Kevin Lally on Film

A four-time Academy nominee for Best Director, New York-based filmmaker Sidney Lumet received an honorary Oscar in 2005, two years before the release of his acclaimed final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. In 2011, on the occasion of his death at age 86, Film Journal International paid tribute to this great American director with excerpts from our January 1986 interview prior to the release of one of his lesser-known dramas, Power.

A social critic and an entertainer. A painstaking craftsman and an actors’ director. A New York filmmaker and a five-time Oscar nominee. No, this isn’t the cast of characters of Murder on the Hollywood Express. Just a partial view of the many facets of Sidney Lumet, whose 33rd film, the Lorimar production of Power, will be released on Jan. 31 by 20th Century Fox.

Power, the story of one election season in the life of a driven political consultant played by Richard Gere, finds the 61-year-old director on familiar ground. Like Lumet’s acclaimed 1976 satire Network, Power cries out against the pervasive influence of the mass media and what Lumet terms “the mechanization of our lives, the loss of contact.” As such, Power is part of a long line of thought-provoking, socially conscious films that make up a large portion of Lumet’s impressive canon: among them, Twelve Angry Men(his first film—and first Oscar nomination—in 1957), Fail Safe, The Pawnbroker, The Offense, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Equus, Prince of the City, The Verdict and Daniel.

But there’s more to Lumet than the sensibility that recently prompted the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California to honor him “for his personal commitment to justice so brilliantly portrayed through his craft.” He is also the director of light entertainments, such as The Anderson Tapes, Murder on the Orient Express, Deathtrap, Garbo Talks and, to most critics’ regret, the big-budget musical The Wiz.

The son of Yiddish stage star Baruch Lumet, Sidney Lumet began his show-business career as an actor, appearing in Yiddish theatre productions and on Broadway in Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End at age 11. That experience has clearly carried through to his film work, for Lumet’s rapport with actors is well-known. He’s worked with the biggest stars—Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Al Pacino, James Mason, Richard Burton—yet each of his films relies on tight-knit ensemble work.

As a technician, Lumet is also something of a legend, consistently bringing his films in under budget through meticulous pre-planning of lighting and camera placement (habits he cultivated working in television in the ’50s). The director’s economy doesn’t mean he skimps on style—if coaxed, he’ll talk about how The Verdict’s lighting scheme was designed after Caravaggio, or about the “Neco Wafer” colors of Garbo Talks.

Yet another dimension: Lumet is the classic New York filmmaker, having made 25 films in and around the Big Apple while amassing a body of work to rival that of any Hollywood denizen. Asked whether he feels any enmity from the West Coast, he replies, “I’m not out there enough to know if it exists. It might be true, because they’re very parochial. I’ve heard people out there say, ‘This is where movies were born.’ Well, movies were not born there—they don’t know their movie history.”

Film Journal visited Lumet last month at his new office near Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Dressed casually in jeans and a well-worn blue sweater, he proved to be as warm and unpretentious as his films are distinguished.

FJI: Do you mind Power being called a companion piece to Network?
SL: Not at all. That’s very true. That whole speech of Howard Beale’s [Network’s “mad prophet of the airwaves”] about the dehumanization process is very much at the core of this. It’s funny, at times working on the script I thought, my God, if Paddy [Chayefsky] were alive, what a delicious comedy we could have made out of this, a really, wild, funny comedy. But Paddy’s the only one that I’d trust with that kind of material.

FJI: Overall, Power is dramatic, but I still detect elements of satire running through it.
SL: The interesting thing is that, yeah, it’s slightly satiric, but it isn’t that far from reality. Paddy and I always used to talk about how everybody looked at Network as such a satire, but to us it was sheer reportage.

I thought when we first worked on the political commercials [for Power] that they were going too far, until I saw the commercials for the New York primary this year, particularly the ones between Andy Stein and Ken Lipper [for city council president]. It made ours look like lily-white heaven. It’s that old theme—if you do a satire about any segment of the society, in four months to four years, it’s no longer satiric, it’s the truth. Things keep moving to such extremes.

FJI: In one of your past interviews, you felt that part of your success during that period with Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico and Network might have coincided with a generation of moviegoers who were really interested in that kind of subject matter. Do you feel you’re losing that audience?
SL: I don’t know if that was true then; that was an idea that I had, because successes coming in that kind of accumulation are rare. (You know, Spielberg’s had four hits in a row—there’s something creepy about that.) So I didn’t know what to make of it, and I thought, have I suddenly found this in-tune thing with an audience? I don’t know. And I don’t know whether it’s true [I’m losing that audience], but I feel it’s true. I feel I’m talking to a smaller and smaller group. The kind of picture I’m interested in not just making but in seeing will occur less and less frequently.

FJI: Are you still against the use of the words “cinema” and “film”?
SL: Yes, more and more. By now, it’s gotten so ridiculous. Those dumb horror movies that come out three weeks before the Christmas rush—you know they’re only going to have a one or two-week run, yet it’s a Randolph Klyborg film!

FJI: Yet if anyone’s films have a right to be called films and taken seriously, it’s yours. It’s odd that you are so self-effacing about your work.
SL: Fred Astaire said it better than anybody. He said, ‘I take my work very seriously, but I don’t take myself very seriously.’ And I think everybody should write that on a big chalkboard and put it up in their god-damned office, ’cause it’s absolutely true. We’re doing movies, period, and hope they’re good. That’s not false modesty—I know damn well what I do on a movie, I know the director is important. I say “Print” and that’s a big decision, ’cause that’s what’s going to wind up on the screen. I’m not playing down the size of the job—it’s a big job—but it is a job.