[Video] The Exorcist: Believer Director David Gordon Green On The “Weird Energy” Vibes During Filming Of The Exorcism Scenes
The director also shares original Exorcist star Linda Blair’s contributions to the new film, out this week.
This is a true story.
I recently caught a movie in Orchard Road. About 10 minutes into the screening, the picture froze for a split second. This happened a few times.
On any other day, I would point the finger at the projectionist or the DCP playback server for this hiccup. But when the movie I was watching happened to be The Exorcist: Believer, I tended to skip the easily explainable and chose to see things in a little more supernatural. (I wish to reiterate: this actually happened. I didn’t pull a Hasan Minhaj, okay?)
When 8days.sg sat down with the film’s director David Gordon Green via Zoom from Los Angeles, I couldn’t resist asking him if anything spooky on his set, especially the
“Nothing so specific, but it was a weird energy,” says Green. “As you can imagine in the climax of this movie when you have all these different religions going into this, this moment with these two young girls and so many religious perspectives and scriptures and texts and mantras and things that are happening.
“And you take the fictional qualities of those characters and add that to the spiritual reality of the actors and then the crew around them. And it was just hard to explain, but there was a very bizarre energy in those in the room for those days.”
Makes your hair stand, doesn’t it?
The Exorcist: Believer takes place 50 years after the events depicted in William Friedkin’s 1973 original, which tells the story of two Catholic priests (Max von Sydow and Jason Miller) performing an exorcism on a young girl, Regan (Linda Blair).
Like the recent Halloween reboot — also helmed by Green — ignores the franchise’s subsequent entries. Over the years, The Exorcist spawned two sequels, two prequels, and one TV series.
Ellen Burstyn reprises her role of Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, from the first movie, and this time she shares her experience in demonic possession with the parents of two teenage girls (Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum) whose bodies have been taken over by a malignant entity.
Here, we ask Green how he — with some assistance from Blair, no less — prepared the girls in the possession scenes and what he would do if he could travel back in time to watch Friedkin work on the original Exorcist. Watch the interview here:
The Exorcist: Believer (NC16) is in cinemas from Oct 5.
Photos: Universal Pictures/UIP
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