From the William Friedkin papers of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. / Photo courtesy William Friedkin

Throughout the intimate one-on-one session, it’s clear that the 85-year-old’s gift of gab has not diminished. As ChainsawMasacre writes on Letterboxd, “his mind and memory is still like a steel trap”. Philippe, a Swiss-born cinephile-centric doco filmmaker who’s covered everything from zombie movies to George Lucas, captures Friedkin’s contagious ranconteuring in all its prickly, contradictory, exuberant bluster. It’s so absorbing that from the moment he opens his mouth, you’ll be hooked in and suddenly an hour has vanished without you even realizing.

It’s true that considerable swathes of Leap of Faith may feel like old news to Friedkin/Exorcist obsessives—anyone who’s listened to the DVD audio commentary, read The Friedkin Connection, or watched Francesco Zippel’s Friedkin Uncut will be familiar with some of these stories. But Philippe’s incisive, thoughtful, highly accessible approach, excavating deeper than anecdotal interest but eschewing academic stuffiness, makes the documentary as much of value to newcomers as to seasoned fans. “The intersection of influences between music, film, fine art and personal travesty made me admire Friedkin on a whole new level”, writes Databaseanimal.

How many times have you seen The Exorcist, and on average how often would you need to rewatch a film in prep? Alexandre O. Philippe: You have to watch a film over and over and over again. I can’t tell you generally how many times I’ve watched The Exorcist but I can tell you when I was preparing for my interviews with Bill, I watched it every day for 30 days straight. That’s part of the process.

Leap of Faith is a bit of a departure from your previous two deep-dives—Memory: The Origins of Alien and 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene—in that you’re only talking to one interviewee, and that interviewee happens to be William Friedkin. What was that experience like? It’s wonderful. It’s really hard to put into words how incredible it’s been to spend that amount of time with him. Getting my own personal masterclass with him is invaluable. There’s no film school in the world that can give you that experience. It’s been really something.

Did spending that extended time reveal something about Friedkin that you weren’t aware of prior to shooting? Oh sure, that’s the beauty of that extensive of an interview—six days—and multiple conversations in between. Without giving it away, in the final sequence when he’s talking about Kyoto Zen Gardens… this is the stuff you can only get from someone like Friedkin once the comfort level is there, once you’re in the groove of conversation. It’s an aspect of his personality we’ve never seen before.

We all know him as a storyteller and a showman but he’s probably been very guarded in the past. There’s a certain amount of vulnerability even when he talks about the climax of The Exorcist, and how much to this day he’s not sure he understands some of the choices he made shooting that scene. That’s a remarkable thing to say about one of the most iconic scenes in the history of movies.

William Friedkin in ‘Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist’. / Photo by Robert Muratore, courtesy Exhibit A Pictures

I could listen to him speak for hours. Did you challenge him at any point? I definitely pushed him as far as I could. The whole sequence around the climax of The Exorcist that I was just talking about. There’s only about three minutes of that in the film but we talked about that scene for an hour and a half. I kept pushing and pushing him because I didn’t understand where he was coming from. I feel as a film fan that I understand that scene. For me, Father Karras sacrifices himself. It’s an act of complete selflessness. But he kept going back to the idea of suicide and that suicide in the Catholic Church is a sin and how he didn’t understand it. And that’s why you see him a little on edge during that scene. It was very important to go there.

I love the obsessive detail that goes into your examination of the creative process. Was there any detail—something that is interesting in and of itself—that you left out? We had a really great conversation around Carlos Kleiber, one of the conductors he admires the most, who essentially taught him to direct in metaphors. It’s a fascinating conversation. We actually built a scene around that and it just didn’t work with the film. There’s a point in any film where it becomes autonomous and its own entity in a way and you have to listen and pay attention to what the film tells you it wants to be.

We also had a great conversation around his first documentary The People vs. Paul Crump, and the technique which he used of slapping him in his cell on death row, which is the same technique he used for Bill O’Malley in The Exorcist. I had a long conversation with [executive producer] Karyn Kusama about this and we felt it was a little too over-the-top to go there and it wasn’t necessary to take the film to that level so we eventually left it out.

Friedkin talks about The Brink’s Job at one point, which is great to hear as it’s probably my favorite underrated Friedkin film. What’s yours? [Laughs] If you’re talking underrated or one that’s not much talked about, for me it’s Bug. Bug is ummm… [pauses]

What can you say about Bug? I mean honestly, truly, have you ever seen performances that pushed to the very edge of what’s even reasonable to expect or see from actors? It’s mind-blowing stuff. How does he even get performances like these? I mean they are wonderful actors but Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, like, really… Like, really? You know what I mean? That’s Billy.

To me, you’re talking about Billy when he was in his early 70s when he made that film, a filmmaker who’s still really interested in pushing the envelope and going as far as he possibly can. It’s absolutely remarkable and I wish we talked more about that film.

