Exorcist Director Makes A New Movie About Exorcism (It's A Documentary)

April 22, 20187:37 AM ET

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

When "The Exorcist," based on the novel by William Blatty, came to theaters in 1973, it captured the public's imagination or, more accurately, our nightmares.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE EXORCIST")

MAX VON SYDOW: (As Father Merrin) Let your mighty hand cast him out of your servant.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exorcisms aren't just the stuff of horror movies. Hundreds of thousands of Italian Catholics reportedly request them each year. But when William Friedkin directed the iconic movie, he hadn't seen one. It took him four decades. During a meeting with Father Gabriele Amorth, chief exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, Friedkin had a chance to change that.

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: I asked him if he would ever allow me to witness an exorcism, which is never done. It's not an entertainment. It's not for show. But he had a wide berth. And a couple of days later, I got a email from the head of his order saying, OK. Father Amorth will allow you to witness an exorcism on May 1 of 2016 at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Friedkin took a small camera with him. And that footage became the central scene of his new documentary called "The Devil And Father Amorth." I asked Friedkin to tell me about the woman whose exorcism he watched, 46-year-old Cristina.

FRIEDKIN: She was an architect and a very attractive, intelligent, soft-spoken, wonderful woman. And when she came into the room, I wondered, what is she doing here? She seems to me to be totally together. And then during the exorcism, she completely unraveled.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE DEVIL AND FATHER AMORTH")

CRISTINA: (Vocalizing).

FRIEDKIN: She spoke in a voice that was completely different from her own. She had what I would say was an unnatural amount of strength for a woman her size and age. And her entire personality had altered.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What was it like to be in that room?

FRIEDKIN: Terrified. I was scared, seriously scared. I was two feet away from them as I am from you. And I was terrified. Gradually, my fear turned into empathy for her. She was in seemingly unnatural and total pain.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You then go off and talk to brain surgeons and psychiatrists, and you show them the footage that you took. Tell us what they said.

FRIEDKIN: Well, I expected they would debunk it and give me a medical or psychiatric term for it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But they don't.

FRIEDKIN: The brain surgeons all said they don't know what this is. These were guys who have done over 5,000 brain surgeries each. So I took it to them. And they all to a person said, we don't know what this is. It's not epilepsy. It's not a lesion in the temporal lobe. We would not know what to remove from her brain to solve this. And the psychiatrist told me, to my astonishment, that psychiatry now recognizes it as something called dissociative identity disorder - demonic possession. The doctor who is the head of the UCLA Hospital said to me in the film, just because we don't know about something doesn't mean it didn't happen. There are many things like radioactivity that we knew nothing about for the longest time. And maybe someday, they'll find some medical or other term for possession. I don't know.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you look back at the horror film that you made that was a work of fiction and the actual exorcism that you witnessed, how do you reconcile those two things?

FRIEDKIN: I don't have to reconcile them. One is a work of fiction. The other is not. It is what I saw. But Blatty's novel and film is what people think about when they think about an exorcism. There's no doubt of that. And I don't know that that ever happened anytime, anywhere. And I tend to doubt it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I have to - because I have you here, I have to say that I saw "The Exorcist," of course, when I was a very young child. I think I was about 6 years old. My siblings showed it to me.

FRIEDKIN: Wrong.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wrong - it scarred me. It scarred me in ways that still exist.

FRIEDKIN: I'm sorry. And I mean that.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, I'm Catholic, so it really sort of touched something deeply terrifying. And I'm curious why you think the idea of demon possession scares us in that way. Even for people who don't believe in it, it's still something that really affects people.

FRIEDKIN: Because it's at the height of the supernatural, things we don't know or understand. We don't understand anything, really. No matter what your religion or lack of it, we don't know anything about the eternal truths. Is there an afterlife? Is there a heaven or a hell? People can have faith and belief, but we know nothing - not the pope, not Bertrand Russell or the greatest thinkers really know the answers to these questions.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You said that you found this exorcism deeply frightening. Is it something that - of what your nightmares are made of, having given so many nightmares to others?

FRIEDKIN: I really don't have nightmares.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lucky you.

FRIEDKIN: You're sorry to hear, I'm sure. The whole experience really scared me while I was there. But as I told you, my fear turned to empathy for her completely because Father Amorth died last year without having liberated her. And she has sought other exorcists. But he was in a class by himself.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist." His new documentary is "The Devil And Father Amorth."

(SOUNDBITE OF MIKE OLDFIELD'S "TUBULAR BELLS")

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That music gives me chills still.

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Venezuela Is In Crisis. Its Economy Is In A Tailspin

July 5, 20165:03 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO

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The South American country is experiencing widespread shortages of food and medicine, along with rolling power blackouts. All of which have sparked rioting and large anti-government protests.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

For years, the face of Venezuela was its socialist president Hugo Chavez, a dramatic presence prone to poking the capitalist world. Three years after his death, Venezuela is spiraling downward. The South American country is now a place of rolling power blackouts, food and medicine shortages and anti-government riots. For the latest, we reached NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro in the capital, Caracas.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: I am in front of a supermarket where hundreds of people are waiting in line to get basic food stuffs. Women, children, old men - so many people. At this private supermarket, the people waiting in line have been told there is butter and rice. And that has caused an enormous queue to form.

Some people told us that they had slept in line, waiting to get access to the supermarket. And all these stores are being guarded as if there are, you know, banks. There are armed police outside because there have been, you know, many occasions of looting - desperate people trying to get the things that they need.

MONTAGNE: And they're telling you, basically, how bad things are. And they are pretty bad.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Things are very, very bad. I have been covering Venezuela for a long time. And frankly, I was shocked at the situation as I see it here at the moment. Basically there's only three ways to get food. One is - you wait in line at a supermarket like this one.

You're only allowed to wait in line one day per week. And it's determined by the number on your identity card. The second way is by going to the black market. And that's incredibly expensive.

And then the third way is that there are government-controlled shops that are giving out food, as well. But it is a very difficult situation for many, many people here.

MONTAGNE: Now, this is a time when the president, who is the sort of handpicked successor to Hugo Chavez, is facing an attempt by the opposition to recall him.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's right. And of course, the situation in terms of the scarcity of food, the scarcity of electricity, the just general insecurity here - I mean, this is one of the most violent countries in the world. And Caracas is the most violent city in the world. And all this plays into a very tense political situation.

I've been going up to people trying to talk to them. And a lot of people simply do not want to give their names. They don't want to talk because they're worried about the repercussions if they say what's actually going on in Venezuela right now.

MONTAGNE: Lulu, you have been covering Venezuela for years. And you've just flown in under these very - I guess - different circumstances. But make a comparison to us - how things are now and how they were just maybe a few years ago.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, I mean, it's extraordinary. I arrived at the airport. And one of the first things that happened is - people started getting their bags coming off the plane. And the bags had actually been looted by the baggage handlers.

And people who had baby milk and diapers had had it taken out. And I said, well, why don't you say something? Why don't you ask to get some of the stuff back? And they said, there's no point.

You know, Venezuela, for all of its problems, always had enough food. It's a dramatically different situation. I was just up in one of the poorer sections of town. This was a bedrock of support for a previous President Hugo Chavez.

And, you know, speaking to one of the mothers there - she said, I really believed in the whole revolution and what Chavez did. And now I would never vote for these guys again. And that is really what's changed here.

MONTAGNE: NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro in Caracas. Thanks very much.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're welcome.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.