Film Forum held a tribute to Sydney Lumet last night that took the form of a two-hour Q&A with the venerable director, interspersed with clips from some of his most memorable films. (Note: All of Lumet's remarks below are quote from memory.)
Lumet's father, Baruch, was an actor in the Yiddish theatre, and Sydney himself got his start there at a very early age.
He went on to appear in a number of Broadway shows, among them a Max Reinhardt production, before slipping behind the camera as a television director in the 1950s.
So it was fitting that the evening opened with a clip from One Third of a Nation (1939), which boasts Lumet's only film acting appearance. The then-14-year-old director-to-be starred as the nephew of Sylvia Sydney.
The next clip shown was from the first movie Lumet directed, Twelve Angry Men. Asked if he'd made a specific effort to make the film in a cinematic style, so as to prove to the industry bigwigs that he could direct as well for the large screen as for the small, Lumet admitted with a laugh, "I was too arrogant. It never occurred to me that I might need to convince anyone."
Asked later about working with Henry Fonda, Lumet said Fonda was constitutionally unable to make a false or dishonest move as an actor. "I don't think he could've done it if I'd asked him to," Lumet said. "He could only play the truth."
Lumet said that he shot Twelve Angry Men in 19 days. He said he shot the film in a very particular way. There were three levels of lighting in the film -- sunlight through the windows, cloudy skies, as a storm approached outside, and with the overhead lighting in the jury room illuminated once the storm is underway.
Lumet shot the film entirely out of sequence, rotating around the room, getting each shot he needed from each actor under that particular lighting. Once he'd shot all of his sunlit shots, Lumet had the set relit to suggest cloudy conditions and slowly worked his way around the room again, going from character to character, getting every shot he needed.
Finally, he had the set relit once last time, with overhead lighting lit, and made the rounds again.
Lumet said he never uses storyboards, as Alfred Hitchcock was famous for doing. Instead, he prefers to rehearse his actors for two weeks, as if they were mounting a play, and when he has all the blocking down, then he considers where to place the camera in each scene.
Regarding The Fugitive Kind, which paired Marlon Brando with Anna Magnani, Lumet said that Magnani, despite her reputation as an earthy, instictive actress, actually came from a show business background, that she had been a song-and-dance performer when she was young -- "a hoofer," Lumet termed her.
As such, she and Brando worked very differently, and there was a just a hint offered that they might not have gotten along very well. But Lumet refuses to gossip, and he was very careful in choosing his words when he spoke of actors he'd worked with.
As an example of his disinclination to use aspects of an actor's personal life to draw a stronger performance from him -- as opposed to Elia Kazan, whom Lumet cited as standing ever ready to throw facts from an actor's private life at him in order to get what he wanted -- Lumet told a story of a monologue in The Fugitive Kind that Marlon Brando was struggling with. Take after take, Brando strived to get through the monologue, and each time, he faltered at the same point in the speech.
Lumet said that Brando had told him a personal story the week before that gave Lumet insight into why the actor was repeatedly stumbling at the same point in the monologue, and the director knew that, if he'd only cited that story, it would've freed Brando to get through the speech.
But as Lumet put it, "I'm not his analyst. That's his private life; this was his work."
At one point, as the evening dragged on, Brando said to Lumet, whom the actor knew did not like to work overtime, "Let's call it a night. Let me get some sleep and I know I can do this in the morning."
"No," Lumet recalled saying, "You won't sleep well, with this hanging over you, and the pressure will be even greater in the morning. We'll stick with it; you'll get it."
Eventually, on the 32nd take, Brando nailed the monologue, and all was well.
Lumet told Brando later that he knew could have merely reminded Brando of the incident from his life that he had shared with the director and it would have allowed Brando to complete the monologue, but that he didn't feel right approaching it that way.
He said Brando was moved to lean over and kiss Lumet. And yet, Lumet is fully aware of the irony inherent in the fact that Brando cited Kazan as his favorite director.
"There's no right way to do things," Lumet repeatedly stated. "I just have to do it my way."
Lumet beamed after a clip from Long Day's Journey into Night. He clearly considers it one of his finest films, and he bristled at the memory of certain critics of the day dubbing it a mere "filming of the stage play."
"I shot each character in the film from a different level, shot each with different lighting," Lumet said emphatically.
Lumet lavishly praised Katharine Hepburn's performance in the film, stating for the first of several times on the evening that when an actor is that locked into a role, it makes the director's job easy. The director just has to follow the lead of the actor, he said, and go with the flow.
Lumet expressed regret at the disappointing fortunes of Fail-Safe, which he blamed on the fact that it came out after, not before, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The producers of the latter film sued for plagiarism, claiming that the novel on Fail-Safe was based stole directly from the novel on which Dr. Strangelove was based. They won the case, and Columbia ended up owning both pictures.
Lumet went to the head of Columbia and urged him to release his film first. "If it's a hit," Lumet recalled telling him, "it'll make Dr. Strangelove that much funnier. And if it bombs, it won't have any impact at all on Dr. Strangelove."
But Lumet's pleas went unheeded, and Fail-Safe came off badly in the wake of Kubrick's film. Attendance was so meagre, he said, that "you could shoot deer in the theatre."
