Sundays with Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies”

A weekly series featuring reflections on filmmaking by one of the truly great movie directors.

Roger Ebert said this about Making Movies: “It has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.” That alone is enough reason to read this book authored by Sidney Lumet.

Known as an actor’s director, Lumet directed 17 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Bergman, Dunaway, Finch and Straight won Oscars for their performances in a Lumet movie.

Among his filmmaking credits are such stellar movies as 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Equus, Prince of the City, The Verdict, and Running on Empty. He also has five screenwriting credits including Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan.

As I’ve done with Sundays with Ray Bradbury and Sunday’s with Stephen King’s “On Writing,” I have worked my way through Lumet’s book focusing on insights applicable to the craft of screenwriting.

Here are links to the individual Sunday articles for the entire series:

1. “What’s important is that the material involve me personally on some level.”
2. “What is the movie about? I’m not talking about plot… What is it about emotionally? What is the theme of the movie, the spine, the arc? What does the movie mean to me?”
3. “After two weeks of rehearsal, I had a complete graph in my head of where I wanted each level of emotion in the movie to be.”
4. “I was brought up with the concept that the one who had the initial idea, who suffered through the agony of getting it down on paper, was the one who had to be satisfied.”
5. “We are two different people trying to combine our talents, so it’s critical that we agree on the intention of the screenplay.”
6. “Inevitability is the key. In a well-made drama, I want to feel: ‘Of course — that’s where it was heading all along.’”
7. “It’s also important that as a director I understand each and every line.”
8. “The point is that there’s no war between the visual and the aural. Why not the best of both?”
9. “Dialogue is like anything else in movies. It can be a crutch, or when used well, it can enhance, deepen, and reveal.”
10. On working with Paddy Chayefsky: “We had a wonderful give-and-take during both rehearsal time and shooting time.”
11. “In a sense, a movie is constantly being rewritten.”
12. “A director is ‘writing’ when he makes a picture. But I think it’s important to keep the words specific. Writing is writing.”
13. “There are times when writers are a pain in the ass. (I’m sure any number of writers have felt the same about me.)”
14. “Surely the way you tell that story should relate somehow to what that story is. Because that’s what style is: the way you tell a particular story.”
15. “Stories take various forms. There are four primary forms of storytelling — tragedy, drama, comedy, and farce.”
16. “We read the script nonstop first, then spend the next two days breaking it down into its components.”
17. “Good camera work is not pretty pictures. It should augment and reveal the theme as fully as the actors and directors do.”
18. “The road to the studio is uneventful and quiet. I study my script and think.”
19. “From the moment the actors start working, I play the scene along with them. I see the lines inside my head, I sense their movements and feel their emotions.”
20. “There are times when a picture takes on a third meaning, a life of its own, which neither the director nor the writer knew was there.”
21. “In a movie, every shot is preceded or followed by another shot. That’s why the juxtaposition of shots is such a great tool.”
22. “The second but equally critical element in editing is tempo.”
23. “One of the indications of good movie music: the immediate recurrence of the visual elements in the picture that the music supports.”
24. “Everything about the movie has become incredibly boring.”
25. “Again, a darkened room. How many hours, how many days, have I spent in dark rooms, looking at this movie?”
26. “My job is to care about and be responsible for every frame of every movie I make.”

Making Movies is one of the most highly regarded books on filmmaking. In going through it week by week — with a focus on what Lumet says as it relates to the craft of screenwriting — my hope is we may learn valuable lessons on storytelling we may bring to our writing.

Other series worth reading:

“Conversations” with Billy Wilder

Guide to Aristotle’s “Poetics”

Screenwriting Advice From The Past: Loos & Emerson (1920)

Songwriters On Songwriting

Sundays with Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing”

Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing”

For more background on Sidney Lumet’s filmmaking career, go here.