• The Craft of Sidney Lumet

    Director Sidney Lumet died this past weekend, at eighty-six. Just a year ago, he agreed to be interviewed for our release of The Fugitive Kind, the first of his films in the Criterion Collection and, therefore, the first opportunity we had to sit down and talk to him. Lumet, deep into the development of a new screenplay and the picture of health and vitality, spoke about his career, which he began in live television in the earliest days of that medium before going on to spend several decades making the riveting, mainly New York–set films for which he was so justly famous. His recollections of working on 1960’s The Fugitive Kind were extraordinarily vivid, and the session resulted in an interview that is something akin to a moviemaking master class. Especially revealing is his discussion of acting—Lumet guided performances by the likes of Katharine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker, Al Pacino in Serpico, and Paul Newman in The Verdict. In this excerpt from the interview, the director remembers working with Marlon Brando on one of The Fugitive Kind’s most important monologues, and in doing so reveals his own expert methods.

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5 comments

  • By LJ
    April 11, 2011
    03:57 PM

    R.I.P. Sidney Lumet You will be missed.
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  • By David Hollingsworth
    April 11, 2011
    04:00 PM

    Sidney Lumet, you were a brilliant director, and film history won't be the same without you.
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  • By Michael Sears
    April 11, 2011
    04:17 PM

    Sidney Lumet's direction of the televised version of O'Neills The Iceman Cometh is a standard that will never be surpassed. Incredible!
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  • By Steven Flores
    April 11, 2011
    06:01 PM

    Thank you Sidney for all of your contributions to film. You will be missed. And "12 Angry Men" is your best film ever.
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  • By Mike Sutton
    April 12, 2011
    05:08 PM

    RIP Sidney and a nice tribute. Might this perhaps be a good time for Criterion to consider doing justice to some of his other films - "The Offence" perhaps since its an MGM property.
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