Making Movies

Sidney Lumet

Action! – This book on the motion picture director’s craft doubles as an excellent book on the fiction writer’s craft. Among the questions raised and lessons loved:

• On “style” – Lumet argues form follows function, in movies as in architecture (Louis Sullivan’s great axiom). Surely the same holds true for crafting fiction?
• Lumet says one of his first steps as a director is to truly understand the scriptwriter’s intention. Do you have an intention before you begin writing, or do you discover what you want to say as you conjure people and their stories?
• During rehearsals of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Ralph Richardson asked a simple question. Lumet spent 45 minutes answering. Sir Richardson then paused a moment and sonorously said, “I see what you mean, dear boy: a little more cello, a little less flute.”
• Motion pictures are made by a series of still images filmed and viewed at 24 frames per second. So far, I’ve heard this math three times in the past month – described in “The Fablemans,” “Empire of Light,” and here.
• To depict a sense of a room “closing in” on the jurors in “12 Angry Men,” Lumet filmed the start of the movie with a normal range camera lens (28mm to 40mm), then shifted to 50mm, 75mm, and 100mm lenses over the course of the picture. In addition, he shifted from shooting above eye level to shooting at eye level to shooting below eye level as the movie progressed. The final shot, an exterior showing the jurors leaving the courthouse, was made with a wide-angle lens and the camera was moved to the highest above-eye-level position. Writers don’t use cameras and lenses, but we do use point of view and sentence rhythm to manipulate our scenes. Among our tools: first-person narration, second-person, third-person omniscient, third-person limited, third-person objective; and word choice, grammar, and syntax (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex sentences).
• Sometimes a director works around the limitations of the technology of his craft. For example, in filming the prolonged monologues in “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network,” Lumet had to use two cameras and numerous takes because he had to reload cameras with fresh film during takes as the monologues unfolded. How has moving from oral storytelling to paper and pen to typewriters to computers affected fiction writing? How have the technological and digital changes in publishing affected storytelling?
• It’s in the “cutting” room that a director really crafts the film’s “tempo,” seeing how all of the edits work in relation to each other. It’s in the cutting room, too, that the viewer gets closer to a subject, or farther away, or inside. All of these decisions should serve the story you’re telling. Seems to me that “cutting room” is a useful term for fiction writers, too, and a helpful way to approach editing.
• Film is a highly collaborative art. Fiction writing is less so, a largely individual effort though healthy partnerships with copyeditors, editors and publishers are essential. Both rely on feedback from first audiences and first readers.