The Best Movies About Filmmakers, and ‘Boorman and the Devil’

The Big Picture

Sean Fennessey and Tracy Letts explore the documentary 'Boorman and the Devil,' which examines director John Boorman's controversial sequel,

Key takeaways

• The documentary 'Boaryman and the Devil' focuses on a high-budget film failure rather than a traditional success.
• John Boorman's career is defined by visually striking, idiosyncratic works like Deliverance and Zardoz.

Main topics

• Boorman and the Devil documentary
• John Boorman's filmography

Notable quotes

I think that artists should be judged on their successes and not their failures.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep, cinephile-centric look at how artistic am

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Last week, we shared the exciting news that we're coming to San Francisco next month for a live show on October 21st. And you were all just as excited as us because you sold that out. So we figured we'd make the most of our time in the Bay Area and screen some movies while we're there. You Speaker 2 (0:19) can join us at the Balboa Theater on Tuesday, October 20th at 6 p.m. for a double feature. We'll be screening the original Halloween. and then one of my favorites, Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, and discussing both movies in between. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, September 24th, at noon Pacific, at balboamovies.com. Again, we'll be screening and discussing Halloween and Halloween 3 on Tuesday, October 20th, at the Balboa in San Francisco. Tickets go on sale September 24th at noon Pacific. More information will be at balboamovies.com soon. We Speaker 1 (0:52) hope to see you there. Speaker 2 (1:05) I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is the Big Picture A Conversation show about Pazuzu, that voodoo that you do so well. On today's episode, Tracy Letts and I will discuss the new documentary, Borman and the Devil, which tells the fascinating tale of director John Borman and his misbegotten exorcist sequel, The Heretic, which also serves as a portrait of an uncompromising and utterly unique artist. It's one of my favorite kinds of documentaries and a rich topic for both of us. Then Tracy and I will dig into other docs and other films that explore the life and work of film directors. We'll jump into it right after this. This episode is presented by State Farm. You know the feeling. Long day, good meal, you finally sit down, and now you're just staring at your screen. Slasher, rom-com, period drama, psychological thriller. But some decisions don't have to be that hard. State Farm is here to help. Like when you choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Bundling, just another way to save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Speaker 2 (2:10) Okay, Letts, you're here. Yeah. What's up? Hey, how you doing? Welcome back. Nice to be back. We saw each other at the Telluride Film Festival. We did. I was a civilian there. You were a celebrated artist. You were a man being fetid. Well, Speaker 3 (2:24) I Speaker 2 (2:24) was with my wife who was being fetid. Speaker 3 (2:28) What were you being fetid for? A movie that Carrie and I made called The Liberation, which had its premiere at Telluride. Speaker 2 (2:37) And was that the number one thing that you were flagged down in the street about while you were at Telluride? Speaker 3 (2:42) No. The number one thing I was flagged down in the street about was being third chair on this podcast. Many people, Speaker 2 (2:49) many, many more people than I can. Was it mostly men? Were there women involved in this as well? Men and women. No kidding. Yeah. What age range are we talking about here? Speaker 3 (2:59) Mostly younger Speaker 2 (3:00) than me. Okay. Maybe all younger than me. Okay. How does it feel to be discovered for this and not all of the actual good work you've done? It feels just. Speaker 3 (3:10) Okay. Speaker 2 (3:11) We have an interesting assignment today. Speaker 3 (3:13) Yeah. Speaker 2 (3:13) And, you know, you're out here because we have a long in the works Gene Hackman Hall of Fame episode coming soon. Yeah. But we wanted to do something else. And this documentary hit the festival scene and has been much talked about in the cinephile worlds for a while. But Borman and the Devil is finally out in the world. It's, I think, spreading across the country as we speak. Oh, I see. I wasn't Speaker 3 (3:34) sure of the release. Speaker 2 (3:34) It opened on Labor Day weekend, and I think it is going from city to city. David Kittredge directed this movie. And as I said, it's a newish kind of documentary about a film where they're exploring not just the life and work of an artist, but specifically a movie that is not a great big fat success. And a movie like this, I think, would have been inconceivable 40 years ago. Why would you spend... lots of money and time and effort and the free moments of artists talking about something that most people don't like and isn't a success. So let's start with The Exorcist 2. Okay, just because I want to know, did you see it when it was released? What was your relationship to it before you watched this movie? What do you make of there being an entire documentary about a movie that most people don't care for? Speaker 3 (4:25) I