I never saw any of the Exorcist films, not even Bill’s [William Blatty, author of The Exorcist novel].
I saw a few minutes of Exorcist II, but that was only because I was in the Technicolor lab timing a film that I had directed — I forget which one — and one of the color timers at Technicolor said, hey, we just made a print of Exorcist II, would you like to have a look at it?
It just seemed to me to have nothing to do with The Exorcist.
I went in, and after five minutes, it just blasted me.