Highlights - Making Movies
"There are no minor decisions in moviemaking."
Sidney Lumet was a prolific film director who’s made many American classics, including 12 Angry Men (1957), my favourite film I saw in 2023.
Making Movies (Goodreads, Amazon) is a book he wrote in 1995, in which he draws upon decades of experience and delineates each stage in the movie-making process. If you’ve ever been even slightly interested in the behind-the-scenes of film production this is a fantastic read. It’s quite short, insightful, opinionated, and filled with a love for the artform.
The only major downside of this book is that it’s full of references and examples exclusively from movies Lumet himself directed, and so if you’re not familiar with his filmography it’s sometimes hard to follow what he’s saying.
Either way, I thought that there’s certain passages in here that’ll interest even the most casual movie-goer who might not want to read the entire book. Hence this collection of highlights below.
Although I’ve added links and boldened my favourite quotes here and there, all words below are Lumet’s and not mine.
I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport - neither of which belonged in a period movie. Only the person who's made the movie knows what goes into the decisions that result in any piece of work.
—
Actually, I've been directing this picture for some time. Depending on how complicated the physical production of the movie will be, I've been in preproduction anywhere from two and a half to six months. And, depending on how much work had to be done on the script, perhaps for months before preproduction began. Major decisions have already been made.
—
There are no minor decisions in moviemaking. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down around my head many months later.
—
I also make sure that I have the time to read a script straight through. A script can have a very different feeling if reading it is interrupted, even for half an hour. The final movie will be seen uninterrupted, so why should reading the script for the first time be any different?
—
Because the truth is that nobody knows what that magic combination is that produces a first-rate piece of work. I'm not being modest. There's a reason some directors can make first-rate movies and others never will. But all we can do is prepare the groundwork that allows for the "lucky accidents" that make a first-rate movie happen. Whether or not it will happen is something we never know.
—
Whatever I am, whatever the work will amount to, has to come out of my subconscious. I can't approach it cerebrally. Obviously, this is right and correct for me. Each person must approach the problem in whatever way works best for him.
—
I don't know how to choose work that illuminates what my life is about. I don't know what my life is about and don't examine it. My life will define itself as I live it. The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it's enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.
—
Lighting is the most time consuming (and therefore most expensive) part of moviemaking. Most relighting takes minimally two hours.
—
Do mountains of preparation kill spontaneity? Absolutely not. I've found that it's just the opposite. When you know what you're doing, you feel much freer to improvise.
—
Preparation allows the "lucky accident" that we're always hoping for to happen.
—
In a good drama, the line where characters and story blend should be indiscernible. I once read a very well-written script with first-rate dialogue. But the characters had nothing specific to do with the story line. That particular story could've happened to many different kinds of people. In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. Melodrama makes story line its highest priority, and everything is subservient to story. For me, farce is the comic equivalent of melodrama and comedy the comic equivalent of drama.
—
I think inevitability is the key. In a well-made drama, I want to feel: "Of course that's where it was heading all along" And yet the inevitability mustn't eliminate surprise. There's not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn't mean predictability. The script must still keep you off balance, keep you surprised, entertained, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give you the sense that the story had to turn out that way.
—
Normally, I'm not concerned about audience reaction. But when you touch on sex and death, two aspects of life that hit a deep core, there's no way of knowing what an audience will do. They could laugh at the wrong places, catcall, start trying to talk back to the screen—any of a hundred defenses that people throw up when they're embarrassed, when what's on the screen is getting too close, or when they're looking at something they've never confronted before.
—
In the early days of television, when the "kitchen sink" school of realism held sway, we always reached a point where we "explained" the character. Around two-thirds of the way through, someone articulated the psychological truth that made the character the person he was. Chayefsky and I used to call this the "rubber-ducky" school of drama: "Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that's why he's a deranged killer." That was the fashion then, and with many producers and studios it still is.
I always try to eliminate the rubber-ducky explanations. A character should be clear from his present actions. And his behavior as the picture goes on should reveal the psychological motivations. If the writer has to state the reasons, something's wrong in the way the character has been written. Dialogue is like anything else in movies. It can be a crutch, or when used well, it can enhance, deepen, and reveal.
—
Most writers hate actors. And yet stars are the keys to getting a picture approved by a studio. Some directors have enormous power, but nobody has the power of one of the top stars. If the star demands it, any studio will drop the writer in less than thirty seconds—and the director too, for that matter.
—
Chayefsky used to say, "There are two kinds of scenes: the Pet the Dog scene and the Kick the Dog scene. The studio always wants a Pet the Dog scene so everybody can tell who the hero is."
—
Most writers are so used to being slapped around that they're stunned that I want them at rehearsal.