avoided Exorcist 2 for a long time. I remember my older brother and friends going to see it in movie theaters. And I remember him coming back from seeing it and saying, that's the worst goddamn thing I've ever seen. He couldn't believe it. I remember him narrating portions of the movie to me. And like, would you believe that he just found it so ridiculous? Only in the last few years did I realize that my brother had never seen The Exorcist. Had missed The Exorcist and only watched The Exorcist five or six years ago and was blown away. It was like I had no, he had avoided it after Exorcist 2, assuming that Exorcist 2 was just, you know, the continuation of more shit from The Exorcist 1. And then he went back and he watched The Exorcist and he's like, that's a. Freaking masterpiece. How have I gone this long without seeing it? What would compel you to go see The Exorcist 2 having not seen The Exorcist? Probably just going out with buddies. I mean, high school or whatever. Okay. And I had a kind of reverse thing where I saw The Exorcist early in film-going life and had avoided The Exorcist 2 for most of my life because of... My brother's reaction to it. I also recall, you know, the MedVeds had a book about turkeys, about famous Hollywood bombs. And I remember this book. And I think The Exorcist 2 was maybe second all time on their list to Plan 9 from Outer Space. Wow. And some... Actually, very funny writing about the movie. Just what a ridiculous venture Exorcist 2 was. So I only watched Exorcist 2 for the first time in preparation for this podcast. I had never seen it before. Wow. Speaker 2 (6:17) So Speaker 3 (6:17) I come to it very Speaker 2 (6:18) fresh. That's really interesting. I definitely knew that it was a turkey, and I probably didn't see it until, I don't know, 15 years ago, kind of filling out the slate of, whoa, what filmmaker, what's their filmography, what are these unusual movies in history? It's not the kind of thing that they show you in film class. It's not the kind of thing that was prominently displayed in your local video store because it had such a bad reputation. But we're in this time now where, and we've talked about this with a lot of our physical media episodes, films that were considered unimportant or even disastrous now have a comfortable home in the future of cinephilia. Like, everything is revived. Everything is reclaimed. And this one is such an interesting example of that because you've got a lot of really... decorated, thoughtful people working on this movie. This is not Plan 9 from Outer Space. That's right. This is not some junky exploitation movie. This is a big-time Warner Brothers film that costs a lot of money with a lot of serious people connected to it. I do remember watching it 15 years ago and not liking it and not getting it and maybe understanding and appreciating some of its ambition, but probably feeling in my heart the same thing that your brother or maybe at least your brother's friends who saw the original Exorcist felt, which is this isn't the Exorcist. Like, this has nothing to do really other than Linda Blair with what I enjoyed about the first film. Yeah. But... The movie poses this really interesting idea, which is should all sequels, should all connective art just gratify the same impulses that the original gave us? How do you think about that? Speaker 3 (7:51) I don't know that there's any hard and fast rule about it. We should be able to do whatever the hell we want to do. I think there is something kind of artistically bankrupt about revisiting a thing. Does the story really need continuation? The end of The Godfather kind of tells us what's going to happen to Michael. Now, Godfather 2 gives us what does happen to Michael, but we understand at the end of Godfather from a character perspective. He's already lost at the end of the Godfather. He's already lost to the dark side. The interesting part of Godfather Part 2 from a story perspective is Vito's story, right? The prequel part of Godfather Part 2. So I think usually... And we'll talk more about Mr. Friedkin because, of course, he made the original Exorcist and he made the original French Connection, which we're going to talk about French Connection 1 and 2 on our Hackman pod. I think that Mr. Friedkin considered the idea of a sequel completely bankrupt, just completely, just a soulless money grab. Speaker 3 (9:16) Just purely for just artists saying, come on, we can make some more money off of this. That's the reason to do this. So do you ever need to continue the story? Now, Horman says in the documentary, I wasn't looking to continue the story. I didn't want to continue the story. He didn't even want to call it Exorcist 2, right? That was a late-breaking marketing decision to even call it Exorcist 2. Speaker 2 (9:42) It's just kind of strange for that to have been late-breaking. Like, you'd imagine that that was part of the deal from sign-on, right? I would think Speaker 3 (9:49) that somebody at Warner Brothers was going, come on, you know when this comes out. Yeah, we're going to call this the heretic? It's going to be called Speaker 2 (9:55) Exorcist 2. That's Speaker 3 (9:55) just Speaker 2 (9:55) not good business. Yeah, right. But it's interesting because Borman was approached to direct the original Exorcist, right? And then he turned it