Watch: William Friedkin Interviews Fritz Lang in 1974

This black-and-white 1974 interview for Italian television shows us Lang, then around 84 years-old, at his most ornery (and insightful) and Friedkin, barely cracking 40, at his most button-pushing. Thanks to One Perfect Shot, this is a delicious find rightly timed for the anniversary of Friedkin’s wrongly dismissed existential disaster film “Sorcerer” (1977) this week.

Lang opens up about a chance Nazi meeting that could have shifted his career, and about his life and influences. He died two years later, aged 86, in 1976. By then, Friedkin had already directed “The Exorcist,” “The French Connection” and queer camp classic “The Boys in the Band,” among other films.

READ MORE: “I Thought I Was Bulletproof”: William Friedkin Looks Back on the ’70s