Scratch That Itch:
William Friedkin on Bug

By Andrew Tracy

To say that Bug is William Friedkin’s best film in 20 years might seem like faint praise, but his cunning and perfectly tuned adaptation of Tracy Letts’ claustrophobic play hardly needs comparisons to Jade (1995) to prove its worth. Of course, Friedkin’s rosier past will surely be invoked to defend Bug against the inevitable catcalls that will greet its release in North America, after it caused a stir at Cannes by picking up the FIPRESCI prize in the Director’s Fortnight. Friedkin may soon be “returning to form” in any and every publication near you, and you can bet there’ll be more said about The Exorcist (1973) for the umpteenth time than Bug—although the lazy social readings now inseparable from the former will surely be broken out once more for the new film. Indeed, how could they fail to be for a work which deals with the infectious spread of paranoia through the heartland, and whose stage original was playing in Chicago when 9/11 hit?
            To write Bug off as an unchecked explosion from the contemporary id would, however, be something of an insult to its very traditional—in the best sense—virtues. Friedkin’s new film is timely to the extent that its construction and the deployment of its effects are, for all intents and purposes, timeless: how to orchestrate a performance, pace a scene, use the camera judiciously, calculate audience response the better to knock them off balance—in short, tell a story. The zeitgeist, where and whatever it may be, doesn’t eclipse several decades’ inheritance of dramatic craftsmanship. Letts wrote his play after the Oklahoma City bombing, which calls up a very different image of terrorist carnage than the brand which the media informs us is dominating our thinking these days. Yet even though Friedkin retains Letts’ references to Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynsci, there’s not a whiff of datedness to the film. Style doesn’t recognize new paradigms.
            As zeitgeist fiends high and low troll through each new release, it’s been increasingly forgotten that these timely echoes are texture, not source—as David Bordwell puts it, culture doesn’t turn on the camera. Friedkin and Letts have taken exactly what they need from the world around them and plugged it in to their nasty little nerve machine, heightening and sharpening the pieces they select the better to calibrate their gut punches. If this sounds rather coldly engineered, I’ll take it if only for the sheer sensual pleasure of the mysterious opening. A brief shot of a bizarre, silvery room, which would look like the inside of a computer but for the unidentified corpse making a mess on the floor; a cut to black, a ringing, a telephone in close-up as it is picked up, a woman’s voice saying “Hello?” to silence; suddenly, a cut to a gorgeous helicopter shot, travelling across a desert to a small cluster of lights in the distance, as the sound of the phone being slammed down and the woman’s voice muttering “Bastard” calls up the film’s title. With a few simple machinations, Friedkin simultaneously disorients and intrigues, slyly plays on the typical “opening up” of a stage work on the screen by taking it to the furthest extreme possible, and enhances visually—cinematically—the theme which the play could only convey in words: a dark, threatening world pressing in upon people who have retreated into their personal fortresses to ward it off.
            Those retreats, naturally, are as much psychological as physical, and the film’s tension hangs upon when these two realms will meet, and ignite. It’s this expectation of the inevitable that Friedkin and Letts so cannily play upon. The film’s first hour is a well-played and tautly written specimen of a very familiar scenario: Agnes (Ashley Judd), a down-and-out waitress imbibing vodka and coke (in powdered form) in her dirty motel room, nervously awaits the return of her ex-con ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.), who she assumes is the source behind the barrage of silent phone calls. Her lesbian best friend and co-worker, R.C. (Lyn Collins), brings over Peter (Michael Shannon), a passer-through she picked up at the bar. Polite, serious, and contentedly square (“I’m not a serial killer,” he calmly repeats after overhearing Agnes joking with R.C.), Peter begins to break down the bitter wall behind which Agnes takes refuge. After platonically spending the night and witnessing Agnes’ black-eyed “reunion” with Jerry the next morning, Peter’s remarks and behaviour start becoming darker and more enigmatic—especially when he discovers that a certain Dr. Sweet (Brian F. O’Byrne) has been asking questions about his whereabouts.
            The explosion does come, of course, but not at all in the form expected. Instead of dropping the other shoe, Bug abruptly catapults into a deranged other dimension, where the finely shaded tones and carefully orchestrated tension of the first hour are exploded gaudily outwards, risking outright absurdity at every turn. That it never goes over the brink is due solely to the drawing of the film’s characters, which is to say that the demands placed upon the film’s actors are uniquely heavy. Camera, sound, editing, and all the fragmentary processes of cinema mean nothing in a film such as this without a unified ensemble of performances at the core. After a few false moves and flat readings in the early minutes, Judd hits exactly the right note of slowly eroding guardedness, her touching vulnerability becoming the film’s ingress to the horror that emerges. As well, her rather calculated deglamourization becomes both affecting and arousing—her casual kisses with R.C. are both wholly natural and genuinely erotic, light years removed from the sapphic salaciousness Friedkin exploited in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Connick’s brute is all the more intimidating for the intelligence and wit entwined with his brutishness, creating a palpable sense of violence by withholding it, flashing the mocking smile that reminds one that he could unleash it at any moment.
The revelation here, however, is Shannon, who originated the role in London. Peter’s growing madness is terrifying rather than risible because Shannon meticulously reveals the relentless, twisted logic on which it is founded: the carefully weighed words, the taut face and searching eyes of the first hour remain locked in memory when the batshit eventually hits the fan. It’s a fine line which Friedkin and company walk in the last 40 minutes, the turn into left-field insanity requiring a lunatic pitch that must be sustained and then built even further. It’s seldom that actors will risk looking foolish for such a prolonged stretch, and it’s to their great credit that self-defensive laughter ultimately freezes in the throat. No doubt there will be some scribes who will have a field day chortling over Judd and Shannon’s daring. That’s all to the good. Leave the small-minded to their scraps and exult in that inimitable bellow to the heavens: “I am the supermotherbug!”

