I think the first William Friedkin film I watched was “The French Connection.” While I liked it, it didn’t leave the same imprint on me as other New Hollywood masterpieces. I preferred directors like Bogdanovich, more conversational, so I put Friedkin on the back burner for a while.

There’s something fascinating about those burning mavericks, those artists who work against themselves as much as for. Think of Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola, and others. You almost want to invent a time machine to go back and shake them up, telling them, “Just roll with the punches for once!” But removing that impulse would erase the creation of masterpieces like “Apocalypse Now,” “Fitzcarraldo,” or their Caribbean-filmed cousin “Sorcerer.”

When I watched “Sorcerer,” I did so with anticipation. Having seen “The Wages of Fear,” I knew what I was getting into. I knew it was regarded as the lost masterpiece of an era, but I didn’t think it’d be as brilliant as it was. Not a wasted frame, not a misplaced beat; true insanity – the sort of madness I’m not sure is possible in today’s world.

Of course, I have no doubt Friedkin was challenging to work with, but I never worked with him, so why should I care?

Friedkin was a genius. Even if he has more bad films than good films, it’s not for nothing that I still try to seek out his hard-to-find films. There’s something bombastic to his movies, always a nearby flurry.

It’s strange to mourn the death of an 87-year-old man who hasn’t made a movie in years, someone whose heyday was two decades before my birth. Yet, it is sad. It’s the passing of an era where the word “auteur” was like a virus in LA, giving directors more powers to inflate their egos. The greatest period of Hollywood filmmaking.

He and Bogdanovich always felt to me like the underrated 70s directors; Cimino was so unpopular that he was bound to get a cult following, and Coppola was too big to ever lose his standing. Peter and William sort of ambled their way to the end of their careers, both pretending they weren’t looking backwards.

Friedkin released a film over a decade ago, “Killer Joe,” a great taut movie, funny and thrilling; it’s a great film – you should seek it out. It got him his best reviews since 1985, but he never followed it up with anything. I’ve always presumed age just got in the way. But in the past year, we were told murmurs of a new work, an adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” by Herman Wouk, starring Kiefer Sutherland, due to premiere in Venice next month.

I wondered if we’d see a plethora of Friedkin’s retrospective pop-ups acknowledging his talents and hardships as the film was released. Perhaps he’d get loads of those fancy ‘honorary’ awards no one wants yet is never rejected.

We don’t get to see that now. He doesn’t get a late-career revival. Instead, he gets the post-mortem assessment, where we all agree he was a great director and then we move on, consigning him to the history books.

Usually, I’m slow to watch films. I never rush to the cinema to see one. I’ll watch them when I’m ready, but with this last Friedkin, I just might head out early.