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(Friedkin has sincedescribed those actual 40 minutes as pure pornography.)
Those acts were not in the mainstream then.
The original music in the clubs where I filmedCruisingwas the usual disco that was in every club.
It was Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder.
I frankly wasnt interested in that music, and I didnt think it caught the vibe of the film.
Did they have DJs in the underground S&M clubs?No, there were no DJs.
It was just recorded music.
They simply would build a reel of a bunch of these tracks, and thats what played.
All the tracks were the same no matter what club you would go into.
Whether it was primarily a sex club or simply a dance club, the music was the same.
I wasnt making a documentary.Cruisingis not a documentary.
Why did you pick the specific punk groups on the soundtrack?
They had the most unique sound.
We had a couple of tracks by Willy DeVille, who was called Mink DeVille at the time.
Jack Nitzsche said that he was the best singer he had ever worked with.
He saw this stuff coming.
Ill tell you, without Jack I probably wouldnt have gone to listen to the Germs.
But then I met all these groups, and I found them very interesting.
He ODd, but these guys off the stage were different people.
Darby was way out there, but a lot of them …
The woman called Madelynn Von Ritz, I knew her in another way.
She was a hairdresser around L.A. for people like Cher and other musical stars and some actors.
She had a unique voice that Jack Nitzsche recognized.
He did some sounds forThe Exorcist.
I was into jazz and blues.
I would go to Sonnys sessions and Sonny originally worked for Phil Spector.
They both had an ear, and they used to build their tracks before the lyrics were even finished.
They would record the background tracks, and they would do them layer on layer on layer.
That influenced the way I made films.
I was in London and I heard on the pop radio stations Wang Chung.
This was the 80s, and I thought they were fantastic and really different and unusual.
The same is true of Tangerine Dream.
That was Edgar Froese and the Tangerine Dream.
I went to one of their sessions and that kind of music was brand new in that time.
It was really unusual and unique and yet rhythmic and powerful and hypnotic.
Thats the stuff I used [forSorcerer].
I had not finished it by the time we were recording music.
One of them was Quentin Tarantino.
Because this was the time just before AIDS.
Quentin said, Its a lost world.
I think its more than just people into S&M culture.
Thats why I did it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
