irector Paul Schrader didn't set out to helm a prequel to 1973's seminal horror film The Exorcist, but when original director John Frankenheimer fell ill, he was too happy to step in when asked. (Frankenheimer eventually died.) Schrader (director of Auto Focus and writer of Taxi Driver) shot his movie in Rome and Morocco in 2003, with Stellan Skarsgard in the role of Father Lankester Merrin, a priest who has lost his faith as a result of a World War II incident. Merrin becomes an archaeologist and travels to British East Africa, where he uncovers a mysterious buried church that puts him into conflict with an evil force. Gabriel Mann, Clara Bellar and Billy Crawford also star.
But in one of the strangest examples of studio meddling in the history of filmmaking, Morgan Creek told Schrader his film wasn't commercial enough and eventually shelved it. The studio, led by founder James G. Robinson, eventually ordered an entirely new film, directed by action helmer Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger), with a new script and a new cast except for Skarsgard. Harlin kept the basic plot of Schrader's movie but amped up the gore and scares, streamlined the psychological drama and tacked on a big, visual-effects finale.
When Harlin's movie, Exorcist: The Beginning, opened in 2004, it was blasted by critics and performed poorly at the box office. Morgan Creek has taken a second look at Schrader's version, retitled Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, swallowed its reservations and slated a limited release for May 20. More than two years after Schrader took on the challenge of the Exorcist, his movie will see the light of day, and the director took a moment to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about the peculiar journey. The comments below combine an interview conducted last week and an interview on the set of Dominion in 2003.
I imagine you're pretty excited that your movie is finally being released.
Schrader: Yes. It's been a long haul. And I think the dominant feeling is just of relief. You know ... if you make a big-budget film that has been discarded in a public way and has been sort of vilified, there's absolutely no way you can convince anyone that you did a good job. People just assume the worst. And I just didn't want to be in that position for the rest of my life, like Orson Welles trying to explain what [The Magnificent] Ambersons was supposed to be. And so even though it was a temptation to walk away some time ago, I just kept at it and just didn't want to have to go through the rest of my life answering that same question over and over: "What about The Exorcist?"
How did this come about? What did Morgan Creek say to you?
Schrader: Very little. I have taken to describing this as a case of buyer's remorse, because it's the only information that really makes sense to me. I was given a script of a project that was already in motion. The budget, the script was finished, some casting, some locations. John Frankenheimer got sick. So within three months of the time I read the script I was shooting, and this was the script [by William Wisher and Caleb Carr]. I think that somewhere toward the end of the process, Jim Robinson—because there really is no "they" here; there is only Jim—I think he came to the conclusion that he had made the wrong movie. The only way I can understand it. Because toward the end of the shoot I started hearing more and more talk about: It's got to be scarier, which no one was talking about at the beginning of it. And then when I finished there was a time pressure on me to submit a cut right away, and I showed it to Jim. And he had almost no comments. I was ready to show it to him a week later. He didn't show up, and I was let go. And that was that.
So there were never any notes, never any previews. I have to believe based on all of that that by the time we finished shooting the movie, he had looked around and said, "It was a mistake to make a kind of classic Exorcist prequel." They should have gone the other route and made more of an exploitation film. And the film I had made didn't have a horror premise per se.
A horror premise is that an innocent is tormented while the clock runs. I had an afflicted boy getting better and being beatified. You can't get much horror out of that. So when they told me, "It's got to be scarier" and "Let's recut it," I said, "We can't. There's not much to recut, because it was never shot." Because you don't really have a horror premise. And that was the understanding going in, that it wasn't a hard-core horror film. So then when Renny came in to make it scarier, I think he must have obviously said the same thing. You don't have a horror premise. You got to get the girl possessed, and you gotta make her ugly and turn her into a monster. That's the only way you're going to scare people. So once they did that, it was another movie.
Did Morgan Creek change its mind because of lobbying on your part, or because fans on the Internet wanted to see your movie?
Schrader: It's only due to one thing. Nothing to do with high motives. I was able to help create a financial incentive for this film to be brought back from the dead. Now, that incentive, it's based on two factors. One was the existence of DVDs, and the other was the ongoing interest in the film. Ten years ago, the film would have been lost. In fact, it was lost over and over again 10 years ago. Even at Morgan Creek, even under the title Exorcist. Bill Blatty's [the original author of the Exorcist book] version of Exorcist 3 no longer exists. But because of the possible revenues from a DVD, and because the Internet keeps fans' interest alive, in a situation where it would normally just drop off and fade away, it became more and more clear that there was money to be made. And I would never have presumed to appeal to the altruism or the artistic inclinations of Morgan Creek. I wouldn't be so foolish. But what I had to do was try to convince them that there was some money to be made.