Tell us about one ‘holy grail’ film or filmmaker you’d like to cover. The one I really want most to make a film about, and I will, is Vertigo. To go back to Hitchcock. I definitely have a healthy obsession with that film—have had since I was a kid. I love melodrama, and it’s the greatest melodrama ever made. I can’t think of a better film for my money from anywhere. It’s a glorious, glorious piece of filmmaking, but it’s also a very complex, tortured, complicated film that alienates some people.

I was on TCM a couple years ago as Ben Mankiewicz’s co-host on “50 Years of Alfred Hitchcock”. We did 24 movies together and when it came to Vertigo we had a fun conversation because he’s not a fan. He’s basically like “what’s the big deal about that film?” That really fascinates me. That’s a really amazing thing and he’s not the only person I highly respect who said that to me. I’d love to not only do a deep dive into Vertigo but also what’s so polarizing about it. That’d be fun to do that.

In Leap of Faith, Friedkin talks a lot about non-horror-specific aspects, such as grace notes, and the mysterious, magical aspects of filmmaking that can’t be easily explained. What movies are you drawn to but can’t explain completely through the technique and science of filmmaking? Any great work of art, not just film, that has a lasting impact on us and on society, works in ways that are much more mysterious than not. You can explain away the many different tangible reasons why Psycho, Alien and The Exorcist continue to have an impact, and had a massive impact on audiences when they came out. But for every tangible reason or every fact that you can provide, there are a million mysteries as well.

I’m much more interested in the mysteries of the creative process than I’m interested in the behind-the-scenes anecdotes or little tidbits of movie history. Because you will never get to the bottom of it and that’s the real beauty of it. And the lesson to learn from that is there’s nothing to do beyond just being in awe of it.

Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe / Photo by Bas Bogaerts

What’s a documentary that uses the form in a way that’s inspiring to you, or one that made you want to pursue this form? I don’t watch a ton of documentaries. I don’t like the term ‘documentary’. With that asterisk out of the way, there are a number of documentaries I absolutely adore and filmmakers that are pushing the form that are remarkable. I think of Allan King, one of the great documentarians.

There is one that, formally speaking, absolutely blew me away and is very hard to watch. It’s called Caniba. It’s a documentary about this French-Japanese man who killed and ate one of his classmates. He did a whole comic book on it, and his brother is equally disturbed. It’s one of the few films, along with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where I had to literally stop halfway through ’cos I just couldn’t handle it. The remarkable thing about this film is that the entire film is extreme close-ups. You’re watching basically his face and his brother’s face in extreme close-up the entire film and it makes you absolutely nauseous.

The formal choice that was made, in committing to that, it’s so much more horrendous and horrible than what’s on the periphery of the frame. You’re trapped in the geography of that face and you can’t get out. I’m not sure if ‘exciting’ is the best word I can use here, but to say this kind of approach excites me when I see a documentary filmmaker doing this, is accurate.

How do you spell that? I’m going to put it on my watchlist. C-A-N-I-B-A. Good luck watching it my friend [laughs]. Don’t eat while you’re watching it.

What films have you caught during the pandemic and completely loved, old or new? I watch almost exclusively the Criterion Channel. They’re the gold standard. I don’t even know where to begin. Recently I just watched the three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter collaborations: The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. I’ve always been a huge fan of Harold Pinter but what Joseph Losey has done with those three films is astonishing. The Go-Between, especially. Wow. That film just floored me.

They had a whole sidebar on Western noir films, and I discovered a bunch of incredible titles like Station West and Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum, which is an absolutely magnificent film. Some of the early Douglas Sirk movies. I can watch that stuff all day.

Oh there’s another one I would like to recommend as it is a criminally not just underrated, but completely under-the-radar film: Sun Don’t Shine.

Kate Lyn Sheil’s performance is amazing in it. Oh my god. Why didn’t she run away with the Screen Actors Guild Award, Oscars, Golden Globes? Like seriously. Some of the recent nominations Meryl Streep has been getting, like give me a break. It’s not even close. It’s not even in the same ballpark [laughs]. It’s really one of those rare performances that I think about, like Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher. Once in a generation you see something like this and you go “Holy cow, what a performance”. It does not exist on DVD or Blu-ray and it kills me. I want that film in my collection so badly.

Kate Lyn Sheil in Amy Seimetz’s ‘Sun Don’t Shine’ (2012).

Maybe this will be the thing that will get them to push it out on physical media. I’m trying, I’m working with them, and I’ve done some with them. I need to send them an email and say “Can you please do something about this?”.

What’s a film that you were cold on first viewing but has grown on you with repeat viewings? The first one that comes to mind is Donnie Darko. I really hated the film the first time around, and it’s weird because there was always this voice at the back of my head that kept saying “watch it again”. I did and it completely blew me away the second time around. Often I will give a film a second chance. Especially when I know the film is well-respected. There are films where you can intellectually understand why the film is respected, but you don’t connect with the film.

I’ll tell you one that I’m really looking forward to giving a second chance. Not because I hated it but it left me really underwhelmed. A film that everybody loves: Moonlight. I also do remember when I was watching it, actively thinking I was not in the right frame of mind for that film. Sometimes you just have to recognize that. Sometimes you can be watching a romantic comedy but what you’re really craving is a film noir. That’s really not going to work.