—
Doctorow was thrilled, though he worried that the picture might be injured once it was turned over to a studio for distribution. I told him this couldn't happen, because contractually I had final cut: Final cut means that whatever I hand in as the final picture cannot be touched in any audio or visual component. This is the last thing any studio wants to give up, so its very difficult to achieve.
—
At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that on the best of movies a third intention emerges, which neither the writer nor the director can foresee. I don't know why this happens, but it does. On every movie I've done that I felt was really good, a strange amalgam was reached that surprised both the writer and me. This is the surprise that Arthur Miller talked about. Of course, the original intent is present. But all of the individual contributions from all the different departments add up to a total far greater than their individual parts. Moviemaking works very much like an orchestra: the addition of various harmonies can change, enlarge, and clarify the nature of the theme.
—
There are four primary forms of storytelling — tragedy, drama, comedy, and farce.
—
Someone once asked me what making a movie was like. I said it was like making a mosaic. Each setup is like a tiny tile. You color it, shape it, polish it as best you can. You'll do six or seven hundred of these, maybe a thousand. (There can easily be that many setups in a movie.) Then you literally paste them together and hope it's what you set out to do. But if you expect the final mosaic to look like anything, you'd better know what you're going for as you work on each tiny tile.
—
When we're sitting at rushes, watching yesterday's work, the greatest compliment we can give each other is, "Good work. We're all making the same movie." That's style.
—
I worked with Marlon Brando on The Fugitive Kind. He's a suspicious fellow. I don't know if he bothers anymore, but Brando tests the director on the first or second day of shooting. What he does is to give you two apparently identical takes. Except that on one, he is really working from the inside; and on the other, he's just giving you an indication of what the emotion was like. Then he watches which one you decide to print. If the director prints the wrong one, the "indicated" one, he's had it. Marlon will either walk through the rest of the performance or make the director's life hell, or both. Nobody has the right to test people like that, but I can understand why he does that. He doesn't want to pour out his inner life to someone who can't see what he's doing.
—
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.
—
In Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Russian Princess Dragomiroff. She wanted to play the retarded Swedish maid. I wanted Ingrid Bergman. I let her play the maid. She won an Academy Award. I bring this up because self-knowledge is important in so many ways to an actor.
—
Knowing your feelings lets you know when those feelings are real as opposed to when you're simulating them. No matter how insecure, almost all the stars I've worked with have a high degree of self-knowledge. They may hate what they see, but they do see themselves. And you thought all that gazing into the mirror was just vanity. I think it's self-knowledge that serves as the integrating element between the actor's natural persona and the character he's playing.
—
How can we get actors with totally different life experiences and acting techniques to look like they're making the same movie?
The answer is remarkably simple, but like all simple things, it's hard to achieve. Just as in life, really talking and listening to one another is very, very difficult. In acting, that's the basis on which everything is built. By now I have an almost set speech I make just before the first reading of the script. I will say to the actors, "Go as far as you feel. Do as much or as little as you want to. If you feel it, let it fly. Don't worry whether it's the right emotion or the wrong one. We'll find out. That's what rehearsals are for. But minimally, talk to each other and listen to each other. Don't worry about losing your place in the script as long as you're really talking and listening to each other. Try to pick up on what you just heard."
—
Most good actors have their best take early. Usually, by the fourth time you've done it (Take 4), they've poured out the best in themselves. This is particularly true of big, emotional scenes, Movies, however, are a technical medium. Things go wrong despite preparations. A door slams off the set, the microphone gets in the shot, the camera operator goofs, the dolly pusher misses his cue. When this happens, the actor has an awful time. Having "emptied out" once, he now has to fill up again. The only way around the problem is to shoot take after take, because the "refill" can come at any time after Take 8 or Take 10 or Take 12.
—
If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third star is the camera.
—
But changing lenses for the amount of information the lens gathers (its "field") is only a partial use of a lens. Lenses have different feelings about them. Different lenses will tell a story differently.
—
Lenses have different characteristics. No lens truly sees what the human eye sees, but the lenses that come closest are the midrange lenses, from 28 mm to 40 mm. Wide-angle lenses (9 mm to 24 mm) tend to distort the picture; the wider the lens, the greater the distortion. The distortions are spatial. Objects seem farther apart, especially objects lined up from foreground to background. Vertical lines seem to be forced closer together at the top of the frame.
Longer lenses (from 50 mm upward) compress the space. Objects that are lined up from foreground to background seem closer together.
—
In addition, I shot the first third of the movie [12 Angry Men] 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.
—
During shooting, most directors' closest relationship is with the cameraman. That's why most directors work with the same cameraman year after year, as long as the style can be achieved.
