Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies
Sidney Lumet:
Nothing helps actors more than the clothes they wear. Ann Roth is an amazing costume designer. She can take the most everyday clothes and turn them into some sort of contribution, to both the actor and the picture.
On Family Business, Sean Connery came into rehearsal after having been with Ann for a clothes fitting. He looked happy. I asked him how it had gone. “She’s bloody marvelous,” he said. “She’s given me the whole bloody character now.”
That’s the greatest compliment an actor can give.
It’s the equivalent of saying, “We’re all making the same picture.”
Does Lumet mention how he justified throwing together Connery, Hoffman, and Broderick and expecting the audience to accept them as related?
I loved the movie when the characters were isolated from each other–good solid work all around. But throw them together and….urghh, it was so distracting. It just reeked of some power agent shoving it down their throat and Lumet just having to accept it to get the movie made.