So we’ll see, we’ll talk about it after I’ve watched it a second time. And hopefully it will be a revelation. There’s nothing better for me than these moments when you watch something the second time that didn’t work and you go “Holy cow this is great”. That’s an awesome thing to experience.

Related content

The Films of Alexandre O. Philippe

Follow William Friedkin on Twitter

Aaron’s list of documentaries on filmmaking and Hollywood

Vince’s list of narrative films about filmmaking

Follow Aaron on Letterboxd

Keep the parameters tight.

“Making a story in a limited setting is a very smart thing to do for an aspiring screenwriter—first and foremost because it’s produceable,” Aneesh Chaganty advises. ”If you’re an unknown entity in the film world, the cheaper your product takes to make is probably a better bet for you to be taking as opposed to writing a kajillion-dollar project. The first project that I wrote was a $90-million movie that Sev and I wrote. ‘Why did we do this?!’”

Chaganty also stresses the need to ensure your project wants to be a limited-setting story. “A lot of times I’ll read a found-footage script and it will often feel like all it wants to be is a not a found-footage script. There’s a lot of times where it feels like the writers don’t want it to be that.”

Explore the whole box.

Chaganty encourages aspiring writers to imagine your limited environment as a box. “You’re writing within this box, all the characters are in this box, I think the best way to examine it is not to ever try leaving the box, but make sure you explore it every which way. The box upside down, the box right side up, the box left, the box right…

“This is an objective that should apply to all films, but it’s easier to objectively analyze whether you’re doing it in a limited setting. With a film like Searching, we have to make sure that every possible iteration of how a narrative can take place on a computer screen is done. Looking at a movie like Buried, they’re doing every possible iteration of how that story can be told underground, in a coffin, before [the location] starts to change.”

(Good news for fans of Searching: with new tech platforms appearing all the time, it turns out there are more parts of the box to explore. A sequel is in the works, but Chaganty won’t be in the director’s chair.)

Give yourselves a deadline.

With no end to the pandemic in sight, it’s easy for one day to melt into the next. Keep your team motivated with a deadline. “I gave us two weeks,” says Rob Savage, Host’s director, who co-wrote the film with Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley, after his Twitter prank went viral.

“So we had two weeks, all three of us, to come together,” adds Hurley. “Let’s figure out a structure, let’s figure out these character dynamics, figure out a way to build tension around this idea of a séance and hang a story and a journey for the characters, for where we want the séance to end up. We had a Google doc where we were editing it together. I’d go away and do my pass, Rob would go away and do his pass, and Jed would. And that was it. It was really just like, run and gun, go go go.”

“If things had gone to plan we would have had this out in two months; in the end it took three,” Savage continues. ”It took twelve weeks from when I first called Jed up and said ‘let’s make a feature’, to delivering the movie—roughly breaks up as two weeks of writing, we shot for three weeks, and then a lot of editing and VFX time.”

Know your story inside-out, but don’t labor the script.

“We’ve got some hearts to break, here,” warns Hurley. “There was no official script in the standard way because there just wasn’t time. The whole point was capturing a zeitgeist moment… If we went away and wrote a feature-film script, well, ‘we’ll see you after the pandemic’s over, guys!’. You’d miss that moment. That was the joy of it. You didn’t have time to labor over every syllable.”

Some of Host’s key moments were scripted, Hurley reassures. “We had lines we wanted them to suggest, but more than giving them dialog it was about giving them prompts for every scene.”

Savage adds: “The thing that we did really well, at the end of the two weeks of writing, is every single scene, me, Jed and Gemma, you could quiz us all in separate interrogation rooms, we’d be able to tell you the purpose of every scene and what we wanted to get out of them. We had the movie so clearly in our heads in terms of how we wanted it to feel.”

An advantage of having a treatment rather than a completed script? “A sense of discovery every day,” says Savage. “The actors just brought that amazing spontaneity to it and these incredible performances, because we knew the parameters.”

Aneesh Chaganty and John Cho on the set of ‘Searching’, with a GoPro behind the laptop capturing the webcam view. / Photo by Elizabeth Kitchens

Choosing your camera (spoiler: it’s not your laptop’s).

“John is acting against a black screen,” Chaganty reveals. “There’s nothing on his computer, he’s literally looking at nothing.” To ensure complete control over their footage while preserving authentic eyelines, both sets of filmmakers taped additional cameras to the laptops of their key talent. In Host, each of the Zoom participants had iPhones recording at their highest resolution “so we knew we were getting a clean 1080p,” says Savage. In Searching’s case, it was a GoPro taped to the rear of the various computers used by John Cho.

