Cynical and cranky, director William Friedkin was in fact a mensch who gave many of our most beloved actors their big breaks. Whether it was playwright Jason Miller (Father Karras in The Exorcist) or amateur fellow Chicago native William Petersen (Agent Richard Chance in To Live and Die in L.A.), Friedkin trusted his instincts, ignoring studio bigwigs, all in the pursuit of gritty authenticity. He shot his murder-mystery film Cruising in actual gay “leather bars” across New York City, securing permission from the owners — mobsters, mostly. In these scenes, all of the background actors double as real-life BDSM patrons out for a good time.

His technique was shaggy, but his vision and style were anything but. He handled spectacle and intimacy, thriving in claustrophobic liminal spaces. He liked to capture scenes in one or two takes at the most. Upon being told that the camera crew was visible in a shot from 2011’s Killer Joe, Friedkin said: “Rehearsal is for sissies — rehearsal is for dummies. I’m not looking for perfection in film, I’m concerned with spontaneity.”

Friedkin was the son of Ukrainian Jews, who fled an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1903 and landed in Chicago. The young Friedkin loved his hard-working parents but disliked school and graduated by the skin of his teeth. He was indifferent about movies until he saw Citizen Kane after which he was inspired “by the power of film to go so far below the surface of a human life.”

After high school, he worked in the mailroom at Chicago’s WGN-TV, and soon after he began directing live television and documentaries. In 1962, he shot his most notable documentary, The People vs. Paul Crump, inside the Cook County jail in Illinois, after he asked a prison chaplain, “Do you think anyone is actually innocent on death row?” That led to meeting Paul Crump, a man falsely accused of murdering a security guard at a meatpacking plant. The state’s governor, Otto Kerner, viewed The People vs. Paul Crump and commuted his death sentence.

Friedkin soon hooked up with David L. Wolper, a Hollywood producer and began making small features. From the beginning he was drawn to the documentary style, or cinema verité, utilized in Z, Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film about the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis and the political crises that ensued. You can see the influence in Friedkin’s classics like The French Connection and Sorcerer and even portions of his iconic box office juggernaut The Exorcist.

Open to taking risks, Friedkin followed up that iconic film’s success with 1977’s Sorcerer, a box office failure at the time but today heralded as a masterpiece. Shot on-location in the Mexican jungle and the Dominican Republic, Sorcerer still impresses today with stunning sequences and “how-the-hell-did-they-film-that” set pieces like a truck loaded with nitroglycerin crossing a dilapidated rope bridge — in a storm. Aside from Roy Scheider, Sorcerer’s cast was relatively unknown, and a fair amount of the dialogue was in French and Arabic. But most detrimental to its box office draw, it opened against Star Wars.

Friedkin then took yet another chance with 1980’s Cruising, loosely based on a series of unsolved murders around New York City’s gay BDSM underworld. This time he had a bona fide star — Al Pacino, Friedkin’s biggest yet. The film however was immediately met with protests from the gay community. Friedkin defended himself by claiming that he had no political agenda to speak of. Yet Friedkin, who back in 1970 directed the landmark gay film The Boys in the Band, had a great love of humanity just beneath his caustic exterior. Cruising was, in fact, an expression of his outrage over the real-life unsolved murders of gay men in New York.

And his films only got more politically charged as he got older. Released on March 14, 2003, five days before the United States invaded Iraq, The Hunted was an antiwar survivalist thriller with two standout performances by Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones. In 2006, once again, he set his sights on the wrongdoings and repercussions of American imperialism in Bug, based on the play by Tracy Letts. Bug centered on the mysterious loner and Gulf War veteran Peter (Michael Shannon), who after connecting with the lonely Agnes (Ashley Judd) become intertwined, descending down a rabbit hole filled with feverish conspiracies.

During a hilariously contentious talk with Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn — in which the two directors exchange barbs about each other’s work from Friedkin’s own Bel-Air mansion — Friedkin dismisses Refn’s claim that one of his own films is, objectively, a masterpiece. Friedkin’s argument is that one can never know if a film is truly great until at least fifty-years or more have passed. Truer words have never been spoken — it’s been at least fifty years since both The Exorcist and The French Connection were released, and their place in the pantheon looks just as secure as it did decades ago.

With today’s films drowning beneath market research, studio notes, and audience-testing, masterpieces are few and far between. Everything is just too sterile now. We can only dream of an industry and an art form that opened their arms — even if for just a brief while — to a talent like William Friedkin’s.