This is a very enjoyable documentary about how the cerebral British filmmaker John Boorman found himself directing one of the biggest Hollywood flops of the 1970s when he took on the sequel to The Exorcist. Acclaimed for stylish, taut dramas like Point Blank and Deliverance, Boorman had also shown that he was not afraid of exploring other genres with his sci-fi dystopia Zardoz. But satanic horror perhaps wasn’t the best fit for him and when Warner Bros (who had made a fortune with the original film) came looking for a director for The Heretic: Exorcist II, they came to regret their choice.
David Kittredge has talked in interviews about how Boorman and the Devil began as a labour of love, funded initially by family and friends and taking over eight years to make – two years of which were spent trying to cut the documentary down from its original 196 to 112 minutes. It still feels a little on the baggy side with occasional longueurs, but in the main it bounces along, enhanced by an excellent range of interviews from cast and crew as well as insights from critics and fellow filmmakers including Joe Dante.
Key to the documentary is a lengthy interview Boorman gave Kittredge in 2018, filled with technical detail about how the film was made but also suffused with bafflement that his vision and narrative ambitions should have gone so awry and rueful about what the whole experience did to his confidence as a filmmaker.
Linda Blair (pictured below), the original child star of The Exorcist is very outspoken about the experience of working on the original film and and the conditions she made before agreeing to the sequel. She’s also very funny about working with Richard Burton, at this stage in his career barely able to function on screen due to drink. Louise Fletcher, who had just won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gives a vivid and detailed account of all the tribulations on the Boorman set.
Doomed by a tight schedule enforced by substantial pre-sale funding that obliged Warner Bros to have the film ready to go into hundreds of cinemas across the world in under a year, the ambitiousness of a story that called for locations as diverse as African tribal lands and iconic New York and Washington landmarks, all led to huge budgetary overspends and a near-catastrophic extension of the schedule.
Boorman fell ill with a virus inhaled on a dirt-filled set standing in for an Ethiopian village and was rushed to intensive care and production shut down for weeks. Arguments about the ever-changing script and the ambiguous role of Boorman’s regular collaborator Rospo Pallenberg heightened the tension on set.
Kittredge uses animation by Rob Ross to fill the screen during some of the interviewees detailed tales of rows and catastrophes, and to replace some of the cut scenes. In the main this works, though it does give the documentary a slightly comic-book effect. It’s fascinating though to see the archival footage and hear Garrett Brown, the cinematographer who invented the Steadicam, describe how he used it on The Heretic.
For those viewers more interested in the craft and process that goes into production than gossip about Richard Burton’s favourite tipples, there’s plenty to enjoy. Boorman, like that great visionary of British cinema Michael Powell, made extensive use of painted glass screens and rear and front projection to create his imagined locations on the Hollywood sets. The entomologist brought in to check that the thousands of male locusts didn’t contain any stray females before being unleashed on the cast to prevent later swarming, is also very amusing.
Boorman and the Devil concentrates on the directorial catastrophe that was The Heretic, but along the way it does provide a pretty good overview of John Boorman’s career. It’s well worth turning to his own autobiographical writings for a more detailed account. Whether after seeing the documentary an audience would want to watch The Heretic, in its original sprawling cut or in the shorter version Boorman hastily edited after the original box office disaster, is another question.
