Oscar-winning director William Friedkin, best known for his films The Exorcist and The French Connection, passed away in Los Angeles on Monday at the age of 87. Sherry Lansing, his wife and a former producer and Paramount Pictures studio head, confirmed his death.

His 1970s cinematic contributions garnered attention during the "New Hollywood" movement, when young directors produced experimental films that broke the mold of the typical studio movie.

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Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection won five Oscars and centered around the seizure of a large amount of heroin smuggled on a French ocean liner.

His other famous film The Exorcist depicts a young girl possessed by a demon and a priest attempting to rescue her in an exorcism. Friedkin went to inventive lengths to capture genuine and surprised responses from the actors, including telling Jason Miller, the actor playing Father Damien Karras, that a mixture meant to look like vomit (really porridge and pea soup) would hit him in the chest when it was actually aimed at his face, to elicit an expression of true disgust.

Friedkin wanted the exorcism scene in the bedroom to be cold enough to see the actors' breath, so he spent $50,000 to install a refrigeration system to cool the set to 20 degrees below zero.

William Peter Blatty, the late author of the 1971 book The Exorcist that inspired the movie, said in 2013 that he had originally not planned to write a horror novel but instead had planned to write a nonfictional account of an exorcism.

"Bill Friedkin never thought it was a horror film, and neither did I. When I was writing the novel, I thought I was writing a supernatural detective story with an apostolic intent," Blatty said on WMAL in 2013.

He added, "I cannot to this day recall a moment when I was thinking, 'Ah, this ought to scare the bejesus out of them.'"

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His widow, Julie Blatty, remembered Friedkin and her husband's relationship.

“Bill and Billy had a love-hate relationship, but it definitely ended in love. They were very close at the end of Bill’s life. Billy continued to be a good friend to me as well. I will truly miss him," she told the Washington Examiner.