“Before we started shooting the film,” Chaganty explains, “we had to make [an animatic] version using Adobe Premiere, because much of John’s performance is knowing his eyeline. He needs to know exactly where the iMessages open up—in order for us to know that we almost have to know those decisions already.” Chaganty and his team developed a 100-minute animatic cut, with Chaganty playing every role; “understanding where every window is, where every cursor is, so that by the time we get to set, what I’m doing is showing John ‘okay, this is where that message pops up, and while you’re talking to Deborah, you’re going to look over there, go down there, open Chrome, type in…’ So everything is very specific eyelines. Sometimes my notes after a take would just be ‘John that was great, just move the cursor a little further to the left this time’.”

Haley Bishop as séance host Haley in ‘Host’.

Develop your characters and the genre will take care of itself.

Chaganty and the Host team have the same advice for how to ratchet up the tension in a limited-setting film: it’s all about character. “If you’re going to end up putting these characters through tough times and potentially kill them,” says Shepherd, “develop them as real characters, so that we care about them.”

Although Host’s script was, in fact, only a seventeen-page beat-sheet, the most important part of its structure was the long stretch up front where the characters are dialling into the call and catching up—what Shepherd calls the “getting to know you bit”. “That first part is really important because if it wasn’t for that, the third act wouldn’t work at all. The best thing to do is make your characters real, authentic, believable. Everything else takes care of itself.”

Chaganty agrees: “When you are writing something that is genre, your other decisions don’t have to be genre, and in fact it might elevate it more when you don’t do that, because everything else is already doing that, you know?”

In particular, he advises, trust your talent to lean into their characters, rather than into the genre. “This was my challenge at least, as a totally amateur director: sometimes what I was looking for was the most obvious take as opposed to the most subtle take. “When we left the shoot I was thinking it was take six, or the one where it was most obvious [John] was angry or he was sad or something—and what we ended up using was the most subtle takes. That subtlety, that underneath layer, so much of that was him. He’s so good. He’s so good. I hate to say it, but I didn’t realize how good he was until we edited it together.”

Spend time getting the interface right.

“There’s not a frame of Zoom footage in the actual movie.”—Rob Savage

Found-footage films and browser horrors rely on the believability of the content. Searching and Host work because the footage feels real, even though the reality is there are multiple takes and a lot of post-production. Just as Searching was built around a detailed animatic, Host is, in fact, not a recorded Zoom call, but a result of three weeks of filming every actor in multiple takes, with stunt set-ups, followed by the addition of VFX and Zoom interface details.

“Originally the plan was just to screen-record a Zoom call, but then we realized that we were pumping so much money into doing these crazy stunts and effects that we could blow half the budget in 30 seconds,” says Savage. “You’re basically making five movies. We have to make sure the performances are all tight in every single screen. Radina might be amazing in take one and Jemma might nail it in take three and we have to cut them all together so they work seamlessly.”

Savage praises Host editor Brenna Rangott for pulling it all together, underscoring the importance of post-production in your budget and schedule. “Honestly, what Brenna did with all this footage? It’s her movie as much as it’s anyone else’s movie. She absolutely smashed it.”

The Host crew also relied on fellow filmmaker and designer Dan Hawkins to build the almost 4,000 individual assets in the film, and producer Douglas Cox, who went through the whole movie to type out every single name, label and other Zoom interface detail. “4,000 times he had to do that, and that’s what you see to make it play seamlessly.” (And, yes, they had Zoom’s permission.)

Jed Shepherd, Rob Savage and Gemma Hurley during a Zoom séance for Slashfilm with Chris Evangelista.

Trust your gut.

The Host team were pursued for a feature-length version of Savage’s Twitter prank by a “mind-blowing” number of studios—“it was a really competitive situation,” says Savage—but they went with Shudder for one reason: instinct.

“It was the height of the lockdown and a lot of production companies just started ringing and saying ‘Is there a longer version of this? Because it’s the only thing we can shoot right now’. So we pitched to a bunch of places, and the pitch was basically ‘a Zoom séance, we don’t know if it’s going to be any good, we’re going to use our mates, are you in or not?’ and Shudder [was] like ‘of course we are’.”

It wasn’t about the money. Some companies offered more generous budgets, but wanted to release six to eight months after filming. “We were like, ‘no, this needs to be out this week’.”

Move away from the wall.

Since so much of the movie business—all those endless meetings—has pivoted to video-calls, we asked the filmmakers for specific advice on how to present yourself online, in pitch meetings, table reads and the like.

The very minimum, they all agree, is to have good lighting. “It’s crazy what a difference a desk lamp can make to your environment,” says Chaganty. And move away from the wall. “Rule number one any director of photography will ever say, is don’t shoot at a wall,” he adds. “The further that you can place yourself from that wall, it’s just going to look better.” (It also gives you more protection from any demons that may burst from cupboards during your Zoom, Host’s filmmakers advise.)

Chaganty reveals that the pandemic has actually helped his pitching abilities in video meetings with executives. Chaganty and Ohanian are currently developing a heist movie, while simultaneously pitching a television show. “Right now pitches are all digital. Traditionally when you pitch something, it’s a lot of material and you just memorize it. But now, you can have your script with you—but you can’t make it seem like you’re reading off a screen.” The trick, he says, is to re-size the window of the person you’re pitching to, and re-size the script to the same dimensions, then place them directly over each other.