At a screening in Los Angeles last week you said that there was a possibility the film wouldn't come out as late as a week before.
Schrader: It's been a very contentious situation. And it's been a battle between greed and hubris. The old battle. And there were days when greed was winning and days when hubris was winning. And the days when hubris was winning is when ... you would sort of hear rumors that [they] don't care how much money we lose, we're not going to let this happen. And then it would swing back around the other way. And, fortunately, the redeeming power of greed won the day. ... But you never can tell when you have a situation which is controlled by a single person. And you just hope that that person acts in their own best financial interest.
Have you seen Renny Harlin's film?
Schrader: Yes, I did.
Do you have any thoughts on it?
Schrader: Well, my experience was really quite ironic, in that I went down to Bethesda and saw it in the afternoon opening day with Bill Blatty, where he lives. And we went out to dinner afterwards. And as the screening progressed, Bill became more and more agitated, because he had had his experience, and it all came back to him. His still-festering resentment of how he was treated. So by the time the movie was over, he was sort of steaming.
I, on the other hand, was sitting next to him, feeling better and better, because I was looking at this film, and I was saying, "You know, this is really bad." And, you know, "If it gets much worse, there may even be a market for my film." By the time the movie was over I thought, "You know, I bet you ... there's going to be an interest in what my film was." I had fear that Renny's film would be ... OK, get good reviews, do good business, in which case my film would be dead forever. But because it was so exploitive it did open the door to this conversation we're now having.
Are you satisfied with it? Is it the film you set out to make?
Schrader: Yeah. I mean, every film could be better, I suppose. But it is ... the film we were making. It's the film that we sat down to make. In going all the way back to day one, would I have done this all over again? No. No. And perhaps I should have at the very beginning said flat out: "This is not a horror movie, and ... you should make it into a horror movie." I think at that point I probably would not have been hired. The irony is if I told them what they discovered a year later, they probably would have hired someone else [anyway].
[The following interview took place on the film's set at Cinecitta studios in Rome in 2003.]
You were raised in a very religious household, with strict Calvinist beliefs.
Schrader: I certainly was raised to believe in a very real devil, a real Satan, and a real hell. Though I don't believe in the physical reality of those things anymore. But I still believe in their power as metaphors. And I certainly understand why they came into being as metaphors and their ongoing function in human psychology and in human spirituality. ...
If I used any kind of inspiration, it's all of the religious intellectuals I was raised with, professors. Because when I went to Calvin College, which is a Dutch Calvinist college. My minor was theology. It had to be, everyone's minor was theology.
Does that inform the film?
Schrader: It informs me, and I inform the film.
You also once said that you thought the original Exorcist film was a perfect metaphor.
Schrader: I did say that The Exorcist was the most metaphorically pure of all films, because you have God and Satan wrestling over the corporeal, the physical body of a 13-year-old girl. It's like rock-solid as a metaphor. I don't have quite that metaphor. I have to pull a few other tricks.
Such as?
Schrader: I have to kind of flip the formula. I can't have another 13-year-old girl being demonically possessed. So the formula gets flipped by having a young boy who is afflicted, physically afflicted. And as everything in this area of British East Africa ... gets worse and worse and the sort of craziness and the human evil increases, he gets better. And he starts getting better when they open up the crypt under the church. ...
It presents some storytelling problems that you have to deal with, because you no longer have this pitiable creature that you're trying to make better. You have this sort of demonic presence who inside him has this little boy. So you have to spread the evil through the entire area. And so that the last act of the movie, the last 20 minutes, is just this sort of ... a progressive montage of how evil is spreading through this area, intercut with the exorcism itself.
Did you have any frustrations on a huge film like this?
Schrader: I guess I really haven't felt it that much. Occasionally you have those sort of moments when you're saying, "What am I doing making this film?" Because you're slipping into a genre that you know you need to do, but it's not your genre. The scenes that I call "Father Merrin and the Secret of the Lost Church." And you're doing it as basically young-adult fiction, like The Raiders of the Lost Ark. And you know you have to do these scenes so they're really cool and they're fun to watch, but they're not really what you do. No one would ever hire you to actually do them. So you're off sort of making a movie that you wouldn't normally make. And sometimes it's fun, and sometimes you just sort of look in the mirror and say, "Who's there?"
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Orson Scott Card
