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Judd and Friedkin: Who's Buggin' Who?
January 9, 2008

Having just seen and tremendously enjoyed the hit Broadway play August: Osage County, I was interested in seeing some more about playwright Tracy Letts. So, I popped Lionsgate’s Bug into the DVD player—adapting his own stage play, Letts wrote the screenplay for the William Friedkin-directed thriller, which stars Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. I figured that I’d be able to find Letts in one of the handful of supplements, but there wasn’t anything—not a thing! I did, however, bump into a couple of cute bits involving Judd wherein she explains how she came to appear in the project years after meeting Friedkin and making quite the social faux pas at a film festival reception.

 

“I met Billy socially years ago at a film festival and I liked him a lot then. I didn’t realize that he hadn’t directed

French Connection II and I complimented him about a scene in it I loved,” she recalls. And he was very gracious and I found that to be consistent with him while making [Bug]!

 

For his part, Friedkin (who’s never at a loss for words, as can be seen in his half-hour interview wherein we never see the actual interviewer, whose questions are shown are screen, but only Friedkin as he free associates his answers) admires his beautiful leading lady very much and, in the grand manner of mutual back-slapping that we’ve come to love on DVD supplemental featurettes, only has nice things to say.

 

“She’s a very beautiful lady, but we tried to play that down in this film. [Bug] is a great piece of material for her,” says Friedkin. “I was very interested in working with her to stretch as an actress.”

 

Oh, and by the by, 1975’s French Connection II was directed by the late John Frankenheimer.

 

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on January 9, 2008 | Comments (1)