CINEMA SCOPE: How did you first become acquainted with Letts’ play?

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: The play first appeared ten years ago, though he’s revised it a lot since. It played London and Chicago, and I saw it in New York off-Broadway about two years ago. It moved me considerably when I saw it; it was extraordinarily powerful. I thought it had really been written for me. I got Ashley Judd interested in it, and it just took off from there. We made it in 20 days for $4 million, and since there’s not really any special effects or CGI, we could just concentrate on the material.

SCOPE: Considering that you’re usually grouped with the New Hollywood of the ‘70s, you never seem to have strained to create as much of a stylistic persona as some of those other filmmakers. The demands of the particular film always seem to come first, which certainly seems to be the case with Bug.

FRIEDKIN: Well, I think that the themes that run through most of my films are similar: the thin line between good and evil, the thin line between the policeman and the criminal, and how with the slightest nudging the darkest demons can come to the fore and rule us. I wasn’t conscious of this originally, but I am now. I don’t have to look for this stuff, though, it tends to find me one way or the other. As far as Bug goes, however, it certainly is a return to a much earlier period of my career. I’ve made films like this back in the ‘60s, when I did Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1968) and Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970), which are both stage adaptations shot basically in one location.

SCOPE: Since “opening up” is one of the traditional hurdles, and often faults, of adapting theatre work to film, that makes the opening of Bug all the more ballsy: cutting from this inexplicable interior to this beautiful helicopter shot. The interior and exterior really play off each other in this film, this intense, paranoid drama going on inside seems to be filtered in from this vast, threatening world outside.

FRIEDKIN: That’s exactly what was intended. I saw in this play an immediate intensity, and I just built from there. The paranoia portrayed there is real. I think that what Peter talks about is valid. I understand where he’s coming from, and I think to a certain extent, this guy is not crazy, he’s just extreme. There are probably thousands, or millions, of people walking around out there who share Peter’s fears, if not his way of dealing with them. The central idea of this script is so powerful, this idea of how paranoia can spread so easily when people feel that they’re being threatened, whether it’s real or imagined. And most people today, I think, do feel threatened. It used to be you could go to a train station, a bus depot, or to get on an airplane, and you never thought about it as being possibly dangerous. My wife and I were in London a couple of weeks ago, flying on American Airlines from Heathrow to Los Angeles. And had the timing been different we could have been on one of those flights which was supposed to be blown out of the air.

