Excerpt from Making Movies
Sidney Lumet:
There are many reasons for accepting a movie. I’m not a believer in waiting for “great” material that will produce a “masterpiece”. What’s important is that the material involve me personally on some level. And the levels will vary.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is everything one can hope for. Four characters come together and leave no area of life unexplored.
However, I once did a picture called The Appointment. It had fine dialogue by James Salter, but a dreadful story line that had been handed to him by an Italian producer. I presume Jim needed the money. The picture had to be shot in Rome. Until then, I had been having great difficulty in finding out how to use color. I’d been brought up on black-and-white movies, and almost all the movies I had made until then were in black and white. The two color movies I had done, Stage Struck and The Group, had left me dissatisfied. The color seemed fake. The color seemed to make the movie even more unreal. Why did black and white seem real and color false? Obviously, I was using it wrong or — much more serious — not using it at all.
I had seen a movie of Antonioni’s called Red Desert. It had been photographed by Carlo Di Palma. Here, at last, was color being used for drama, for furthering the story, for deepening the characters. I called Di Palma in Rome, and he was available for The Appointment. I happily accepted the picture. I knew that Carlo would get me through my “color block”. And he did.
That was a perfectly sensible reason to do the movie.
heh heh
The levels vary indeed.. Vin Diesel, Sheila!
The colour-block does sound more like a reason he came up with after accepting as a favour to James Salter.. which was a damn good enough reason to begin with.
If it’s the same James Salter who is a novelist – damn, can that guy write. His books are kind of about nothing, but the prose is so good I feel like: “Well, that’s it, I should never pick up the pen again.”
I’m not familiar with him, Sheila, but I will add him to The List.. The ‘damn good enough reason’ I had in mind was that if Sidney thought that he should do the job as a favour to him.. then that’s a damn good enough reason.
His big success was, I think, a book called … something like Sportsman’s Paradise – which I haven’t read. Something like that.
The only book of his I read was his novel Light Years. Magnificent writing.
This Light Years?
There’s The Hunters, down as his first novel, which looks like it’s definitely by the James Salter Sidney is referring to..
And this Soldiers Once and Still would seem to confirm that.
I’ve got about 60 hits (some duplicates) on the Amazon search.. I may have to narrow it down to pick a beginning.. Light Years gets a by for at least a couple of rounds of that process. :)
Light Years – yes, that’s the one in the link. (And don’t read the plot – because it sounds very very formulaic – as it is. The reason to read the book is his beautiful writing).
Maybe his first book was called The Sporting Life???
He hasn’t written that much – but he did just come out with another book – a memoir, I believe.
A Sport and a Pastime may be the title you have in mind.. but The Hunters seems to be listed as his first novel..
The memoir is Burning the Days: Recollection..
looks like there’s a collection of short stories called Dusk and other stories – that may be a good place to begin.. at least for me.