down, or so he says. And he turned it down at a really interesting time in his career where he, let's talk about him. Because we've not had reason to really discuss his work at all, I don't think, on this show. and he's a really, really interesting filmmaker who's probably best known for Deliverance, which is the film that sort of more or less put him on the map. He made some films in England in the 60s. He made a film with Dave Clark Five. He very memorably made Point Blank, which kind of redefines a certain kind of noir crime movie. It adds a layer of kind of abstraction and artistic style to it. But Deliverance is like... You can kind of do whatever you want after that. He's approached him. Blank check. A blank check, truly. Yeah. And he cashes his check right away on Zardoz. Yeah. Which, you know, Zardoz remains one of my physical media grails. I still don't have a copy of Zardoz. Speaker 3 (10:55) Really? Speaker 2 (10:56) Yeah. And there's a Twilight Time and an Arrow edition, and they're both like $500 on eBay. They are. That's news to me. I Speaker 3 (11:03) bought that Zardoz hot off the presses from Arrow. It's very good. Yeah, I Speaker 2 (11:07) wish I had it. If you've not seen Zardoz, I would encourage people to check out. Very unusual movie. Actually kind of puts the heretic to shame in terms of its oddity and strangeness. And so Sean Connery's science fiction fantasia of sorts about two sort of like. warring tribes and which side Connery's character will land on. He's memorably wearing a mankini in the film, looking quite strong. Speaker 2 (11:35) He looks thick, doesn't he? In more ways Speaker 3 (11:37) than Speaker 2 (11:37) one. And a bizarre movie that was not a huge success, though it was quite memorable in terms of cult classics. And you'd think that after something like that happened that he would be asked to take a step back from commercial cinema. But John Calley from Warner Brothers sought him out to make The Exorcist 2. And what he's chosen to do with it is so strange. How would you describe The Exorcist 2 in terms of its relationship to the first film? Speaker 3 (12:06) Well, it's hard to, I mean, I think it is awful. I just do think it's an awful, awful film. It does not work. It doesn't work. Speaker 3 (12:17) First and foremost, it's not scary. There's not a moment in it that is genuinely frightening or even suspenseful, really. It is not a scary film. Speaker 2 (12:29) And coming on the heels of the original, which I think has a claim for scariest film ever made. Speaker 3 (12:34) Yeah, I mean, so there is a bit of hubris there on Mr. Borman's part to think, I'm going to make a sequel to the scariest movie. ever made and there's not going to be anything scary in it. Speaker 1 (12:47) And Speaker 3 (12:47) I'm going to be able to get away with that. I don't know why anybody thought they were going to be able to get away with that. I don't know why anybody would look at the script on the page and think, oh, well, that's scary. That gives me a shiver. It doesn't. It's just not scary. And it just doesn't work. Speaker 3 (13:06) Richard Burton is, I don't know what he's doing. I mean, the documentary reveals that he maybe was not completely, maybe he was just cashing a paycheck and just kind of playing the Burton hits and relying on his voice to get him through. But it's a pretty, it's Speaker 2 (13:24) a Speaker 3 (13:24) pretty dreadful Speaker 2 (13:25) performance. Speaker 3 (13:26) He's terrible. Speaker 2 (13:26) Yes. When will you enter your Burton era? Oh, I'm there, baby. Speaker 2 (13:31) I'm there. I don't think so. Speaker 3 (13:33) Not like this. He was, you know, he was a very severe alcoholic, and he was drinking to great excess while they were making this film. And it feels like it, and not in a way that is firing up his creative imagination, just in a way that's making him very sodden and sweaty. And just, it's... He's not a compelling lead Speaker 2 (14:00) for this film. No, he seems somewhat checked out during much of the movie, which is a movie that you probably shouldn't be checked out in because it is meant to be this kind of ecstatic intellectual exploration of some ideas that maybe are underneath The Exorcist. And Borman's whole pitch on the film was the original film is this sort of bleak and destitute. exploration of like a loss of faith and like a, you know, the depravity in our culture and a lot of other rich ideas. And this movie is meant to be more hopeful and more about transcendence and the flip side of the Exorcist Speaker 3 (14:32) story. He even says at some point that the Exorcist, the original is about torturing a child, which is just ridiculous. That's not what the Exorcist is about. The fact is that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Borman just had such wildly different Speaker 3 (14:49) Just a different approach to, well, different things that interested them, right? I mean, one of the things that's so terrifying about The Exorcist is it's presented in this, well, Mr. Friedkin was a documentarian first and foremost, so it is intensely realistic. Everybody is playing the absolute realism of this. That's why the scenes at the doctor's office, you always forget about this before you watch The Exorcist. When she goes, she does what any mother would Speaker 2 (15:20) do. I'm Speaker 