Sidney Lumet

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

I return to that all-encompassing, critical discussion: What is the movie about? Work can’t begin until its limits are defined, and this is the first step in that process.

The Pawnbroker: How and why we create our own prisons.

Dog Day Afternoon: Freaks are not the freaks we think they are. We are much more connected to the most outrageous behavior than we know or admit.

Prince of the City: When we try to control everything, everything winds up controlling us. Nothing is what it seems.

Daniel: Who pays for the passions and commitments of the parents? They do, but so do the children, who never chose those passions and commitments.

The Fugitive Kind: The struggle to preserve what is sensitive and vulnerable both in ourselves and in the world.

The Anderson Tapes: The machines are winning.

Fail-Safe: The machines are winning.

12 Angry Men: Listen.

Network: The machines are winning. Or, to borrow from the NRA: TV doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt people.

Serpico: A portrait of a real rebel with a cause.

The Wiz: Home, in the sense of self-knowledge, is inside you. (This was true of the brilliant Garland movie and of L. Frank Baum’s book.)

Running on Empty: Who pays for the passions and commitments of the parents?

The Seagull: Why is everyone in love with the wrong person? (It’s no accident that in the last scene the principals play cards around a table, as if everyone got a bad deal and now needs a little luck.)

Long Day’s Journey Into Night: I must stop here. I don’t know what the theme is, other than whatever idea is inherent in the title. Sometimes a subject comes along and, as in this case, is expressed in such great writing, is so enormous, so all-encompassing, that no single theme can define it. Trying to pin it down limits something that should have no limits. I am very lucky to have had a text of that magnitude in my career. I found that the best way to approach it was to ask, to investigate, to let the play tell me

Print it and hope that nobody sees the compromise

Lighting is the most time consuming (and therefore most expensive) part of moviemaking. Most relighting takes minimally two hours.

you’ve had two hits in a row, you’re sizzling. Three hits and it’s “What do you want, baby? Just name it.” Before you say, “Hollywood—what do you expect?” I think you should check your own profession.

First comes an examination of each scene—in sequence, of course.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters

For me, farce is the comic equivalent of melodrama and comedy the comic equivalent of drama

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