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BARRETT: I want to say at the outset that I'll try not to duplicate questions and discussions the reader could find in your other interviews.
FRIEDKIN: Well, it's hard not to repeat yourself, there are only so many things one knows and can talk about.
BARRETT: I have a few things to talk about that I don't think you have previously discussed in an interview.
FRIEDKIN: Good. And I have a couple of new things I want to talk about.
BARRETT: -What are they?
FRIEDKIN: I'm sure they'll come out naturally during our conversation.
BARRETT: How is The Exorcist doing these days?
FRIEDKIN: The Exorcist is right now, after eight months of release, the fourth highest grossing film of all time. It will eventually be the all-time top grossing film. In America, so far, it has grossed sixty-five million in profits, and the estimate for the foreign market is another forty to fifty million.
BARRETT: What are you doing these days?
FRIEDKIN: I've worked on The Exorcist from beginning to end, and it took three years. The end was last week. I just finished doing all of the foreign versions of the film. I did the Italian. German, and French dubbed versions and supervised all the subtitled versions, too. Japanese . . . Spanish . . .
BARRETT: Sounds tedious.
FRIEDKIN: I don't mind when I see the checks! That kind of thing is the hard work of direction that people don't think about.
BARRETT: What's the most important part of direction?
FRIEDKIN : It changes at different points in the making of the film. Initially, the most important decision you make is to decide what story you're going to tell. There's no decision more important than that. Because the commercial cinema, in which I work, is a storytelling medium. It's not necessarily a medium for . . . well, it isn't at all a medium for documentary purposes, for educational purposes, for experimental purposes. It's strictly a medium of entertainment. And the other aspects of it, if there are any, come as a kind of by-product of the audience experiencing the story. So, the most important decision I make as a filmmaker is to decide what story I'm going to do. There's nothing more...