Sidney Lumet looks to the future

By Cameron French

TORONTO (Reuters) - Sidney Lumet, one of the group of directors who in the 1970s created some of America’s greatest films, is finding he has some pretty big shoes to fill when he makes a movie these days -- his own.

The 83-year-old last year released courtroom drama "Find Me Guilty", which suffered from comparisons to his 1957 classic "12 Angry Men". Now he’s finding that people are likening his latest heist flick "Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead" to one of his ’70s masterpieces, "Dog Day Afternoon."

For most, such a comparison would be pure flattery, but for Lumet, who nabbed his first Oscar nomination 49 years ago, the new film stands on its own in a career that includes favourites "Serpico", "The Verdict", and "Network".

"A number of people have asked me about its relationship to ’Dog Day’. I don’t see any relationship," Lumet told Reuters at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Nevertheless, the film bears a thematic connection to Lumet’s gritty crime dramas of eras past, and has been praised in some early reviews as his best work in several years.

In the film, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke star as two brothers who plan to rob a mom-and-pop jewellery store. The problem is, the mom and pop are actually .....continued below

Advertisement starts

Advertisement ends

Also featuring Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei, the film opens with the heist gone wrong, and moves both backward and forward in time, revealing that the true motives of the main characters as it shifts through several different points of view.

Having the key players part of the same family upped the tension, and in the end makes the characters’ actions more plausible, Lumet said.

"Because the stakes would be higher, there would be a greater pressure, and if the pressure is greater, it would justify more extreme behaviour," he said.

"I think we’re all capable of much more dastardly things than we give ourselves credit for."

NOT LIVING IN THE PAST

Lumet, along with contemporaries such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman, stood tall in the 1970s, an era called by some critics the last golden age of American cinema.

But the director holds no reverence for his heyday.

"There’s never a last great (era). The last great one before the ’70s was the ’50s. The last great one before the ’50s was the ’30s," he said.

"I think there are terrific movies around now. I think the actors, they keep their commercial bona fides intact by doing ’Ocean’s 11’, ’Ocean’s 12’, ’Ocean’s 13’, and then for no money taking off and doing pictures they really care about."

Often rumoured to be on the cusp of retirement, Lumet said he is planning another film, with a production start date likely next year. And he is staying on film’s cutting edge, having shot his last two films in high definition digital video, which requires special projectors that few theatres have.

Page: 12next