“So you’re reading and your eyeline is exactly where they are, and then you switch over, and they’ll never know and you’ve just pulled it off perfectly because you’re still looking at the exact same spot. It just kind of feels like an incredible performance where you’ve pulled these great words out of your mind and your heart, without anyone knowing.”

On the other hand, don’t put too much effort into details that nobody will notice. “We were doing a table read for a film,” says Host’s Shepherd, “and I thought it would be fun to change the background to correspond with what scene were were reading. I thought it was really clever but nobody noticed except me.”

Producer Natalie Qasabian, writer-producer Sev Ohanian and writer-director Aneesh Chaganty on the set of their forthcoming feature, ‘Run’.

There’s no time like the present.

“When digital cameras came out, everyone started saying ‘this is a great thing for filmmakers because it really democratizes filmmaking’,” says Chaganty. “We are in a very small bubble where it’s even more democratized than it was before—that’s because everybody has the same resources that we do right now.

“It feels like John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj and Trevor Noah are all making stuff with the same quality that you can make, that I can make, just in our own houses right now. The longer this pandemic goes on, and the longer that it feels that Hollywood can’t make traditional stuff the way it used to, the more likely it is that the demand for content is going to rise.

“If you can make something good in this time, I think you’re in a really good spot as far as getting eyeballs on it. And eyeballs essentially are the things that can propel a career to the next stage.”

Plus, there are mental health benefits to making movies together, at a time when we are all being urged to stay socially connected while physically distant. “What’s been really nice about the whole thing is it just made it so clear how collaborative a process filmmaking is,” says Savage. “Normally people kind of forget about that and you have ‘a film by’, but here you had to put so much trust in everyone. It was just a really fun way of working. I recommend it to everyone.”

Medak is not the first filmmaker to spin non-fictional gold out of a director’s nightmare (in this case, his own). His movie follows in the footsteps of legendary documentaries such as Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which revealed the full extent of the already infamous insanity that comprised the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and used extensive footage shot at the time by Coppola’s filmmaker wife Eleanor (filmmaker spouses are handy to have along for the ride, as Nicolas Winding Refn also knows). And there’s Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 work Lost in La Mancha, which detailed Terry Gilliam’s (ironically?) Sisyphean efforts to film an adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

In both instances, the films in question were (eventually) made—and released to some acclaim (one considerably more than the other)—but as The Ghost of Peter Sellers shows, the shooting of Ghost in the Noonday Sun was such an epic boondoggle that the unfinished film sat unreleased for years and was much later released to no acclaim whatsoever.

The uphill battle to make his never-released horror movie Northwestern made indie filmmaker Mark Borshadt an unlikely filmmaking hero thanks to the breakout success of Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie. Like with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, the efforts to make a film proved more interesting than the film being made.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in ‘The Big Picture’ (1989).

There are several narrative films of note that have successfully captured the specific pandemonium of filmmaking. Richard Rush’s 1980 cult classic The Stunt Man follows a fugitive who stumbles his way into the titular job on a big chaotic Hollywood production (Peter O’Toole plays the Machiavellian director), while Christopher Guest’s under-appreciated 1989 comedy The Big Picture stars Kevin Bacon as a hot young director who is roughed up by the Hollywood machine. It’s a notable and often overlooked antecedent to The Player, and like the Robert Altman classic, is more about ‘the business’ overall than the specifics of filmmaking, although in both cases Hollywood proves itself analogically appropriate.

Playwright, writer and director David Mamet’s own filmmaking experiences obviously inform his 2000 comedy State and Main, in which a Hollywood production takes over and smothers a small town with its singular thinking. It’s not hard to imagine Mamet processing his own filmmaking trauma in State and Main, just as the Coen brothers famously did in Barton Fink, their ode to writer’s block supposedly inspired by the difficulty they had penning the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing.

Charlie Kaufman channeled his own creative struggles into the screenplay for the 2002 masterpiece Adaptation, then built on those themes with his wildly ambitious 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, whose more maddening aspects arguably capture the irrational nightmare that is filmmaking better than any film directly ‘about’ filmmaking.

With her 2018 documentary Shirkers, writer Sandi Tan gained some measure of closure regarding an indie film she had starred in and written in her home country of Singapore, in 1992. The documentary (which shares its name with the original movie) has her revisiting the footage from the never-released film, which was stolen (!) 25 years previously by its director—and Tan’s filmmaking mentor—George Cardona.

Back to Peter Medak. In The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival in 2018 and has just had its virtual screening release, we learn that Hungarian-born Medak was a rising directing star in the early 1970s in London, hot off the Oscar-nominated Peter O’Toole film The Ruling Class. Unable to resist an offer to work with Peter Sellers, then comedy’s reigning superstar—mostly thanks to Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films—Medak set about shooting a treasure-hunting pirate film on the island nation of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

In addition to the usual production problems associated with shooting on boats, Medak had to contend with the titanically and infamously fickle Sellers, who quickly turned on him and attempted to get him fired. Sellers also antagonized the other actors, then, after failing to get the production shut down, brought in his friend and longtime creative collaborator Spike Milligan to try and salvage the film, but things kept going wrong, leaving Ghost in the Noonday Sun unfinished and Medak with the blame for the production’s troubles.