After a clip from The Hill, which starred Sean Connery, who moderator Foster Hirsh said "really acted" in the film, Lumet came to the actor's defense. "People thought Connery wasn't acting in the Bond films, because he made it seem so effortless, but he was acting -- he was acting high comedy, and that's not easy."
Lumet went on to cite Cary Grant as another actor who doesn't get enough credit because he made it look so easy.
Lumet clearly felt that much of the credit for the success of Serpico should go to Al Pacino. It was another instance in which Lumet clearly marveled at an actor's ability to be so "locked in" to a role. He spoke often throughout the evening of the benefits of an actor coming in "full," with all his work done and the character a part of his very being. When that happens, Lumet said, an actor can climb the walls and the audience is right there with him. The most theatrical, over-the-top gestures can work, he said, when an actor is fully in the role.
He also said he'd much rather have to rein in a very demonstrative actor -- Pacino, for example, or Rod Steiger, who starred in Lumet's The Pawnbroker -- than to have to extract a more energetic and demonstrative performance from an inhibited actor.
Lumet said that he very consciously aimed for a verite look for Dog Day Afternoon, a picture with which he wanted to show, he said, that "freaks and outsiders are not so different from the rest of us. We have more in common with them than we allow ourselves to admit."
Dog Day Afternoon was shot almost entirely in natural light, Lumet said. In scenes inside the bank, if more light was needed, they just added more florescents. He likes it, he said, when an audience feels as if they're right there, and that's why he's very enthusiastic about shooting pictures in hi-def video, as he's done with his last two movies.
"Hi-def allows you to capture exactly what you see," said Lumet. "With film, you almost never get what you're seeing."
Lumet said Pacino was totally locked into his character, so much so that Lumet allowed him to ad lib extensively.
Lumet said that, if ever a film could be credited to a single individual, it was Network, which was entirely a product of Paddy Chayevsky's brilliant script. He acknowleged that some feel the picture has proven to be prophetic, but that he never considered it a satire. He felt then and still feels, having worked in television, that it was actually pretty realistic.
Lumet agreed with Hirsh that, as great as Peter Finch is in the picture, William Holden is the heart of the film. "There was a humanity to Holden's performance," Lumet said, "that is far too often missing from films today."
Lumet said his favorite thing about Prince of the City was that he got to meet Akira Kurosawa because of it. The film features a memorable, lengthy on-foot chase scene in the rain shot on location on the streets of New York, and the great Japanese filmmaker, who knew something about rainy scenes in movies, was moved to pull Lumet aside at a dinner party and ask him how he had achieve that impressive deluge.
Lumet spoke very highly of Paul Newman, who starred in the director's acclaimed 1982 feature, The Verdict. "What a shame it is," Lumet said after viewing a clip of Newman's performance in the picture, "that Paul has announced he'll no longer act in movies. That's a real loss."
Newman's alcoholic attorney, Lumet said, is a character who finds solace and comfort only in the past, who has nothing in the present to make life worth living, so he set out to make the film using only autumnal tones. "There's only one scene in the whole movie that has blue in it," Lumet said, "and that was the sky, and I couldn't hide it."
Asked why he thought that so many of his films dealt in one way or other with the justice system, he said growing up in a poor immigrant family had given him an interest in how the system worked. "All Jews have a certain interest in the workings of justice," he added.
He told a story of being a kid and pitching pennies with his pals. A cop would come around and break up the game, he said, but the cop would keep the pennies. This was in an era when a pack of cigarettes cost twenty cents, he said -- a penny a cigarette. So those eight pennies, which bought about a half a pack of cigarettes, were, to them, a substantial amount.
Asked about the melodramatic aspects of his most recent picture, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, he said the two brothers who plan the robbery were originally friends, but he felt the tension was heightened if they were brothers.
And he has no use for those who would mock melodrama as somehow a lesser form.
"Imagine it's a warm spring day in Greece," he said. "You pack a lunch and you join your friends at the theatre. It's a lovely setting, and you're enjoying a good play. After an hour and a half or so, the lead character has plucked his eyes out, there's blood streaming down his face, and he's holding two dead children in his arms that he fathered with his own mother.
"I'd say that's pretty melodramatic, but it works."
At 83, Lumet couldn't be sharper, more alert, or more energetic. He seemed far more like a man of 60 than a man in his eighties, and he harbors no thoughts of retirement. He's at work already on his next project, and if the actors, who are next at the bargaining table after the resolution of the writers' strike, don't put the project on hold, he expects to start shooting in April.
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Today marks the 75th anniversary of the debut of the very first drive-in theatre, Richard Hollingshead's Camden Drive-In in on the Camden/Pennsauken Township border in New Jersey. The fare on that historic night was the comedy Two White Arms (1932), which was then in rerelease as "Wives Beware."
If not, Bogart's table, J.J. Hunsecker's table in Sweet Smell of Success will do (I've not yet managed to suss out just which table that was).
Jimmy Stewart, had he managed to stick around, would have been 100 years old today. As an old movie buff, I have a fondness for many actors of the golden age of Hollywood, but none more than Mr. Stewart.
It's never a surprise when a 93-year-old man passes; still, I can't help but feel saddened by the passing of the great Richard Widmark.