The key to Friedkin's cinema is his experience as a documentarian. His first feature, "The People vs. Paul Crump," was about a convicted armed robber and murderer in Chicago who would've been executed had Friedkin not taken a camera into the jail and told the man's story so convincingly, including his protestations of innocence, that the governor of Illinois intervened to get him released. From that point forward, Friedkin continued to incorporate a documentarian's sense of intense physical reality into every movie he made, whether it was a horror film like "The Exorcist" or "Bug," a crime drama like "Killer Joe" or "Sorcerer," a cop-on-the-edge picture like "The French Connection" or "To Live and Die in L.A." Whether shooting a foot chase, a car chase, an exorcism, or a couple's descent into madness, Friedkin battered the audience with details that made them feel as if they were right there next to the characters. 

Coppola says that if he had made "The Exorcist," " ... I would probably have dealt with evil in terms of metaphor ... Billy shows it. He shows it over and over again in the most direct possible way. In Billy's film it's not implied; it's shown. He doesn't philosophize about evil, he shows you evil." Friedkin approached the "French Connection" car chase in a similar way, to the point of potentially murderous irresponsibility, shooting some of the most kinetic point-of-view shots from a car driving at high speed through Brooklyn neighborhoods without a permit. The climactic sequence of trucks traversing a rickety, rain-soaked bridge in "Sorcerer" were likewise documentary records of actors and stunt performers doing dangerous things that could have gotten them killed. 

Related, though less unnerving, are stories confirming that Friedkin prefers to shoot as few takes as possible. Sometimes he secretly films performances he's told the actors are only rehearsals, and resists their requests to do more takes to refine a performance or try something different. This, to put it mildly, is not how most directors work (with notable exceptions like Clint Eastwood, also legendarily averse to doing more than a few takes of a scene). 

But actors seem to appreciate, or at least accept, the pressure-cooker demands Friedkin places on them. McConaughey, the title character of "Killer Joe," seems to relish them: his eyes widen as he talks about how Friedkin's one-take approach ratcheted up his focus and freed him up to "just go for it." Ultimately, even though Friedkin is making films of fictional stories, he still seems to be trying to capture an ineffable something that will disappear from the room or the street or the set the instant he calls cut. 

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