William Friedkin does not have a temper. “I am very calm and very mild-mannered,” says the 73-year-old director of movie classics such as The French Connection and The Exorcist, sitting back on a long velvet couch in a West London hotel room, the model of inner peace. “You can’t make the number of films I’ve made and throw temper tantrums.” But what about the stories of him going head-to-head with lead actor Gene Hackman on the set of his 1971 movie The French Connection? “Well, with Hackman, he didn’t want to go to places where his character [the hair-trigger cop Popeye Doyle] went, so I had to provoke him, to start a fire in him.”

Friedkin talks some more about The French Connection, which is about to be released on Blu-ray DVD. He discusses its origins (“It was inspired by Costa-Gavras’s Z and by French New Wave movies”), its themes (“I was reflecting what it was like on the streets during that period”), and its legacy (“You see some of it in TV shows like The Wire and The Shield”). During all this, he is focused and animated. Eventually, however, we move beyond Popeye Doyle, and through the oeuvre, the life and the man.

A tough Chicago kid, Friedkin was inspired to direct by Citizen Kane and Psycho. After getting his break in TV documentaries he had an early boxoffice double whammy with The French Connection and then The Exorcist. He became, instantly, one of the anointed young movie directors (alongside Spielberg, Scorsese and Coppola), and was famed in some quarters as a firebrand screamer, and in others as an unapologetic ladies’ man.

Of course, the temper stuff is rubbish, he says, and a product mostly of gossiping journalists, and authors such as Peter Biskind who filled his bestselling Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tome with stories of Friedkin as “Wacky Willy”, a phone-throwing martinet. And the ladies? “You won’t find this unique to me,” he says, with a wide wolfish grin, “but film-making is a rather randy profession. There were times during the making of The Exorcist when it was often a different girl every night.”

He giggles softly to himself, and elaborates, saying that although it is still widely available now on film sets everywhere, he is happily married (to Sherry Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures) and, “not looking for relationships and one-night stands”. He adds in retrospect, as if sensing that he’s said too much, “It falls into the realm of gossip, and I don’t go there.”

We move swiftly on to his post-1970s career, and he gamely answers charges that he somehow has an innate ability to make movies that polarise audiences. Here, we’re talking about the alleged homophobia in the Al Pacino thriller Cruising and the alleged anti-Arab bias in the military drama Rules of Engagement. “I don’t set out to provoke anyone,” he says. “If I make a film that’s set in a place and period, it’s about what I see and what I observe.” He pauses for a moment and adds: “The divisiveness that may have come about through Cruising did not come from me, but from ‘certain journalists’ who had ‘certain attitudes’ about it.”

We talk about the future, about the operas he’s going to direct, and about the script he’s nurturing into development. We try not to mention the movies, all commercial disappointments, he made at Paramount Pictures (including the erotic thriller Jade) while his wife, Lansing, was the studio chief there, but we’re drawn to the subject by an infamous New York Times article from 2004, which ran under the cumbersome headline: “A Director, Married to the Studio; With a New Assignment from Paramount, Cries of Nepotism Dog William Friedkin”.

The words “your wife” and “New York Times” barely get out before he erupts. “I don’t know anything!” he snarls. “Don’t come to me with gossip like that! I’m absolutely shocked to get a question like that! Show me the exact quote!” he yells. “You’re wasting your time! I’m not going to go there!” He is apoplectic now. “These are not questions about somebody’s films!” he rails. “You’re trying to deal with my personal life, and I’m not going there!” I tell him that I’m just trying to paint a rounded portrait. “This is not going to be a rounded portrait!” he says.

The publicists call time. I stand up, and Friedkin calls me a “flaming idiot”. I tell him that I’m sorry he feels that way, and I turn and go, safe in the knowledge that he doesn’t have a temper.

The French Connection I & II is released on Blu-ray on Monday from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

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