
part. I think many people will be suprised. They're
going to see a different aspect of George Scott --- extremely
vulnerable. It's quite a spirited performance. I
expect he'll be nominated --- this time I hope he accepts if he
wins.
There is a mistaken
impression that your Lt Kinderman character is based on the
Columbo television series starring Peter Falk. Did that
cause you to alter the character at all, to avoid the comparison?
The novel [ The exorcist ]
predated Columbo. It was close but what people forget is
that after I had submitted my manuscript to the publisher,
another six to eight months went by, not to mention all the time
I slaved over the manuscript a year before that. I feel
quite strongly that Columbo ripped off Kinderman. There's
very little doubt in my mind. I asked Peter Falk: he said,
'No, it had been planned before your book came out.' But my
manuscript was circulated all over town, all the agencies and
production companies and studios, and somebody said --- and I
know who that somebody is --- 'Wouldn't this be interesting for
our detective?' I must say it does tick me a little.
I had planned my own little TV series for Lt Kinderman --- not
any more.
I've
doenplayed that aspect of his character --- the constant
forgetfulness --- in the script. I saw a Columbo episode
--- I could go on and on about this --- in which they did the
'autograph this for my daughter' bit --- straight out of The
Exorcist. But God bless Peter Falk --- it wasn't his fault.
SPIRITS ON TAPE
One of the more intriguing
supernatural elements in Legion is the recording of the
disembodied voices, presumably spirits, on tape. [ The
process involves leaving a tape machine recording at full volume
while asking questions in a quiet room, then playing the tape
back and listening for responses.]
There are several books on the
subject. There were two by scientists; the one by
Konstantin Raudieve [Breakthrough] got me going. At the
risk of sounding like a wacko, I'll tell you now that it is an
absolutely authentic phenomenon, these taped voices. I
don't know what they are. I don't know how they get on the
tape. But they're there. All those voice messages in
the novel Legion were tapes that i had made, including one I made
at Magno Sound Studio in New York City, which was so loud I sent
it to Columbia University for analysis. Back it came with
the result that it could not possibly be a human voice: the graph
was perfectly even; with a human voice that's not so --- it's
irregular.
What was particularly
interesting was that some of the voices' messages changed if the
tape speed was changed. Was that based on one of your
tapes?
Yes. The answer was
'Lacey,' which was not responsive to my question, 'Is there a
God?' Played at twice the speed it became, 'Hope it.'
And the sampling at Magno Sound was not clearly intelligible
until I played it at twice the speed I recorded it.
One nigh,
two people came to my house and asked for a demonstration.
On the playback --- I had asked to hear the names of the two
people --- I heard one of the names. I altered the speed,
and that same piece of information became the other person's name
--- and the names were totally different. Don't ask me how
--- whether there are two different frequencies riding on top of
each other, and changing the pitch by changing the speed allows
one frequency to become audible while the other is not --- I
don't know. My friends were utterly stunned.
I'll tell
you this, though: Based on my own experiments, if these are the
dead, they don't know any more now than when they were
alive. No supernatural powers or anything else --- they're
just on a different frequency. Jung talked about that, the
other side being a higher frequency, because they are invisible
to us, like a spinning propeller. In fact, one of the
things I heard on the tape was a voice saying, "We have two
souls", and much later, in my readings on Carl Jung, I came
across a slim volume of his research on animistic beliefs among
the Sennoi Tribe in Africa, and one of their beliefs was that we
have two souls.
Interesting
Phenomenon, but I've stopped it. It takes too much intense
concentration --- I cant do it for more that twenty minutes at a
time --- and you learn nothing: "Hello, my name is
John. I'm fine. How are you?" You're not
going to get any great illumination.
So there are no
philosophers on the other side?
There may be; but, curiously,
if you ask significant and important questions, or broadly
philosphical ones, you get very cryptic answers or none.
Evasive.
That may be one reason why
some people avoid The Exorcist: it seems closer to reality than
most horror fiction.
That is very much a part of
it. Some people don't want to be subjected to that kind of
experience, because this is terror based on reality --- at least,
I believe it is. I don't think of The Exorcist as a horror
tale at all. It's frightening but quite real. It's
power to frighten derives from it's credibility.
And There
was the unavoidable obscenity of The Exorcist. Newsweek, in
its review of the novel, said: 'The Exorcist is obscene in the
highest possible sense. It restores the proper meaning to
the word 'obscenity'" --- which was to make you aware of
something that should not be, that has no right to exist.
When you are made aware of that, it's laudable. So one
never revelled, hopefully, in the vulgarity in the film, because
it was set in its proper context: something not to be desired.