by
Sidney Lumet
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This is particularly important on pictures not funded by a major studio. Some of the pictures I’ve done have been combinations of private financing and the selling off of “territories.” It works as follows: Let’s say the picture is budgeted at $10 million. Of this, $3 million is in what we call “above-the-line” costs: property, director, producer, writer, actors. The other $7 million is for “below-the-line” costs—that is, everything else: sets, locations, trucks, studio rental, location and studio crews, catering, legal fees (which are enormous), music, editing, mixing, equipment rental, living expenses, set dressing (furniture, curtains, plants, etc.). “Below-the-line,” in other words, is the cost of the physical production of the movie. You don’t have major studio backing, so the producer goes to any or all of the yearly meetings in Milan, Cannes, or Los Angeles and tries to sell the distribution rights for the movie to individual distributors in France, Italy, Brazil, Japan—every country in the world. If he can hold on to the television rights, he can then sell those off country by country. Videocassette rights. Cable television rights. In this way, he slowly accumulates the $10 million needed to make the movie: $2 million from Japan, $1 million from France, $75,000 from Brazil, $15,000 from Israel. No offer is too small.
useful
Most writers are so used to being slapped around that they’re stunned that I want them at rehearsal. Only twice has this backfired. Once, the writer fell in love with the leading lady. He showed his love by trying to make her feel as insecure as possible. He was hoping she’d ask him to help her with her part at night. She complained to me, and I had to ask him to leave. The second case involved a writer who was ready to surrender anything he wrote so that the star of the picture might hire him the next time he needed a rewrite. If the star asked a simple question, such as “I’m not sure the time of day is clear here,” the writer would go downstairs, we’d hear the clackety-clack of his portable, and he’d be back with the scene rewritten to take place in a watch factory. It got embarrassing. The actors began to refer to him as “Round Heels.” At the end of a week I told him the script was frozen and that he was free to go home.
Another example of knowing immediately was Dog Day Afternoon. Because of the then shocking material, I felt that my first obligation was to let the audience know this really had happened. That accounts for the whole opening section of the movie. We went out with a hidden camera and photographed every ordinary incident we could shoot on a hot August day. When we finally cut to Pacino, John Cazale, and Gary Springer sitting in a car in front of a bank, they seemed like just one more shot of a group of people on that oppressive summer day in New York. You weren’t even aware that the story had begun.
The actors are also learning about each other. They are revealing themselves to each other, sharing, in greater and greater amounts, their personal feelings. Henry Fonda told me that on the first day of shooting a Sergio Leone movie, he had to shoot a sexy love scene with Gina Lollobrigida. No rehearsal. Right to it. Actors are very different about love and sex scenes. Some shy away from them. The wife of an actor I worked with wouldn’t allow him to do them. I know that if an affair develops between two actors, it will usually begin on either the day I stage the love scene or the day I shoot it. An actor who must remain nameless wanted to be in on the casting of the woman who was going to play opposite him. When I asked why, he said he had to be able to relate to her sexually if he was to play the love scenes properly. So I asked him, what if the script called for him to kill her? Would he have to relate to her murderously in order to play the part? Things were a little testy between us for the next few days.
lmao
12 Angry Men, Boris Kaufman, photographer. It never occurred to me that shooting an entire picture in one room was a problem. In fact, I felt I could turn it into an advantage. One of the most important dramatic elements for me was the sense of entrapment those men must have felt in that room. Immediately, a “lens plot” occurred to me. As the picture unfolded, I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller. That meant that I would slowly shift to longer lenses as the picture continued. Starting with the normal range (28 mm to 40 mm), we progressed to 50 mm, 75 mm, and 100 mm lenses. In addition, I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, and then, by lowering the camera, shot the second third at eye level, and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end, the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie. On the final shot, an exterior that showed the jurors leaving the courtroom, I used a wide-angle lens, wider than any lens that had been used in the entire picture. I also raised the camera to the highest above-eye-level position. The intention was to literally give us all air, to let us finally breathe, after two increasingly confined hours.
sick
The overriding consideration for me, as is apparent in all these examples, is that the techniques come from the material. They should change as the material changes. Sometimes it’s important not to do anything with the camera, to just shoot it “straight.” And equally important for me is that all this work stay hidden. Good camera work is not pretty pictures. It should augment and reveal the theme as fully as the actors and directors do. The light Sven Nykvist has created for so many of Ingmar Bergman’s movies is directly connected to what those movies are about. The light in Winter Light is totally different than the light in Fanny and Alexander. The difference in lighting is related to the difference in the themes of the movies. That’s the true beauty in movie photography.
This opens up an important area. When the actor is being photographed looking at someone off-camera, he can obviously see past him to the whole darkened studio. We call this the actor’s “eyeline.” It can involve both sides of the camera. Just before we roll, any well-trained AD will always say, “Clear the eyeline, please.” If William Holden is making love to Faye Dunaway, he doesn’t want to see some teamster sipping coffee behind her. He doesn’t want to see anybody other than Faye watching him, even if he has great concentration. Since most crews don’t understand this, “Clear the eyeline” becomes a never-ending refrain.
But in a movie, every shot is preceded or followed by another shot. That’s why the juxtaposition of shots is such a great tool. In the agonizing, soul-baring fights in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the shots kept getting wider and wider as father and son found themselves telling each other the cruel, ugly truths about each other. At the culmination of the fight, two extreme close-ups ended the scene; the frames were so tight that foreheads and chins were lost. The impact of the close-ups was doubled because of the wide shots that had preceded them. In Prince of the City, when Ciello was considering suicide, the presence of the sky mattered so much because the sky had never appeared before in the movie. In The Verdict, the most important transition in the movie was illuminated by the close-ups of Paul Newman examining a Polaroid photograph. He had taken the picture of the victim, and he watched it develop. As the photograph took on life, he did too. I could feel the present breaking through for a man who, up until then, had been trapped in the detritus of his past life. It was the intercutting between the developing Polaroid and the close-ups of Newman that made the transition palpable.
sweet
From everything I’ve mentioned so far, it’s apparent that preplanning extends to the editing phase as well. However, one of the joys of the cutting room is that sometimes the editing can help turn a scene that isn’t working into one that does. This often involves shortening it. Other times, a shift in emphasis can make a scene more interesting. Because movies are physically larger than life-size, they tend to make the point of a scene or character clearer sooner. In Daniel, Daniel is searching for some sane explanation of the cataclysms that have overtaken his life: his parents’ executions in Sing Sing and the mental collapse of his sister. There were two scenes where Daniel visits his sister in a psychiatric hospital. The second scene, where he carries his now catatonic sister around the room, wasn’t as moving as I’d hoped. I eventually realized that nothing was wrong with the scene. The problem lay in the way the first scene between them had been edited: the scene had emphasized him. As a result, the second scene provided no new revelation about him. It seemed redundant. After the first scene was recut to emphasize the sister’s pain, both scenes played much better. She was very moving in the first scene, and we still had something new to discover about Daniel in the second.
When the score is predictable, when it duplicates in melody and arrangement the action up there on the screen, we call it “mickey-mousing.” The reference is obviously to cartoon music, which duplicates everything down to Jerry kicking Tom’s teeth in. Pictures with scores like that are probably not injured by them. Chances are, the music is not the only cliché in the movie. It’s probably loaded with them.