You Have to Be Able to Risk an Exorcist II to Get an Excalibur: David Kittredge on Boorman and the Devil

David Kittredge has a cold and about nine more of these calls today, and he still lights up when I ask why anyone would spend years inside a film that has been a punchline since 1977.

“I think that’s my favorite question that I will probably be asked all day today,” he says. Then he corrects the premise. “I didn’t pick it. It picked me.”

Boorman and the Devil is his documentary about John Boorman and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and it is not the movie you would expect from that description. There is no rehabilitation campaign here, no argument that we all got it wrong. Kittredge is after something harder to sell, which is the case that a spectacular public failure was worth having.

The First Interview Unlocked It

Kittredge came up in narrative filmmaking, and he says he resisted this for a while, precisely because he knew what he was signing up for. “I know how much work documentaries are,” he says. “I was very reticent to try to go into it because I knew if I was going to do it, I would want to try to make something that was really about more than just the making of this movie.”

What changed it was Boorman himself, who was the first interview. A day at the director’s home in Ireland, a crew, and a decision Kittredge still sounds a little amazed by. Boorman “made the decision to be open and vulnerable with me, in a way he certainly didn’t have to be,” he says, “talking about this one film in his incredible body of work that I think probably is least regarded. But it’s also the movie that changed the way he made movies.”

That is the thing worth sitting with. By Kittredge’s account, Boorman had barely discussed The Heretic in roughly forty years, mentioned it in passing and moved on. He describes a filmmaker who almost quit, who spent something like a year at home in Ireland teaching his young son Charlie, who is dyslexic, how to read, and did essentially nothing else. Excalibur arrived in 1981.

The Argument the Documentary Is Actually Making

I told him I would rather watch an indie film with one real idea than a seventh Conjuring, and he agreed and then immediately made it more interesting.

“I would rather see one movie of any budget that takes real risks and maybe doesn’t even succeed all the time, or even most of the time, than like 10 movies that kind of are these like, they’re good,” he says. “You know, they’re just good. They’re fine. And you don’t think about them afterwards.” He is not sneering at competence. He is saying competence is not the thing he goes to the movies for anymore. “I need to see the ones that take big swings. And I don’t care if they connect or not. I want to see what the swings are.”

When I pushed back with the obvious commercial objection, that nobody funds a swing that does not pay, he gave me the line the whole documentary hangs on.

“You have to be able to risk an Exorcist II in order to get an Excalibur,” he says. “If you can’t take those risks in this sense, you’re not going to take the risks in any sense.”

He means it literally, and the chronology backs him. Excalibur was the film Boorman made next, and Kittredge points out that it is its own act of lunacy, compressing the entire Arthurian legend into one movie. He also says Boorman carried the toolkit forward, all the old school tricks he had revived for The Heretic, front-projection glass and forced perspective among them, into a film where they finally worked.

Later, near the end of our time, he extended the argument past Boorman entirely. “Without Exorcist IIs, you don’t get Excaliburs. You don’t get Deliverances. You don’t get Point Blanks. You have to be able to withstand that.” Then, cheerfully: “The studios need to put on their big boy pants. I think the worst thing you can do in cinema is be safe.”

Why It Didn’t Work, According to Him

Kittredge is not sentimental about the film’s reception. Asked whether it was ever going to land, he goes straight to genre.

“I think there was a fundamental miscalculation about genre,” he says. The Exorcist, whatever William Friedkin wanted to call it, scares people. It is literal, grounded, character driven. The Heretic is “more about ideas and images and kind of conveying a dream logic to the story.” His reasoning about why that combination fails is the sharpest film criticism in the conversation. A literal world is what lets an audience accept a supernatural threat, he argues, because the literalism is the ground you stand on while you agree to believe the rest. Build the foundation out of metaphor instead and the danger stops registering as danger.

“Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t really a horror movie,” he says. “And that’s a problem when you’re making a sequel to one of the scariest movies ever made.”

He is careful to note that Warner Bros. seems to have been fine with that at the time. He cites producer Richard Lederer saying the film was not trying to outscare the original, and adds the obvious editorial: if you are making a sequel and not trying to match the original on the thing people came for, the problem starts there.

I asked whether the same film would fare better now, in an audience trained on a decade of A24 and dream logic. He was less romantic about it than I expected. The movie has real flaws, he says, and Boorman would be first in line to admit it. What he thinks would need to change is not the audience but the marketing, and he immediately clocks how self-defeating that pitch would be: you would have to spend the campaign telling people this is nothing like the first film. “However you do that, that’s a high bar.”

The Shoot Was Not a Disaster, and That Is the Odd Part

The production history is where I expected the horror stories, and Kittredge partly refuses to give them. Yes, the shoot was rocky. A production originally scheduled to begin in January 1976 did not start shooting until May 24, with a locked summer 1977 release because Warner Bros. had nothing else for that slot. Roughly a third of the way in, Boorman came down with Valley fever, halting production for about a month. The schedule kept slipping into late 1976, and post was compressed.

But he did not want to run the standard disaster reel. “For all the stuff that went wrong in that shoot, they had so many talented people and they pulled off such amazing work that I almost didn’t want to push too hard on the, oh, it was a disaster,” he says. He describes a well run set under an experienced assistant director, Phil Rawlins, who died in 2009 and whom Kittredge says he wishes he could have interviewed.

The detail that actually stings is the testing. Kittredge says he believes Boorman requested a test screening in Tucson and was turned down on the grounds that this was the sequel to The Exorcist. The single screening the film did get came days before release and went badly. “I don’t think that even the executives at Warner Brothers knew what they were sitting on before that time.”

Louise Fletcher Is the Heart, and He Wants No Credit for It

The emotional center of the documentary is Louise Fletcher, who died in 2022 and never saw the finished film, which Kittredge says breaks his heart. I told him it seemed like a deliberate structural choice. He would not take it.

“I wish I could take credit for making her anything,” he says. “That’s her.” He describes her as warm, forthcoming, funny and wise, and admits he could not get through cutting her final story, about a spaghetti dinner, without crying. “I can’t take credit for making her the heart. She is the heart. I just put her in there the way that she came.”

That impulse runs through the whole documentary, and it is why the last section works. There is a stretch near the end where he asks his subjects, flatly, whether Exorcist II: The Heretic is a good movie. He kept it in on purpose.

“I didn’t want to misinterpret this as a reclamation of this hidden gem,” he says. “It’s not about whether Exorcist II works or not. It’s about the fact that it got to do it.”

Ask him what he wants people carrying out of the theater and he shrugs it off as the audience’s business, then lands somewhere better anyway. He wants you to go watch Boorman. Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, The General, which he notes almost nobody has seen and calls a great movie. And Zardoz, obviously.

Boorman and the Devil begins its limited theatrical release on August 28, 2026.