00:00It's a sort of spell is cast over people to make movies.
00:08In 1975, Academy Award-nominated director John Borman was offered the opportunity of a lifetime
00:15to direct a sequel to the blockbuster film The Exorcist.
00:19Borman's follow-up was enormously ambitious and had the biggest budget in Warner Brothers history,
00:24and on June 17, 1977, Exorcist II, The Heretic, opened to sold-out theaters across the country.
00:33It was one of the biggest disasters in Hollywood history.
00:36David Lean said to me once, he said,
00:39John, you know, we all make failures. Try not to make a famous one.
00:42And this became one of the most famous failures of all time.
00:55To make a sequel is a radical thought.
00:58Amen.
00:59If you think that I wanted anything to do with that, you would be wrong.
01:02So we read the script. It's really good.
01:04This was completely original.
01:06It was so tempting that I said I would do it.
01:10There are always signs that a production is entering a period of chaos.
01:15They just kept rewriting it. Things were going wrong.
01:17There's a lot of dust. There's a lot of smoke.
01:19They're throwing friggin' locusts at me.
01:22Can't even imagine.
01:27Technically, it's an astonishing movie.
01:30There was wildness to it.
01:36It looked extraordinary.
01:38It didn't look like any other film.
01:39It's the true story of how one of the world's greatest filmmakers
01:42made one of the most hated movies ever.
01:45What happens to a great filmmaker when it all collapses under you?
01:49I was in the hospital taking ice baths to stop my body from exploding.
01:54It almost killed him, this movie.
01:56And I blamed it all on the devil.
02:04You're not a masochist, are you?
02:05I suppose I must be, you know?
02:07Otherwise, I wouldn't be making movies.
02:08It works?
02:08I will pass away from you.
02:09.
02:10Thank you very much.
02:10It's this story.
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