IT had been 38 years since William Friedkin last trained a camera on the boxy red-brick apartment complex on Stillwell Avenue, just a few blocks north of the Coney Island boardwalk in Brooklyn. But on a bright, windy day last spring, Mr. Friedkin was back with a crew — shooting high-definition video this time — to revisit the fictional residence of the New York police detective Popeye Doyle, the character played by Gene Hackman in Mr. Friedkin’s 1971 film, “The French Connection.”
“It looks like a prison,” Mr. Friedkin said, remembering why he selected this building to be Popeye’s home; that, and the fact that it adjoins the Bay 50th Street station of the Stillwell elevated train line, the jumping off point of possibly the most electrifying chase sequence in movie history.
The reason for Mr. Friedkin’s return was to shoot some supplementary material for the Blu-ray edition of “The French Connection,” which Fox Home Entertainment will release on Tuesday (along with its 1975 sequel, “French Connection II,” directed by John Frankenheimer). Walking his young crew members through the setup to the chase scene Mr. Friedkin effortlessly remembered exactly where he’d positioned his camera all those years ago. Here, he said, is where Popeye enters the courtyard; here’s where he takes cover behind a tree when a bullet meant for him strikes a bystander; here’s where he jumps a railing to climb the stairs to the roof; where he sees the sniper (Marcel Bozzuffi) already at ground level, running for a train.

At 73 Mr. Friedkin has hair touched with gray, and his trademark glasses are a bit bigger than they used to be, but the famous Friedkin intensity — his Hollywood nickname was Hurricane Billy — seems almost undiminished.
But “I was a different person then, really,” he insisted. “I was like Popeye, obsessed. All I cared about was getting the shot that I had in my head.”
Mr. Friedkin was a rising young filmmaker with four features (his unlikely debut was the 1967 Sonny and Cher vehicle, “Good Times”) and several documentaries to his credit when the producer Philip D’Antoni approached him about “The French Connection.” The story, essentially true, was derived from a book by Robin Moore that described how two narcotics detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, broke up a drug smuggling ring in the early 1960s, resulting in a record seizure: 120 pounds of heroin, worth more than $32 million.
“We felt, at the time, that the story had everything for a great police thriller except for one thing, and that was a great action scene,” Mr. Friedkin said. “Because it was mostly about an investigation that took place between 1960 and 1962, it was mostly listening in on wiretaps, following guys. There was no action. It was all police work.”
As the producer of “Bullitt” (1968), with its famous car chase through San Francisco, Mr. D’Antoni knew something about the importance of action. Joining Mr. Friedkin in Brooklyn for the DVD shoot, Mr. D’Antoni reminded him about a brainstorming session: “I remember meeting you at your apartment, and we went for a walk, maybe 50 blocks. And somewhere along the line an elevated train went by. You said, what about doing this? We got so excited we raced back to Ernest Tidyman, who was our screenwriter, and page by page we gave him our version of what the chase would be like. Later, when you shot it, it was changed three times again.”
The concept evolved into a parallel setup: as the sniper commandeered a train on the tracks above, forcing the motorman to drive at top speed, Popeye would hijack a passing car on the avenue below, and try to head the train off at the next station.
The car was driven by Bill Hickman, a veteran stunt coordinator who died in 1986. “Bill Hickman drove the car at 90 miles an hour,” Mr. Friedkin recalled. “I was in the back seat holding a camera over his shoulder, focused on the street ahead. There was a camera in the front seat looking out the window, and another one on the front bumper. The reason I handled the camera was because the camera operator and the director of photography both had families with children, and I didn’t.”
Riding in the shotgun seat was Randy Jurgensen, a police officer moonlighting as a technical advisor for the film. (Later Mr. Friedkin would base “Cruising” on one of Mr. Jurgensen’s cases.)
“We took off, with Billy telling Bill Hickman, ‘Give it to me, come on, you can do it, show me!’ ” Mr. Jurgensen said in an interview. “We had a police siren on top that people could hear, so that those who were able to get out of the way, could.”
There were no permits and no planning — just sheer nerve. “After 26 blocks, from Bay 50th to Bay 24th Street, I ran out of film, but I knew I had enough,” Mr. Friedkin said. “The fact that we never hurt anybody in the chase run, the way it was poised for disaster, this was a gift from the Movie God. Everything happened on the fly. We would never do this again. Nor should it ever be attempted in that way again.”
Even with the master shot in the can, it took a lot more shooting, spread out over five weeks, to get the close-ups of Mr. Hackman and the exterior views that Mr. Friedkin and his editor, Jerry Greenberg, would massage into the final sequence.
As brilliantly executed as the chase scene is, it would mean little without the grindingly realistic context that Mr. Friedkin provided in his story, set in a New York City on the verge of economic collapse. “I had made documentaries,” he said, “and I thought I could make a film out of the street.”
The evocative locations were chosen with the help of Fat Thomas, a downtown bartender and New York character who was a friend of Mr. Friedkin’s friend, the columnist Jimmy Breslin. For the dialogue Mr. Friedkin cocked an open ear to the contributions of his actors and, above all, his two technical advisors, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the detectives who had worked the original case.
“We didn’t really have a final script,” Mr. Friedkin recalled. “I would ask Eddie or Sonny, ‘What would you say here, when you come into the bar?’ Eddie would tell Hackman and me, and we’d shoot it.”
If anything, the movie reined in Mr. Egan’s outsize personality: Mr. Friedkin’s original choice for the role was Jackie Gleason. “But the studio wouldn’t do it with Gleason,” Mr. Friedkin said, “Though if you knew Eddie Egan, as an actor, you’d say Gleason. He was a big, heavyset Irishman, dark and brooding, but funny.”
Mr. Egan died in 1995, after enjoying a career playing variations on himself in movies (“Badge 373”) and television shows (“Police Story”). Mr. Grosso, the calmer, more conciliatory member of the team, continued to work as a technical advisor.
“On the last day of ‘The French Connection,’ ” he recalled, “Billy drove me over to the studio where Francis Ford Coppola was shooting ‘The Godfather,’ and convinced Francis to take me on.” Today he is a partner in a busy independent television production company, Grosso-Jacobson Communications.
Mr. Friedkin remains an active director of movies (“Bug,” 2006) and has developed a second career staging operas in the United States and Europe. (He recently withdrew from a La Scala adaptation of “An Inconvenient Truth,” citing problems with the libretto.)
But all these years later he still hasn’t finished tinkering with “The French Connection.” The Blu-ray release offers a new transfer from the original negative, for which Mr. Friedkin has devised a different color palette, inspired by experimental work the cinematographer Oswald Morris had performed on John Huston’s 1956 “Moby Dick.” The color now appears to be brushed on to what is essentially a high-grain, black-and-white image, giving the film a raw, chilly look.
“There’s a false impression that in the ’70s we had all this freedom to do whatever we wanted, to experiment,” Mr. Friedkin said, suggesting, in more colorful language, that the studio was on his case through the entire production. “They wanted to fire me three or four times. The budget was $1.5 million, and the film ended up costing $1.8. In those days that didn’t go down well.”
The complaints stopped when “The French Connection” won five Oscars — best picture, director, editing, actor and adapted screenplay — and grossed nearly $80 million worldwide, according to a 1972 Variety article. Just more gifts from the Movie God, who has never stopped smiling on this little cop thriller.
Da The New York Times, 22 Febbraio 2009