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Keeping the Devil Waiting

Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymore Hoffman in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

If Sidney Lumet isn’t one of the first directors you might think to put on a top 10 list of the great American filmmakers, it’s probably because his control over a movie is less obvious than, say, Martin Scorsese’s. But the list of classic films on his resumé is staggering. Beginning with his first feature, the Oscar-nominated Twelve Angry Men, in 1957, Lumet went on to make Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Serpico, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, Prince of the City, The Verdict, Daniel, The Morning After, Running on Empty and Family Business, to name only the best known.

He’s had his fair share of flops (most—or least—notably 1978’s The Wiz), which can probably be laid to the fact that he doesn’t see himself as an “auteurist” filmmaker whose every work has to spring from a personal vision.

Auteurist or not, Lumet is a master of the crime melodrama, and his newest film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, is one of his best in years. It’s so good that it seems churlish to mention, as reviews inevitably do, his age: If Lumet is doing such strong work at the age of 83, it’s because he is willing to change and adapt, finding worthwhile actors and taking advantage of the benefits of new technology like HD video.

As unsentimental and unsparing as the best of his movies, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead uses a fractured, spiraling chronology to weave the grim repercussions of an ill-planned crime. What should have been a simple robbery of a suburban jewelry store goes awry: A robber is killed, the woman running the store is seriously wounded. We learn that the job was planned by Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a real estate accountant whose business success has come with bad habits beyond his means. He has enlisted his weaker brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to carry out the plan. Hank and Andy figure the job will be a snap because they have inside information—the store is owned by their parents. But as the film circles around both the wounds that led to this tragedy and the new ones it causes, in the brothers, their parents and their loved ones, we get a bleak portrait of human failings on a novelistic scale.

I had the opportunity to speak to Lumet at the Toronto Film Festival, where Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead premiered in September. Spry and compact in a comfortable outfit of sneakers, blue jeans and a polo shirt, he was as happy to talk about new filmmakers as about a career in directing that stretches back to 1950 and the early years of television.

Artvoice: Did you develop this movie or did it find you?

Sidney Lumet: It found me. It was sent to me by the producers, privately financed, not studio financed, going out with a small distributor [ThinkFilm] but a very good one.

AV: Were you attracted to the fact that these characters are so despicable?

SL: Absolutely—I’m a great disbeliever in the studios’ approach that you’ve got to have somebody to love in a movie. Not at all! People that you can dislike are as valuable as people you can adore. There was a not bad movie done brilliantly by the magnificent Jonathan Demme about a guy who ate people! On a good day! And not only that, what’s fascinating about [The Silence of the Lambs] is that it was not only about this terrible psychopath but this perverted love story. And you accepted it—that odd relationship and that strange, strange man were wonderful, and despicable.

AV: You’re known for rehearsing your actors, which isn’t the usual thing in movies. Given that stars call the shots these days, do you have trouble getting what you want from actors?

SL: If he or she won’t give me what I want, I don’t hire them to begin with. We all know who the lunatics are, and if you’ve got any sanity about yourself, life is too short, you don’t get involved with those people.

Generally I find that most actors love rehearsal—almost every actor I’ve worked with, even the ones who’ve not had a theatrical background. I remember when I worked with Jeff Bridges on The Morning After. Jeff had had no theater background. He’d always been a movie actor, his father was one, his brother was one, and he said “Gee, Sidney, I don’t know about [rehearsing], what if I use up all the spontaneity?” That’s what screen actors worry about. But by the second day he was in hog heaven. Most actors—I’ll tell you how much they like it, they will even do it for nothing.

AV: Some viewers have been shocked by the amount of sex and nudity in this film, though it probably wouldn’t have gotten much attention in the 1970s. Do you think audiences have grown more conservative in recent decades?

SL: I think there’s a split—there’s a lot more freedom, but also a greater conservative influence on it. Knocked Up, which I loved, really made me laugh, is really at the heart of it a very conservative movie. They get married, he turns out to be a wonderful father, the word “abortion” is never mentioned. Now I don’t know whether that’s because [writer/director Judd] Apatow is genuinely conservative or they want to be careful of a conservative audience, who knows? But there’s no doubt, at the same time, you’ve got many more outrageous and flagrant ideas and behavior in movies.

AV: Is it harder to get a smaller film like this made today?

SL: Yes and no. It’s true that studios are into what are called these tentpole pictures—Oceans 11, 12, 13, whatever the final number will be when it stops making money. But there’s a lot of good work going on, for at least two reasons. One is that an awful lot of independent money is coming in, from guys who got rich in hedge funds or own supermarkets, shopping malls, you name it; they find movies glamorous and a good way of making money. But there’s another reason that’s very interesting. This generation of actors are enormously caring about their work. You’ll have a George Clooney doing Oceans 13 and then taking no salary and doing Syriana. Brad Pitt, one of the biggest male stars now, did Babel, which was one hell of a movie, and took enormous courage to do. And he produced A Mighty Heart for Angelina Jolie, for which I’m sure she took no money.

And I think that that’s all very encouraging. They realize that it’s a commercial world and they’ve got to exist in it, but there’s also such a thing as their own satisfaction, and they’re going to try to keep the two in balance for as long as they can. So I think that combination of new money and the actors learning how to handle the marketplace demands and their own internal demands in terms of what they want to play is producing a lot of good stuff.

AV: You do so much rehearsal before shooting, do you get to be like Alfred Hitchcock, who said that he was bored on the set because he’d already planned his films out before he even got there?

SL: I love the actual process. Don’t you believe what Hitchcock said for a minute. I saw him on the set, and he loved every second of it. However, it’s absolutely true that he did the picture in his head. Certainly among the directors I knew he was the first to use storyboards for every single shot. I remember I asked Henry Fonda, who had just finished The Wrong Man, I said, “Hitchcock is getting on, this is New York in the middle of winter, how did he get through it?” Fonda said, “Very easily—in the car.” He would take his sketch of the shot, the cameraman would come over, he’d roll down the window, hand him the sketch and the photographer would do the set up. But he watched the performances very carefully. I was on the set when he shot Rear Window—Grace [Kelly] was an old friend of mine—and he saw it all.

AV: You’ve made so many memorable films, they must be after you all the time to do DVD commentary tracks. Do you enjoy doing those?

SL: I don’t know this myself, but they tell me that people like those things on DVDs, that it’s a reason they buy them. I think there’s some myth in that. I’m very careful when I do one not to reveal how we did things, because I think that disturbs the concentration of people watching them.

AV: Where are you living now?

SL: New York, where I always have.

AV: It’s great that you’re still working and still enjoying it.

SL: I don’t understand why people retire—well, I do, it’s because they’re doing work they don’t want to be doing. That’s not my case, thank god. [They’ll have to] carry me out, I’m not going to give up.