BUG JUICED Friedkin extends his antennae.

Photograph: Michael Hart

He spun heads—onscreen and off—with his horror classic The Exorcist, and mounted what is still the best car chase of all time in The French Connection. But the following decades weren’t as kind to William Friedkin, though not for his lack of originality or daring. His new film, the paranoid sci-fi thriller Bug, about a road-stop romance plagued by microbiological warfare, is easily his strongest in years. TONY chatted with Friedkin, 71, over lunch.

Bug brings you back to two people screaming in a bedroom.

The first thing to be said is that it’s the vision of its playwright, Tracy Letts. I’m on the same page as him, or I couldn’t have done it. I believe there’s good and evil in everybody, that it’s a constant struggle for our better angels to prevail. Often, we lose. Actually, I think Tracy’s original impulse is black comedy.

The Exorcist is pretty funny too: Look at these hippie kids, vomiting, swearing. They need the power of Christ to compel them.

[Laughs] I never thought about it that way. It’s a film about the mystery of faith. I actually believe in that stuff. I believe in evil, and the power of God to overcome it. I was bar mitzvahed, but I believe in Christ. The common denominator in Bug is irrational fear.

What are you irrationally afraid of these days?

[Pause] Losing my mind. Which often happens as you get older. Or of contracting a serious disease. I also grew up thinking that America could go on forever. And I don’t feel that way anymore. No one’s in charge.

Interesting to hear that from a ’70s movie brat, who came to Hollywood and took over from the adults.

We weren’t conscious of that. We just wanted to work. I mean, when you went to work at the magazine, you didn’t want to take it over, you just wanted to write and get paid.

But sometimes the process goes awry. How does a director lose a film?

Did you ever drive down an unfamiliar road with a set of directions and wind up somewhere else? That happens to filmmakers constantly.

Let’s go down that road a little. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, you released Sorcerer.

Sorcerer was a very difficult film to get across when the zeitgeist was changing. I miscast it. It was written for Steve McQueen and Lino Ventura and Marcello Mastroianni. And I could have gotten all those people if I had agreed to shoot it somewhere in America. McQueen gave me five different ways to get him in the picture and I turned them all down.

Why?

Arrogance. I didn’t realize then what I know now: that a close-up of Steve McQueen’s face is worth more than the most incredible landscape you could see. I thought the film was about me. And it wasn’t. It was about Steve McQueen. He was having his relationship with Ali MacGraw. And he said, “Could you write a part in it for her, so she could be with me?” I told him to go fuck himself, and I fucked myself. And I wouldn’t do that today.

Your gay cop drama, Cruising, is a misunderstood movie.

I think it was understood too well! [Laughs]

Are you saying it’s homophobic?

Not at all. But you know, if you were going to send out a film to illustrate the necessity for gay rights, it wouldn’t be Cruising. Even though Cruising, in my view, has nothing to do with gay rights. It’s a background to a murder mystery in a world that I was fascinated by. And it had not been explored.

Do you think you still understand what Hollywood wants from directors and movies?

I don’t think I ever did. I wouldn’t do an episode of Spider-Man if they paid me $100 million. Because I don’t know it. I can’t find that in my… It may be a great movie. But I’ll never know it. I frankly don’t believe it’s really for adults.

Are you a victim of that change in tastes?

I don’t picture myself as a victim at all, in any way. I mean, I’m lucky to have a job. That’s how I look at it. Billy Wilder was a good friend of mine. For 20 years, he couldn’t get a meeting in Hollywood; they didn’t know who he was. Those were the people who were hiring me! But they wouldn’t talk to Billy Wilder.

Feel any resentment over the way your career has turned over the years?

Why should I? The word isn’t in my lexicon. First of all, it implies that I’m so self-centered, I would sit down and think such a thing.

Plenty of filmmakers do.

Maybe they do, but I don’t. Life is a continuum. And every day, there are fresh new choices. And new problems, too. I don’t sit in a fucking chair and think, Jesus, I won an Oscar 80 years ago and what happened to me since? To say it doesn’t consume me would be an understatement.

Bug opens Fri 25. Click here for venues. Click here for the review.