—
The script girl may whisper in my ear, "He's picking up the drink a little late." When we shot over his shoulder yesterday, he picked up his drink at the beginning of the sentence. If he's now picking it up at the end of the sentence, I'll have a problem later in the editing room when I want to cut from yesterday's shot to today's.
—
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.
—
Sometimes the actor will ask for another take. I always go along with that. About half the time the actor does do better. Sometimes if I feel the actor is struggling with a scene, I'll call "Print" even though I don't intend to use the take. I do it as encouragement. When actors have heard "Print," they know they have a good one in the can and they relax. This frees them for something more spontaneous.
—
By the way, I always call "Action" in the mood of the scene. If it's a gentle moment, I'll say "Action" just loud enough for the actors to hear me. If it's a scene that requires a lot of energy, I'll bark out "Action" like a drill seargent. It's like a conductor giving the upbeat.
—
When this magic happens, the best thing you can do is get out of the way of the picture. Let it tell you how to do it from now on. I think it's quite clear by now that my movies proceed with great control and replanning. But on those pictures when this feeling arose at rushes, I'd slowly jettison a lot of the ideas I'd formed before shooting began. I'd trust my momentary impulses on the set and go with them.
—
I guess I'm talking about self-deception. In any creative effort, I think that's absolutely necessary. Creative work is very hard, and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to begin. To start, you have to believe that it's going to turn out well. And so often it doesn't. I've talked to novelists, conductors, painters about this. Unfailingly, they all admitted that self-deception was important to them. Perhaps a better word is "belief." But I tend to be a bit more cynical about it, so I use "self-deception."
—
Don't let the difficulty of actually achieving a shot make you think that the shot is good. In the finished movie, no one in the audience will know that it took three days to light or ten people to move the camera, the walls, or whatever.
—
Don't let a technical failure destroy the shot for you. Obviously, any mechanical error endangers the reality of the movie. And those errors must be eliminated in the future. But you have to keep your eye on the dramatic impact of the shot. Is there life there? That's what matters.
—
For many years, the cliché about editing was: "Pictures are made in the cutting room." That's nonsense. No movie editor ever put anything up on the screen that hadn't been shot.
—
In the thirties and forties, directors rarely cut their own movies. The studio system was totally compartmentalized. There was an editing department. It had its chief editor, to whom all the editors reported. The chief editor saw the cut movie even before the director did. In fact, the director might not see his movie until it had been completely finished. He was probably off doing another movie. In those days, directors under contract to a studio did four or five, sometimes six, movies a year. Like everyone else at the studio, they were simply assigned to a new job as soon as they had finished their last one.
—
Movies are full of battles you think you've won, only to have to fight them over and over again.
—
Like everything else in movies, editing is a technical job with important artistic ramifications. While it's absurd to believe that pictures are "made" in the cutting room, they sure as hell can be ruined there.
—
I've read that a certain picture was "beautifully edited." There's no way they could know how well or poorly it was edited. It might look badly edited, but because of how poorly it was shot, it may in fact be a miracle of editing that the story even makes sense. Conversely, the movie may look well edited, but who knows what was left on the cutting room floor. In my view, only three people know how good or bad the editing was: the editor, the director, and the cameraman. They're the only ones who know everything that was shot in the first place.
—
The second but equally critical element in editing is tempo. [...] Think of each cut as the beat of a visual metronome. In fact, quite often entire sequences are cut in a rhythm that will accommodate the musical scoring that will be added later. The more cuts, the faster the tempo will seem. That's why melodramas and chase sequences use so many cuts. Just as in music, fast tempo usually means energy and excitement.
—
In movies where I'm not using tempo for characterization, I am very careful to continually change the pace of the movie in the editing. The use of sustained shots, with no intercuts, is laid out very carefully at the beginning, before shooting begins. If it's going to wind up a long uncut take in the final movie, chances are that I'll want camera movement. That means I'll want a floor that I can dolly on so that I can move freely. In my original conference with the art director, at least sixteen weeks before my entry into the cutting room, I'm already thinking of the tempos of my final cut. I may not use the sustained take in its entirety. I may chop it up. But if I haven't shot it, I can't create it now in the cutting room.
—
I said earlier that there are no small decisions in moviemaking. Nowhere does this apply more than in editing. One of the miracles of film cutting is how a change in reel 2 affects something in reel 10. (A one-hour-fifty-minute movie will be composed of eleven reels: ten minutes per reel.) One can never lose sight of the relationship of cut to cut, and reel to reel.
—
If the cliché about pictures being made in the cutting room is false, that other cliché, "It'll play better when we add the music," is true. Almost every picture is improved by a good musical score. To start with, music is a quick way to reach people emotionally. Over the years, movie music has developed so many clichés of its own that the audience immediately absorbs the intention of the moment: the music tells them, sometimes even in advance. Generally, that would be the sign of a bad score, but even bad scores work.
