Making Movies

How is a movie made and what exactly does a director do? This book attempts to illuminate every circumstance, internal and external, emotional and technical, involved in the arduous process that culminates in what we see on the big screen. Only the director knows the background to the scenes, behind every passing frame of film, and the complex series of details and decisions involved, from budget considerations to divine inspiration, from the earliest rehearsal to the final screening. Sidney Lumet's knowledge of the art and craft of directing is considerable, and here he discusses everything from art direction and wardrobe, shooting and editing, the verbal and mechanical soundtracks, to the distribution and marketing of a film and the role of the studio.

Sidney Lumet's films have received more than fifty Academy Award nominations. He has been awarded an honorary lifetime membership in the Director's Guild of America and received its most prestigious honour, The D.W. Griffith Award, given for an entire body of work. He lives in New York.

How is a movie made, and what exactly does a director do? In Making Movies, Sidney Lumet, the award-winning director of over thirty-five films including 12 Angry Men, Murder on the Orient Express,/i>, Dog Day Afternoon and The Verdict, provides the first and only book by a working, professional director to illuminate every circumstance, internal and external, emotional and technical, involved in the arduous process that culminates in what we see on the big screen. Only the director knows what's behind what an audience sees and hears with every passing frame of film. Only the director is aware of the complex series of details and decisions involved, from budget considerations to divine inspiration, from the earliest rehearsal to the final screening. Lumet's knowledge of the art and craft of directing is encyclopaedic, and here he discusses with clarity and candour everything from art direction and wardrobe, shooting and editing, the verbal and mechanical sound tracks, to the distribution and marketing of a film and the role of the studio. Making Movies is at once a veritable textbok on the ins and outs of directing, and an engaging, focused personal examination of the work of the American film-maker. Of writers he says: 'I come from the theatre. There, the writer's work is sacred.' Of actors: 'I don't want a life reproduced up there on the screen. I want life created.' And of the camera itself: 'If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third is the camera.' This is a book that, like its author, is straightforward, wonderfully opinionated, unpretentious, and above all, in love with the movies.

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