SCOPE: That’s part of what gives the final apocalyptic scenes of Bug such power, because for most of the first hour we’ve been rooted in this sense of normality. In Shannon’s case, particularly, when he lets loose it’s not just some Hannibal Lecter-style mugging: from what we’ve seen of him in the first hour, we really get the sense that this is coming from somewhere deep inside him, from some other place.

FRIEDKIN: That’s a great piece of acting, Michael’s performance, and Ashley I think really helps push it up to that level of intensity and sustain it. Agnes is kind of Peter’s medium for unleashing the destruction he does at the end: because she’s so vulnerable in her relationships with men, her habits, her insecurities, she taps right into his paranoia, goes along with it, and eventually exceeds it.

SCOPE: Your films are often remembered for the money shots: the car chase in The French Connection, of course, or the spinning head—well, lots of things in The Exorcist. But what often gets overlooked is that the actors are very much part of the effects you pull off, even something that went virtually unnoticed, like that strange, private body language Benicio del Toro was playing around with in The Hunted (2003). How do you work with your actors on set? There are all those famous stories of you and Hackman going toe to toe…

FRIEDKIN: Well, as to that, it works differently with different people. With guys like Tommy Lee Jones or Sam Jackson, you have a really brief conversation about who their characters are and what the arc of the story is, and then other than giving them a staging plan, you don’t say much to them, because if you do you can spoil it. And then there are actors like Benicio, who likes to talk endlessly: about the character, about the underlying ideas and themes in the script, about the backstory of his own character. And of course all or most of that you have to make up. But he needs a psychological grounding for his character which requires a lot of discussion. Most of the actors I’ve worked with like to work in that way, but not Tommy Lee or Sam. They walk in before the first day and they’ve got it, and you know they have it, so you just modulate it as it goes along, a little bit more or a little bit less.

SCOPE: How did you work with the actors on Bug?

FRIEDKIN: Ashley and I talked extensively about the film before we did it, and we were really on the same page. To achieve Shannon’s performance took a great deal of discussion, toning, modulation. Shannon is primarily a stage actor, he’s only done small parts in films, though I’ve been told he has a very good role in World Trade Center, a small but pivotal part. He needs a lot of attention, love, appreciation. He becomes that character. And you have to realize that you’re talking to the character and not to him when you start rehearsing. You’ve got to walk on eggshells. He would tend to go over the top too soon, so I’d have to bring him down. But whenever I would modulate his performance, he almost took it as an insult to his character!

I’d met Connick at a party before I was casting this film, and I saw that a very large part of him was this guy. When I called him to do this role and sent him the script, I told him about some of his behaviour which I’d observed, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. There’s a part of him that likes to put people on like Goss does, sometimes maliciously.

SCOPE: Connick does some really strong work in the film. He sets the menacing tone of the first half so powerfully.

FRIEDKIN: He sets the tone for menace, but of course he’s not the menace, and the fear he creates moves instead onto someone like this mild-looking guy, Dr. Sweet—who, by the way, is played by one of the very best stage actors in the English-speaking world, Brian F. O’Byrne. He was in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt on Broadway, and before that he did something else that won him a Tony award, and he’s just an absolute genius. You need that calibre of actor even in what seems to be a secondary part in a film like this. They all have to score, because if there’s a false note it can bring the whole thing down. For a film to work for anybody, I’d say about 50% of it is the script, 45% is the cast, and if the elements in the other 5% work well—like the stuff I do—they can enhance it, but without the right cast and the script it’s not going to happen.

SCOPE: The long shots and sustained sequences you allow Judd and Shannon in the first half of the film are quite refreshing, and they make the more frantic camerawork in the second half a lot more jarring. You don’t often see that kind of breathing space being given to actors in a lot of mainstream American films these days, where even veteran directors are adopting the fast cutting model, even for simple dialogue scenes.