—
After the screen-writer, I think movie composers are violated more often than anyone. Everybody thinks he knows something about music and wants to get his two cents in about the score. If the composer comes up with something too original-that is, something the producers or the studio people haven't heard before-the score can get thrown out.
—
Working in movies is the fatal compromise composers make. In return for very good pay, they go to work writing for a form that can never belong to them. Music, clearly one of our greatest art forms, must be subjugated to the needs of the picture. That's the nature of moviemaking. Even though it may take over completely at certain points, its function is primarily supportive.
—
As must be clear by now, I feel that the less an audience is aware of how we're achieving an effect, the better the picture will be.
—
When tracks are beyond rescue or a word is unclear, we "loop" it. The actor comes into a recording studio. The scene or line is placed on a repeating film loop. The original sound is fed into an earphone. The actor then says the line in the quiet of the studio, trying to get exact lip synchronization. There is an editor in charge of looping called the ADR editor.
—
Scenes of violence, whether car crashes or battles or fires, can use all sixty-four tracks on the board or even more. A simple car crash can easily have twelve sound-effects tracks: glass breaking, metal tearing, metal folding, tires on macadam, tires blowing (two tracks), impact (three tracks, one of them timed a frame late so that it can have "echo" added to it), car doors popping open (two tracks), one overall crash effect to provide body for the basic sound.
—
As in so many other aspects of American life, audience research is one of the dominant factors in the distribution of movies. When the picture is turned over to the studio, the first thing they arrange is a preview.
—
I think previews can be helpful for certain pictures. In a comedy or melodrama, for example, the audience is part of the movie. By that I mean that if they're not laughing at the comedy or not frightened by the melo-drama, the movie's in trouble. In comedies, changing the timing of a reaction shot can make all the difference in whether the joke works.
—
Then comes the big question [to the focus group]. He says, "What didn't you like about the movie?" Sometimes there is an awkward pause. Then one person suggests something, then another speaks, and in no time there's a feeding frenzy, with the body of the movie as dinner. There are disagreements, wrangling. Stronger personalities dominate. People who liked all of it have nothing to say, so they sit quietly by.
Every comment is being absorbed by the studio people. Later, many of their conversations begin with, "You know, this came up in the focus group, and I've always felt it was a problem." That only one person might have said it doesn't matter. It's treated as if the entire group voiced the same objection. Every opinion, no matter how wild, is given weight, and suggestions about what needs fixing are directly related to what the execs heard at the focus group discussion.
—
Equally if not more important is the percentage [of focus group participants] that would "definitely" recommend the movie to others. This is considered a strong indication of whether or not a picture will receive strong "word of mouth," the main ingredient of a successful commercial engagement. The "numbers" can determine a great deal: release date, number of theaters, and, most important, advertising budget.
—
How many movies went through changes dictated by "Audience Surveys" and lost whatever quality or individuality they might have had? We'll never know.
—
Commercial success has no relationship to a good or bad picture. Good pictures become hits. Good pictures become flops. Bad pictures make money, bad pictures lose money. The fact is that no one really knows. If anyone did know, he'd be able to write his own ticket. And there have been two who have. Through some incredible talent, Walt Disney knew. Today Steven Spielberg seems to.
—
That night at dinner, I literally burst into tears. My wife asked what was wrong. I said I was just so tired of fighting. I'd fought for the script, for the right cast, then fought the heat of the desert, the exhaustion, the British rules about extras. I felt like Margaret Booth, who had fought with me about the same picture. And now I was fighting about an idiotic ad.
And that's what so much of making movies is about: fighting.
—
One studio I know will not green-light a picture unless it stars Tom Cruise or his equivalent. This has two immediate effects. First, the stars' salaries skyrocket. And because major stars are getting ten and twelve million a picture, even supporting actors' salaries rise proportionately. Two to three million dollars is not uncommon now for an actor who was getting $750,000 for a picture. The average cost of a movie is up to $25 million and still rising. The second effect is that the agencies that represent the stars are automatically in a more powerful position.
[...]
In all fairness, I should mention that another company makes its decision to green-light a picture strictly on the basis of script and budget. Then they get the best stars they can. Over all, they're often more successful than the star-based studio.
—
Moreover, as far as I know, no studio chief has ever died poor. But an awful lot of writers, actors, and directors have including D. W. Griffth.
—
My job is to care about and be responsible for every frame of every movie I make. I know that all over the world there are young people borrowing from relatives and saving their allowances to buy their first cameras and put together their first student movies, some of them dreaming of becoming famous and making a fortune. But a few are dreaming of finding out what matters to them, of saying to themselves and to anyone who will listen, "I care." A few of them want to make good movies.