At the introduction to the Sundance opening night screening of Memory: The Origins of Alien, director Alexandre O. Philippe announced that he had already shot a documentary about The Exorcist. Like Philippe’s other movie subjects – Alien, Psycho and Star Wars – The Exorcist is one of the most well-covered films of all time. So we asked him how he found a new take on The Exorcist.

“So, on The Exorcist, I’m working with William Friedkin. I’ve been working with him now for a year, a little more than a year actually. It’s very different. This is just going to be him and it’s basically about his very personal process. The approach was to do a film on The Exorcist using the Hitchcock/Truffaut model of interviews. I said to him, ‘I just want to sit with you for days and crack open The Exorcist and get into your process as a filmmaker. We’ve had four and a half days of interviews. As you can imagine, we went pretty much in depth.”

The making of The Exorcist has been well documented, so Philippe didn’t ask Friedkin the same old questions.

“There’s no talk at all about special effects, about the cinematic tricks,” Philippe said. “Instead we talked about art. We talked about music, about opera, about movies from Citizen Kane to Ordet by Dreyer, to 2001, The Third Man.

“It’s a very intimate chamber film about William Friedkin as an artist and his process in the making of The Exorcist.”

Friedkin had pretty eclectic taste, and Ordet (pictured below) may have been most significant.

“It is the one film that had the most profound influence, believe it or not, on The Exorcist,” Philippe said. “That’s all I will say.”

In his run from The French Connection to The Exorcist to Sorcerer, Friedkin became a notorious legend in Hollywood. Philippe wants to show his softer side.

“I think we all know him as this maverick filmmaker,” Philippe said. “Obviously, he was that. The guy was shooting guns on the set, slapping his actors across the face and almost broke Ellen Burstyn’s back. There’s a lot of drama and a lot of outrageous things about the making of that film. There’s a lot of myth also. I don’t think many people know the quiet, reserved Friedkin who thinks very much in nuance, who is obsessed with art, who will go to Chicago and spend hours in front of the Monet painting Morning on the Seine near Giverny, who goes to the Kyoto Zen Gardens and cries because he finds it so beautiful. That’s what this project is going to be about. He’s very excited about it.”

Philippe is now in the process of culling a feature film out of the four and a half days of interviews. He’s shown a bit to Friedkin.

“I sent him an 11-minute short version of it,” Phillippe said. “He sent me an e-mail. He’s very, very touched by it I think. I told him I really want to do something that’s very special.”