FRIEDKIN: Well, they’re just trying to get with the trend. I’m just sick of all that. Most of the time it’s there to disguise the fact that there’s no solid material. I don’t like most of the American films that I see. The films that interest me the most today are often from Europe, and in particular from France. Michael Haneke, for instance: The Piano Teacher (2001), and his last one, Caché (2005), this is real cinema to me. I have a DVD of that and I watch it over and over.

SCOPE: Do you find there are things you’re learning from these films that make their way into your own, or are you more or less certain what you want and need?

FRIEDKIN: At this point I can’t really change what I do, and it’s hard to be affected by anything now. Of course when I started making films, I was affected by many other people, a great many other people, and since I knew nothing, I started out by imitating them, and not very well. But eventually I developed my own interests and my own style, even though you rightly point out that my films don’t really have a particular visual style. But what they do share is a respect for the material, for the most part, and a concentration on the characters.

Something that has greatly fed my filmmaking is the operas I’ve been directing for the last decade or so. Zubin Mehta first invited me to do Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1996, and since I had two and a half years to prepare, I agreed. We did it in Florence, which is one of the great homes of grand opera, and fortunately it was a success there, so I’ve had all these other offers to do operas since. I’ve done Samson and Delilah in Tel Aviv, last year I did Aida in Turin just before the Olympics, right now I’m preparing Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to open the Kennedy Centre season before going to Munich to do Salome with the Bavarian State Opera company.

When people ask me how directing an opera differs from making a film, I reply that it’s very much the same, except there’s no camera. You have to conceive the production, the sets, the lighting, the costumes. You work with designers and technicians. You can’t change a word of the libretto or a note of the music, but within that there’s a lot of room for personal interpretation. And the great singers I’ve worked with want pretty much the same things that good actors want, which is a psychological underpinning for their character and a staging that works. I love opera, and working in it has made me much more aware of what’s important in both arts. I think Bug was a better film because of the operas I’d done leading up to it, especially Wozzeck.

SCOPE: You made Bug on a relative shoestring after two mid-level studio films. What is your relationship like with the studios these days, especially in terms of the freedom they allow you?

FRIEDKIN: It’s really a question of the kind of films the big studios want to do as opposed to what I want to see. I’m much more interested in Haneke or Dominik Moll or others than in some adaptation of a comic book. I would much prefer to spend the rest of my film career making low budget, character-driven pieces, but even that’s a difficult proposition with the studios these days, where $60 million is considered low budget.

SCOPE: You were certainly making commercial films in the ‘70s, but there must have been a marked difference in the freedom allowed you then as opposed to now.

FRIEDKIN: Well, there was even more freedom long before my generation, in the time of John Ford, Raoul Walsh, and the other great directors we learned so much from. There was a greater sense on the part of the guys who ran the studios that there had to be all kinds of different films. And they had respect for the filmmakers. They didn’t always know what they were doing, but they knew there was going to be a certain degree of professionalism and a connection with the audience. There was a lot of freedom there, even though the studios controlled everything. Today, there are any number of filmmakers who have a lot more contractual freedom than any of those guys had, but I don’t see the same great body of work being produced.

As to my generation, a director like Sidney Lumet is a lot less free, whether it be in his subject matter or his approach to filmmaking, than he was when he made his great films. Coppola hasn’t made a film for a very long time. He’s working on something now, and I have no idea what it’ll turn out to be. He’s entered another chapter in his life, and I don’t know if he’s even trying to make films on the scale of Apocalypse Now (1979). Not that he needs to, because those films will last as long as there’s an archive.

SCOPE: So you don’t think there’s any need for a grand valedictory Friedkin project?

FRIEDKIN: Who needs it? I’ve been working steadily, even though you haven’t seen a lot of films from me in recent times. I’m almost never inactive. I don’t even think in those terms. It’s just boring to me.

Bug will be released in North America this December.

Bug

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