Lumet does not make a splashy use of style. He likes the camera to be “invisible” and yet most definitely THERE.
Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies
Sidney Lumet:
Network. Owen Roizman, photographer. The movie was about corruption. So we corrupted the camera.
We started with an almost naturalistic look. For the first scene between Peter Finch and Bill Holden, on Sixth Avenue at night, we added only enough light to get exposure. As the picture progressed, camera setups became more rigid, more formal. The lighting became more and more artificial. The next-to-final scene — where Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and three network gray suits decide to kill Peter Finch — is lit like a commercial. The camera setups are static and framed like still pictures. The camera had become a victim of television.
