In 1973, William Friedkin released The Exorcist, one of the highest-grossing and most applauded horror movies in history. In 2018, William Friedkin released The Devil and Father Amorth , a documentary about exorcisms. The movie landscape has drastically changed in the intervening years, but William Friedkin hasnt.

He is still a dazzling raconteur. His most recent fiction features, Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011), boast the same moody panache seen in the movies that launched his career, including The Boys in the Band (1970), The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist, Sorcerer (1977) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). And, at 82, he has aged into your overly nostalgic and slightly regressive great-uncle. He rails against the changes in American popular culture sometimes with good reason and carps about the whole diversity thing thats hit Hollywood in recent years.

For an hour on a recent Thursday afternoon, I sat with Friedkin in his room at Manhattans swanky Carlyle Hotel, where the Oscar-winning director wore slippers, green pajama pants and a T-shirt with a dog on it. In The Devil and Father Amorth (now in theaters and available on select streaming platforms), Friedkin travels to Italy to profile one of the worlds leading exorcists as he treats a woman apparently possessed by demonic forces. The movie presents footage of this womans exorcism as fact, which led to a conversation about the reliability of documentary filmmaking, the role evil plays in the world, Friedkins views on the state of movies today, and the more socially conscious culture we now live in.