3 (15:21) going to run every possible physical test to see what's going on with my daughter. And all of that is presented with great realism, heavily researched. Billy researched the hell out of everything. He would have talked to all of the doctors who were running those tests. What are you looking for? What are you trying to find? Speaker 2 (15:40) I'm haunted by it. Is it like the needle in the back during the spinal tap is just awful? Yeah. Speaker 3 (15:45) And so what happens when something supernatural occurs against this extremely realistic backdrop? It's scary as hell. Borman isn't interested. That's not his. That's not his aesthetic at all. He's interested in flights of fantasy. He's interested in symbols. Speaker 2 (16:12) There's deep symbology in Zardoz, and he's interested in legend. Yeah, myth, transcendence, all this stuff. All this stuff. And all of his movies have that. Even Deliverance, which is a fairly boots-on-the-ground movie for him, is still about lost masculinity, the transition of a generation. big, big thematic ideas that are not meant to be realistic, that are meant to be very elevated, which I could kind of see the thinking of the executives who wanted to hire him for that. But he brings such a specific point of view, and he seems pretty unwavering about the kind of movie that he wants to make. And it's just all the wrong movie for The Exorcist. But is there a world where you can dispense with that idea? Because the movie sort of attempts, the documentary sort of attempts to interrogate this. Can we just throw the exorcist out? And can we look at the heretic as its own thing, as its own idea, as its own experiment? There are a lot of incredible kind of physical filmmaking strategies in this movie that are really interesting to learn about. The ghost glass, for example, is one of them that is explored. You know, the synchronizer and the way that that's used in the movie. Like, can you find value in these other things, even though... it seems like a total rejection of an all-time classic that people still love to this day in the original Exorcist movie. Speaker 3 (17:31) So let's pretend The Exorcist was never made. There is no movie called The Exorcist. There's only The Heretic. It's still a terrible movie. And the synchronizer still looks fucking stupid. It still looks... Looks like a tape recorder Speaker 2 (17:48) with a light on it. It Speaker 3 (17:49) still looks really stupid. Speaker 3 (17:52) The ghost glass, it's a fine technique, and I understand it was a sophisticated use of it, as the documentary shows us, but it's not used well. I mean, it's not used to good—it's not impactful. And in fact, it looks, again, kind of stupid, kind of cheesy. It just doesn't work. Speaker 3 (18:16) There are so many things about this movie that just don't work. James Earl Jones just doesn't work. There's imagery in here that's like, what am I looking at? What were they thinking? What did they think the impact on an audience was going to be? Speaker 2 (18:35) What about the bug perspective? Speaker 3 (18:37) Look, I like the idea of we're trying to get at something about the hive mind. Speaker 3 (18:45) A locust could be, you know, scary, but the way it's shot is not scary. It's a little cheesy. I mean, let's face it, it just doesn't work. I will say I was quite struck by the influence Exorcist 2 must have had on Italian horror. There's a whole world of Italian horror that seems to borrow pretty heavily from this movie, from Exorcist 2. Well, Speaker 2 (19:10) what Speaker 3 (19:10) specifically Speaker 2 (19:10) are you thinking of? Speaker 3 (19:11) Well, I'm thinking about the climax of Exorcist 2 primarily. Speaker 3 (19:16) The the the the kind of grand operatic gestures of the house breaking apart and the plagues of locusts and screaming into the wind, which happens a lot Speaker 2 (19:30) at Speaker 3 (19:30) the end of the film. Fulci Speaker 2 (19:30) and the later Argento movies. The Argento mother Speaker 3 (19:34) trilogy, right? And all that kind of stuff. It's almost like these Italian filmmakers are horror nerds, and they went to the video store, and Exorcist was checked out. So they just checked out Exorcist 2 and said, Speaker 2 (19:45) that's it. That's the shit. That's what we want to do. It's really funny. There's definitely something to that. And it's, that's a little ironic because one of the reasons why this movie was made and the documentary does a nice job of showing you this is that in the aftermath of the exorcist, there were all these copycats, you know, like Abby, like Mario, Baba's Lisa and the devil movies that are effectively just remaking in a different milieu, the exorcist. Yeah. And so Warner brothers realizes like, shoot, we gotta, we gotta get on the gravy train here where there's, there's money on the floor. The one thing that struck me, and I wish Callie was alive to talk about this, is it just seemed like they left Borman alone. It doesn't seem like anybody fucked with him on this movie. Right. Which is maybe just a product of an utterly unique moment in movie history where we are at the tail end, really, of this time where a major auteur, a big kind of ideas filmmaker, has been given a large budget on property that is very valuable. And not been messed with. And this film is, you know, it's 77. It comes