Boorman and the Devil Review

Boorman and the Devil will be released in New York City on August 28 before expanding to other cities on September 4.

“A dream to some… a nightmare to others!”

That line, spoken by Merlin in director John Boorman’s 1981 epic Excalibur, could very well describe the filmmaker’s experience while making Exorcist II: The Heretic, the disastrous 1977 sequel to William Friedkin’s landmark horror original. Reviled by critics, laughed at by audiences, and nearly career-ending for Boorman, Exorcist II became a cautionary tale in Hollywood about the dangers of too much of a good thing. And now, a documentary about the making of the film has been released, and it’s an engrossing look at the art of filmmaking and the tension between artist and audience.

Directed by David Kittredge, Boorman and the Devil traces where John Boorman was prior to taking on Exorcist II (namely, having just suffered through another career lowpoint with the oddball sci-fi film Zardoz) before digging in on the writing, production – including an extended hiatus during which the filmmaker was gravely ill and in the hospital – and eventual release and self-destruction of the film while the Hollywood Eye of Sauron looked on. As a matter of fact, it was during that period that Boorman, who took most of the blame for the film’s reception, said in an interview, “What do you want me to do, immolate myself on Hollywood Boulevard?”

The documentary is buoyed by interviews with key players behind the film, including a reflective Boorman himself and stars Linda Blair and the late Louise Fletcher, while commentary is also offered by various crew members who worked on the picture, film critics, and filmmakers alike, the latter of which includes, kind of randomly, Joe Dante and Karyn Kusama, and less randomly, current horror icon Mike Flanagan, who's working on his own take on The Exorcist for next year, The Exorcist: Martyrs.

Boorman, who is 93 now but apparently shot his interview for Kittredge about seven years ago, is sharp and dryly funny as he looks back at the ups and downs of not just Exorcist II – which he would rather have just been called The Heretic, as he never saw the film as a sequel as much as a “riposte” to the original – but also of his life as a filmmaker. “I've often felt that I've been braver in my filmmaking, and more cowardly in my life,” he says. “Perhaps there's only so much bravery you can muster, and I've put mine into the films.”

Certainly, his intention with – and let’s observe the master’s wishes from here on out and just call the film by the name he’d prefer – The Heretic was noble and brave. He recalls how, in the wake of his film Deliverance’s huge success, he passed on directing the original Exorcist because, after reading the book on which it was based, he determined that it was about “torturing a child.” But by the time The Heretic came about, Boorman was licking his wounds after Zardoz and trying to get the project that would eventually become Excalibur off the ground. The two-page treatment that the studio provided him had hints of a metaphysical approach to the material that intrigued the director. As he told Max von Sydow when trying to get the actor to return for the sequel, the film would be “a beautiful poetic healing film bearing the hope of spiritual regeneration.”

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And so he signed on to the project. Though in doing so, as he himself admits here, Boorman miscalculated what kind of film this needed to be. He may have been making The Heretic, but audiences were expecting Exorcist II. And that is where things truly went wrong.

Boorman and the Devil drags just a tad in its first chunk as it recounts the story we’ve all heard before about the sunsetting of traditional Hollywood studio films and the rise of New Hollywood, plus some time spent on the state of sequels back then (they were more Beneath the Planet of the Apes than The Empire Strikes Back at that time) and Boorman’s career. Perhaps part of the problem here is that these days it’s that much harder to differentiate a feature-length documentary from, well, a YouTube essay. Kittredge steers clear of that danger in part through his use of some slick illustrations and animation which depict behind-the-scenes events, often in comic fashion. And fortunately, once the doc gets into the guts of how The Heretic was made, as told by the people who made it – and how it went horribly wrong – the agony and the ecstasy of the project comes to life.

Louise Fletcher, who passed away in 2022, is a hoot as she recounts her time on the production, having essentially replaced Ellen Burstyn (who refused to return after the difficult production of the first film) as the adult female lead, albeit in a different role. The One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest actress (though she’ll always be Kai Winn to me) regularly has a zinger ready as she reflects on her Heretic time, like when she laughs that she “would’ve been better in the first one!” Meanwhile, un-credited co-writer, second-unit director, and “creative associate” Rospo Pallenberg, who was a frequent collaborator of Boorman’s, is also present and accounted for here, even as he’s painted as something of a villain, or at the very least, an unwanted presence by Linda Blair, among others.

Full of interesting and often funny anecdotes, as well as some scary ones – too many people wound up in the hospital while making this film! – in the end, Boorman and the Devil is about the filmmaker and his own personal devil, which is figuring out how to make his art while also satisfying the masters who pay for it – not just the studio, but the audience as well. We know he found that balance eventually, but making The Heretic almost finished him off for good.