Director Peter Medak with Peter Sellers (as Dick Scratcher) and Spike Milligan (as Bill Bombay) on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’, finally released in 1984.

Although Medak’s career recovered, he has clearly been carrying around a lot of hurt associated with the experience, and it’s remarkable watching him work through that on screen by revisiting Cyprus, telling the story of the shoot, and talking to some of the people involved. Sellers (who died in 1980) looms large over the film, but it also has interesting content surrounding the great Spike Milligan, who died in 2002.

Why did you decide to revisit this experience with a documentary? Peter Medak: Because it’s been haunting me for all these years. Because it should’ve been a really very successful film and I was blamed for everything going wrong, when in fact it had nothing to do with me. It was due to Peter’s changing mind and state of mind, and all kinds of things had physically gone wrong on the film. It was always easiest to blame the director for everything and my career at the time was very high up after [The] Ruling Class and this should’ve been the icing on the cake and it wasn’t.

It really bothered me for many years afterwards, even though I went on working. I was asked to do it by the producer of the documentary and I originally said “It’s the last thing I want to do”, because it would mean I would have to go back to Cyprus where I shot the original movie and go on the water, and I never want anything to do with water anymore because a lot of the disasters on the film, production-wise, were all connected with shooting at sea, which is totally impossible to do. Then I thought: well, you know, I should just do it and try to explain what happened on the film. And because some of the explanations were funnier scenes than the original film. So that’s why I did it.

Peter Medak fishing for answers in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

In the documentary, you talk about needing to free yourself from the experience by making this film. Do you feel like you achieved that? Well, I think I did because I had a wonderful time doing it. A very sad time at the same time because when you go back to places where you shot 45 years before, it creates a very strange kind of illusion inside your mind, your heart and everything of the time. And having been there then and then being there again, it’s a very strange kind of a supernatural feeling in a way. It felt like you have died and your ghost is actually revisiting all these things you know. I called it The Ghost of Peter Sellers because it sounds good and also because the original film was called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, and this ghostly feeling of mine of revisiting that island after all these years, it’s a very, very strange feeling and somehow the film captures that emotionally.

Do you feel like the large distance from the shoot was necessary to be able to revisit it? It’s not that I thought about it every day of my life, but I talked about it to all the people who I worked with in my following career. When I was doing Romeo Is Bleeding with Gary Oldman, my darling Gary said to me one day, “You know, we are crazy, what we should do is make a movie about your movie, but I don’t want to play Peter Sellers, I want to play you, with your Hungarian, broken-English accent.” We had a script written but we never did it. That was a good 25 years ago.

Peter Medak in front of a promotional poster for ‘Zorro, The Gay Blade’, his 1981 film starring George Hamilton and Lauren Hutton.

So you had considered doing a scripted version of it? Yeah, but I don’t know quite what we would’ve done. I said to Gary at the time: “I never want to go on a boat again”, and so I thought in my mind that the scenes would start each day [with] the characters getting off the pirate ship and they come ashore—that’s where the scenes would begin. I’m sure we would’ve done something quite wonderful, and it would’ve maybe explained the things the [documentary is] trying to explain because I guess that’s what has unconsciously driven me. Because [for the documentary], we didn’t write one word of it, I just completely did it out of instinct. Where I want to shoot, what I want to shoot, and how we should go from here to there. I loved it, so going back on to it was quite easy. It did show me actually what a wonderful medium it is, documentary, because you can do anything with it. It’s a much freer form than scripted movies. Which is rigid. And this is liquid.

Did you have any other documentaries about filmmaking in mind when you went into this? Not really. I knew Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, because I love Terry and I love his films and we know each other and knew each other. Terry was very fortunate, because he had so much trouble before on Baron Munchausen, that he decided to have a documentary film crew filming the whole process, so he had the material available, which allowed him to make his film. I said to him after [a screening], “You were lucky because you didn’t make the movie. I had to suffer through 90-something days of shooting with Peter [Sellers].” But of course since then, Terry made the film, and he made something slightly different than what he was originally gonna do.

Peter Medak retraces his steps in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

Did any of your subsequent films feel nearly as difficult? Most movies are very difficult to make, and always when you anticipate problems, they never seem to happen. When I did The Changeling, everybody said “George C. Scott is very, very difficult to work with” and he was an absolute angel with me and [it was] the easiest thing to do. It was a wonderful ghost story. I’m very proud of that film. It will live forever. All movies are like your kids, your own children, because you put so much emotion, so much of your soul. That’s what I’m saying to [Ghost in the Noonday Sun executive producer] John Heyman [in The Ghost of Peter Sellers]: the director’s viewpoint is completely different from the producer’s because every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie. Because of that it becomes an incredibly personal journey when you put your absolute soul on the line. When it gets criticized or not accepted or whatever, one takes it very personally because the whole thing came from a very personal experience, even though the subject may be nothing to do with you.

