Chase scene

1985’s To Live and Die In L.A., recently released on Blu-ray by both Shout! Factory and Arrow Video, is another Friedkin film about men on the hunt, in this case two Secret Service agents bending the law in order to nab a murderous counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe. Like The French Connection, To Live and Die In L.A. has a show-stopping chase sequence. Friedkin didn’t set out to to top his previous film’s chase sequence; he merely wanted something “different.”

Shooting on weekends when traffic was lower, Friedkin once again puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action, and inverts The French Connection chase: here, it’s the “good guys” who are being chased by the bad, trying to outrun not just cars but strategically placed snipers along the way. “I decided midway that the two guys weren’t being just chased by two agents in one car–rather, by agents all over the place,” the filmmaker said. “I wanted this to be Kafkaesque…they thought they were being chased from everywhere, and they were.” Not only does the car at the center of the scene swerve down alley ways and through aqueducts, it ends up going the wrong way up a freeway. http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/william-friedkin-chase/