out right around the same time as Star Wars. Right. Right around the same time as Sorcerer, another famous, you know, bomb at the box office that Friedkin makes that year. There's this great segment in the documentary where, shoot, Jeff Canu, the film director who was working as a trailer editor at the time, said he cut both the trailer for The Heretic. and Sorcerer at the same time, and they would run next to each other and neither movie worked. But I don't know that this could ever happen again, this specifically. I think that there can be bad sequels. I think that there can be sequels that go way far afield of the original intention. In fact, The Exorcist is, as a franchise, is the home of one of the more interesting sequel stories ever, where you've got an Exorcist prequel that was directed by two different men in Paul Schrader and Rennie Harlan some 25 years later. But this specifically. Where you've got what otherwise seems like a very classy movie that has a ton of money behind it. And no one came to the set and said, what the fuck are you doing? Well, it was Speaker 3 (21:52) probably, you know, the documentary talks a bit about some of the other Hollywood disasters in which directors were really given free reign and given a lot of money. And some of them went way over time and some of them went way over budget. Speaker 3 (22:12) right after Heaven's Gate, which we acknowledge is kind of the end of new Hollywood, all of that starts getting pulled back and it really becomes the time of the executive and of the studio. And as far as I'm concerned, it's why 80s and 90s filmmaking, studio filmmaking starts to go in the shitter because you can watch some of those movies from that period and go, that's not a filmmaker making that decision. That's a studio note. That's why that movie is ending that way in a way that doesn't make any sense. That's just a studio note. Because I think you're right. I think they weren't paying attention to what Borman was doing. Because I think they thought, we've got the sequel to The Exorcist. It's directed by an acknowledged master. We've got Richard Burton. We've got the little girl from the first movie. We've got Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher. Speaker 2 (23:02) Yeah, Max von Sydow's back. Max von Sydow's back. James Earl Jones, Oscar nominee. James Speaker 3 (23:06) Earl Speaker 2 (23:06) Jones, Speaker 3 (23:06) take your hands off the wheel. He's got it. But you would think somebody is like looking at the dailies going. Speaker 2 (23:12) Well, this is, I bring this up with Amanda all the time on the show where I'm like, it's very easy to mock studio executives and say that these people don't know shit about art and they're ruining everything all the time. Sometimes you do need a person with a little bit of critical distance. And so there are good executives and bad executives, just like there are good directors and bad directors. And Callie is one of those people. I keep saying his name because he is widely seen as one of the. the good guys of the Hollywood story for the most part. I'm sure some people had bad experiences with him, but he had taste. He always brought on a lot of interesting projects. He was in a seat of power during a glory period for Hollywood filmmaking. And this just kind of seems like negligence to me. And it's really interesting because sometimes there's something wonderful about letting an artist just go full bore on something and spend the money and pursue their dreams. And I think that's ultimately what's at the heart of this documentary is. This is a person with a singular point of view. And he somehow, right time, right place, right work ethic, right collaborators, created this huge body of work that is so unusual. Borman in general, like, do you consider yourself a big fan of his work? Do you feel like? Oh, yeah, I Speaker 3 (24:21) really do. I mean, I think there's the top. Let's talk British filmmakers for a second. There's the foundational directors, Hitchcock, Michael Powell, David Lean. Speaker 3 (24:36) Chaplin, I mean, I suppose Chaplin and Kubrick. We're always going to have, even Hitchcock, we're always going to have a discussion. Are they English? Are they Speaker 2 (24:44) American? Carol Reed, there's a few more. Carol Reed, yeah. Speaker 3 (24:48) Those are the real foundational names. And then there's, I think, a second tier of just acknowledged great British directors. Mike Lee. Speaker 3 (25:03) Peter Borman, Peter, who am I thinking of? Give me a last name. Peter. Speaker 3 (25:11) Peter Yates. We've talked Speaker 2 (25:12) about him on this. Peter Speaker 3 (25:13) Yates. Yeah, Speaker 2 (25:14) yeah. Peter Yates, yeah. There's also like, Borman is coming right in the aftermath of the Tony Richardson, Carol Rice, like kitchen sink group of filmmakers. And he's right behind them. But he comes in, you know, in that Dave Clark 5 movie. grafting off of Beatlemania, you Speaker 3 (25:37) know? And Speaker 2 (25:37) he's a little bit more of a fine artist. And that movie is really interesting because it's basically a satire of what it is. You know, it's about how a band can kind of get sucked into the corporate machine, the media machine, and become kind of a parody of itself. So he's always got, there's always a little... extra spit, I would say, on every