Peter Sellers on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’.

Even within the canon of famously difficult performers, Peter Sellers is notorious. How would you describe him to a modern audience? Well he was a genius, there’s no question about it. But he was a manic-depressive person. And it’s a generalization, but most of the great comics are manic-depressive. And he changes his mind all the time. One minute, he loves you, next minute, he hates you. One minute he loves the subject, next minute he doesn’t wanna do it, he wants to get out and all that. So it is very up and down. When you’re running film with a crew of 150 people, and boats on the sea, and weather’s changing and everything, you can’t have that, because you fall behind the schedule and things go wrong.

At one point very early on, all he wanted to do was get off the movie. And then he did everything he [could] to sabotage the film so the film would close down and he wouldn’t have to finish it. But it didn’t just happen on my film, it happened with all his biggest successes, including the Pink Panther movies. Because if you look into Blake Edwards, each one was an absolute nightmare for the director and for the film company, United Artists. And I was gonna include that in the documentary but it had nothing to do with the Ghost in the Noonday Sun so I didn’t. I actually shot some scenes with one of the executives from United Artists at that time who had to deal with the insanity of Peter and also Blake Edwards. I say ‘insanity’; I didn’t want to say it too much in the documentary because I love Peter, even today. And it’s wrong for me to accuse him of those things because it sounds like I’m excusing myself. Peter was crazy. There’s no other way one can describe it. Touched by God. And so was Spike Milligan. But Spike had the love of goodness. Peter had kind of a nasty streak on him when he turned on people.

There’s a moment in the documentary where you suggest that Spike Milligan is more influential than he gets credit for. Do you think he’s under-appreciated? Totally. Totally. Totally. Because his talent was absolutely, monumentally genius. I always say this, but Spike basically created Peter Sellers through [legendary BBC radio programme] The Goon Show. And he also gave him all those various characters and developed those voices for him. It’s all in The Goon Show. The Monty Pythons, they were inspired by The Goon Show and they made it into television. Not story wise, but style wise. That kind of zany, insane humor. Spike was a total genius. Not that Peter wasn’t, but they stood together, completely overwhelmingly wonderfully insane. But Spike was quite something. He was incredibly human, he was incredibly gentle. And incredibly kind. Peter was incredibly combative. And he had that most incredible ego.

But all our lives come from our backgrounds and what our past was and where we come from, and Peter had a very sad upbringing and a very sad life and he was tremendously influenced by his mother. When his mother passed away, he kept on talking to her for ten years. When he came to Cyprus to make the movie, he arrived with big blow-up [photos] of Liza Minnelli—who he’d just broken up with a week before—and his mum. And it sounds terrible when one says it, but psychologically, some of the answers are there. But at the same time, both Peter and Spike, I can’t tell you what a gift it was… I mean the reason I did the film is: who could give up the chance of actually working with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan? It doesn’t matter what the fucking script is, you know? It was a wonderful thing and I would do it all over again tomorrow.

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Our Showdown on films within films

You often draw your films from your personal experiences and you’ve described Waves as autobiographical. Can you go into some detail about which life experiences fed into this film? Trey Edward Shults: Where to start? In broad strokes, I was a wrestler and tore my shoulder in the same way as Tyler. The relationships between Tyler and Alexis and also Emily and Luke are inspired by my girlfriend and [me] in the good moments, bad moments, and everything in between. Their parents are inspired by my parents. I live in Florida, my cat’s in the movie. It is incredibly personal, but I had a huge collaboration with Kelvin, and then as more actors came on it got more collaborative, so it really started from this personal place and grew out of that.

How do you reconcile your relationship to your own suffering with the fact it’s become your livelihood and commodity? It’s very strange. When we recreated events in Missouri I think that was the furthest I’ve ever gone. That shoot was an all-consuming dread and I broke down, it was very hard. I would question: “Is this healthy? Is this right?”, but I came out the other side happy I did it. It was cathartic. My mom and my step-dad are therapists and I would be a total mess without them, though I’m not in therapy right now. Working through these movies is a bit of therapy.

I’m trying to make personal things that I hope connect with other people, especially this movie. Going through life and getting to the other side of it and having perspective informed me a lot. Whether it’s just tonally or pacing-wise, I wanted the film to spiritually feel that way.

The film’s photography is remarkable, especially the first act, when you have your fullest frame. Can you take us inside how you executed some of those spinning 360-degree shots? For the car shots we took out the middle console of the truck and put a slider that went from the backseat to the front. Basically, the dolly grip and I were crammed down hiding behind the car seats and the grip pushed the camera from the back to the front. Drew [Daniels, the director of photography] was in the car behind us with a remote, so he’s operating the spinning and I have a monitor in the back. That way I could talk to the kids in the car and I also had a walkie so I could talk to Drew.

