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Sidney Lumet
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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.
As I said earlier, I don’t want to “mickey-mouse.” I want the score to say something that nothing else in the picture is saying.
For instance, in The Verdict, nothing much was ever revealed about Paul Newman’s background. At one point there’s an indication that he went through a rough divorce and was the fall guy for his father-in-law’s shady law firm. But we dealt with nothing in his youth or childhood. I told Johnny Mandel that I wanted the deep, buried sound of a religious childhood: parochial school, children’s church choir. He was possibly an acolyte. Since the picture was about this man’s resurrection, he had to have been brought up religiously, so he would have somewhere to fall from. The picture could then be about his return to faith. The score’s function was to provide the state of grace from which to fall.
cool
The Pawnbroker had as complex a score as I’ve ever worked on. In the opening scene, Sol Nazerman, a Jewish refugee from Germany, is sitting in a suburban backyard, soaking up the sun. His sister asks for a loan so she and her family can take a vacation in Europe that summer. To Nazerman, everything about Europe is a cesspool. He says, “Europe? It’s rather like a stink, as I remember.” The next sequence shows him driving into New York City, to his pawnshop in Harlem. Those two scenes set up the conception of the score. Earlier, I said that The Pawnbroker was about how and why we establish our own prisons. At the beginning of the movie, Nazerman is encased in his own coldness. He has tried desperately to feel no emotion, and he has succeeded. The story of the movie is how his life in Harlem breaks down the wall of ice with which he has surrounded himself.
The concept of the score was “Harlem triumphant!” —that the life, pain, and energy of his life there forced him to feel again. I decided I wanted two musical themes: one representing Europe, the other Harlem. The European theme was to be classical in its nature, precise but rather soft, a feeling of something old. The Harlem theme, by contrast, would be percussive, with lots of brass, wild in feeling—containing the most modern jazz sound that could be created.
When I haven’t been able to find a musical concept that adds to the movie, I haven’t used a score. Studios hate the idea of a picture without music. It scares them. But if the first obligation of Dog Day Afternoon was to tell the audience that this event really happened, how could you justify music weaving in and out? The Hill was also done in a naturalistic style, so no score was used. In Network, I was afraid that music might interfere with the jokes. As the picture went on, the speeches got longer and longer. It was clear at the first screening that any music would be fighting the enormous amount of dialogue. Again, no score.
Finally, movies are an art. I believe that no combination of the highest-grossing movies would attract the attention that movies have without the work of Marcel Carne, King Vidor, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, David Lean, George Cukor, William Wellman, Preston Sturges, Yasujiro Ozu, Carol Reed, John Huston, Satyajit Ray, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, John Ford, William Wyler, Vittorio De Sica, Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Elia Kazan, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Vigo, Frank Capra, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ernst Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Steven Spielberg, and so many others. These are the people who have made movies an art form, who have driven movies on a two-track course. At the same time that Batman Returns grosses forty million dollars on its opening weekend, My Life as a Dog is moving four hundred and twenty people to laughter and tears in a small theater. The amount of attention paid to movies is directly related to pictures of quality. It’s the movies that are works of art that create this interest, even if they’re not on the ten-highest-grosses list too often.
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