A lot of the dynamic camera stuff was a case-by-case scenario, sometimes it was just running behind our steadicam operator or just hiding and letting them go and play. We wanted the camera to be purely motivated by where our main character’s emotional state of mind was, so it’s all coming from them, but then we also wanted to figure out the technical shit and make it feel to the actors that the camera disappeared and we’re not even there. So it was an interesting balance getting there. It’s a second skin for us and we know exactly what we’re after visually, but let’s disappear and let the kids play and we’ll adapt to them.

Since our name is ‘Letterboxd’, I feel obligated to ask you an aspect-ratio question. Can you share with us how you built this intuition to change at will—did you have films you saw that you feel did this well? That’s a good question, because this one really felt like it was building off what I did with Krisha and pushing it further. I do remember The Grand Budapest Hotel came out right before I started Krisha and it had the three aspect ratios to separate [its] time periods, which was really cool to me. I think I got really excited about using aspect ratio to echo the character’s state of mind. That was the goal with that, especially for Tyler’s trajectory.

The soundtrack is getting some acclaim. Do you have any songs you wanted to fit in but couldn’t find the room, or couldn’t clear the rights for? I realized there were so many songs I wanted in it, but the movie told you what works. If you tried to force it on, it didn’t work. It started with the writing and it worked its way organically. The final soundtrack is pretty close to what was in the script though I think a few changed along the way. We got incredibly lucky that we got everything we wanted. I don’t know how we did it. It was a long process and our last song didn’t even clear until after Telluride and Toronto.

Trey Edward Shults and Sterling K. Brown on the set of ‘Waves’. / Photo: Monica Lek

There are shades of Chungking Express, Magnolia and Moonlight in the film’s DNA. What were some other films you watched or recommended to your cast and crew as preparation? Funny thing is we didn’t do a lot of movie-watching for preparation. Drew and I lived in the same house so we’d always have a movie on. We were watching The Story of Film a lot—the giant anthology series and study of the history of cinema, incredible. What we watched would totally range, it could be things like Ordinary People and Raging Bull, to The Tree of Life and I Am Cuba, to Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love. We would take inspiration from anything, even a film like Yi Yi. It’s a completely different cinematic approach.

Yi Yi might just be the best film about family, so it’s a good start (Lulu Wang also mentioned it in our recent chat with her about The Farewell). That’s the thing exactly: even though Waves is made in such a different way, I think spiritually they’re sprawling tales of family. That’s one of my favorite movies. For the cast, we didn’t actually talk about movies that much. It was more about Florida, music and the character dynamics and all that good stuff.

Which movie scene makes you cry the hardest? One that just popped in my head is Dancer in the Dark. When Björk escapes in her head doing these musical numbers and it leads to the end, to the most devastating thing possible, it broke me. That movie’s rough, man. That’s not one I could watch and have good cries or something. I can’t rewatch it because it’s utterly traumatizing. I was probably crying for hours after it, I felt dead.

Which film makes you laugh the hardest? The most recent film that made me laugh the hardest is What We Do in the Shadows. I saw it for the first time on an airplane sitting next to a stranger and I think they thought something was wrong with me. Then I got home to Florida and showed it to my girlfriend, and her brother came home and we watched it again. It never got old.

Who was the most relatable coming-of-age film character for you? It’s hard because when I was a teen I was obsessed with sports and then it was music. I’m trying to think who I related to the most. Man, I don’t know. Nothing is coming to mind. Shocking.

What film do you wish you made? I’ll go with There Will Be Blood. It’s the first film that popped in my head.

What mind-fuck movies changed you for life and why? There were three that I saw pretty close together at a young age: Boogie Nights, A Clockwork Orange and Raging Bull. I had a digital cable box in my room, so I would sneak and watch a lot of things that my parents didn’t know I was watching. They just rocked my world. Until that point it was all Aliens and Terminator and every big action movie, so then when I saw those films it was like “this is what movies can be! What the hell is this?”.

I remember with Raging Bull I didn’t actually enjoy it. I was like, “This isn’t Rocky but I can’t stop watching.” It’s like a trainwreck and I’m fascinated but I don’t know if I like it, then I was obsessed with it and it’s one of my favorite movies now. Boogie Nights and A Clockwork Orange felt like a bigger vision was at work. It wasn’t just something made out in the ether, it was a specific singular vision and I cannot stop looking at it.

Sterling K. Brown in ‘Waves’.

What’s the most overlooked movie from A24? Shoot, I wish I could look at the catalogue right now. I’m just gonna go with The Spectacular Now because I just watched it again on the airplane and I thought it was really beautiful. It’s a good one, man.

Lastly, it’s time for best-of-decade lists. What’s the greatest film of the 2010s? When we interviewed Robert Eggers, Waves was his first choice. Shut up, come on! Oh my god, Rob’s the best. I will say that The Lighthouse is my favorite film of the year, without a doubt. I’m obsessed with it. I could gush about him for hours. He’s not just one of the greatest young filmmakers, he’s one of the great filmmakers working now. Honestly though, for my decade number one I gotta go with The Tree of Life. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time so I would put that at number one, and then The Lighthouse is close to it.