Tod Lippy: I know you’ve made over fifty films, but I’m not sure of the exact number…

Sidney Lumet: I’m not, either. [Laughs.]

Do you know, percentage-wise, how many of those were shot in New York?

The only ones not shot in New York were The Morning After and then the ones I did in Europedo the right thing. I don’t know quite how many of those there were—at the most, ten. Seventy-five percent of them, then.

You said somewhere that you found the city to be “character-rich geographically.” Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

New York can become whatever you want it to become. It can be ice-cold—I’m talking about emotionally—and it can be as warm as can be. Just architecturally, in terms of the feel of the city. So it’s an endless palette for whatever story you want to tell.

You’ve also talked about the access to actors here—

The acting is really the best in the world. It’s amazing. So many American actors start here, one way or another. Eventually, some of them wind up in L.A. doing various TV shows or whatever, but even that’s breaking up a little. There are more and more TV shows being done here, so the talent pool is enormous.

Does that go for technicians as well?

Yeah. When I started, you could literally put one crew together, and slowly it grew to three crews.... Now it’s an enormous pool of technicians. We almost came a cropper several years ago when unions were having problems with studios and couldn’t come up with a new contract, and studios just stopped making movies here.

This was in the mid-nineties?

Yeah. And the problem there was that the infrastructure collapsed. The camera-equipment houses, the lighting houses, the sound-effects studios, they all took a severe beating. But that’s all been restored now.

I remember you writing a letter to the union right after you wrapped A Stranger Among Us—it was quoted extensively in Jimmy Breslin’s column in Newsday—vowing that you wouldn’t make your next film here.

And I didn’t. I went up to Toronto.

How was that?

I love working in Toronto. It’s a wonderful city, and a very different atmosphere than New York. If you want modern architecture, it’s one of the best cities in the world. Beautifully laid out—and the control that they’ve had over construction has been marvelous. Also, because of the weakness of the Canadian dollar, by now I think they’re getting much more work than New York.

In your book, you talk about the difficulty of shooting the diamond-heist scene in A Stranger Among Us on 47th Street—basically, having to do on one Sunday (the only day the shops closed) what would normally have been spread over several days. Do you think working with the restrictions inherent in a city of this size and density has made you a more creative filmmaker?

I’m a great believer in need, you know? Not having everything easily presented to you. Obviously that’s got its limitations, because when you’re doing certain kinds of pictures you need everything at your disposal. But in general, without doing Titanic or Lucas or Spielberg movies, I think deprivation is good for the imagination—it helps.

You wrote a piece in the Times a while back about the importance of location shooting. You were responding to George Lucas—who had mentioned not long before that location work could soon be made obsolete by digital technology. I believe your point was that one can’t really approximate the energy that comes from shooting in an actual urban environment—its effect on the actors, in particular…

Yeah. Lucas is a marvelous moviemaker, a wonderful director, and American Graffiti is one of the really magnificent American movies. But it’s very easy, especially if you’re as interested as he is—and as I am, by the way—in all of the technical advances that Lucasfilm has been involved with, to get yourself into a little isolated box up there on the farm and end up with a very narrow focus on the kinds of movies you want to make. I’m sure that at some point very soon one will be able to digitally create any background one wants for any sort of location. But I don’t know what that will do to actors, particularly in highly emotional scenes. What’s it like playing that in front of a blue screen, with the light all wrong for what you’re playing? Knowing all the other adjustments that actors can make, I would imagine that down the line they’ll adjust to it—but for a while it’s liable to be a little rocky.

Well, to be completely cynical, I guess one could just digitally “correct” their reactions…

[Laughs.] Right. Put a tear in their eye.

You said once that you didn’t move to L.A. or work there because you felt that it was an “inorganic” place.

I don’t want to get pretentious about all this—it’s not that important—but the history of art is the history of cities, and cities have always had another purpose—they’ve either been the major seaports or the geographic centers of the country. And that’s where art has always gone—like a camp follower, to where the money is. L.A. had no reason for being—it’s not a port, and the farmland has been eliminated—not that there was much there to begin with—so it had no reason to be, other than the fact that land was cheap. Now, maybe all of that doesn’t matter—maybe movies have finally given the city an organic function. Which is fascinating, considering how impossible they make it to shoot in Beverly Hills. It’s one of the worst cities I’ve ever been in to shoot.

Why is that?

They’re terrible people. They’re rich and they don’t want to be inconvenienced and have their parking spaces taken up and all that sort of stuff.

Why do you think New York became a center for so much independent film-making in the last three decades?

Well, there’s a great deal of—the word “entrepreneur” always amuses me, but I hate it, so let’s call it “hustle.” [Laughs.] You’ve got more hustlers here. And I don’t think it’s at all coincidental. There’s a level of energy. I shouldn’t really say, because I don’t know what the UCLA film school is like these days, but I do know that it’s gotten to a point where your worst nightmare here is running into NYU film crews. They’re all over the fucking place, it’s unbelievable. It’s adorable, but Jesus, god, enough already. [Laughs.] Harvey, thank god, has shifted the whole thing downtown—way downtown—so as long as it’s below Canal Street, that’s fine with me. [Laughs.]

Weren’t you born here?

I was born in Philly, but I came here when I was one or two.

I know you got involved very early in acting in the Yiddish Theater and then later, on Broadway. How did that come about?

Well, there was almost no choice. My father was an actor, so I just got thrown into it, and I loved it and was good at it and it kept me off the streets. It was a very good childhood that way.

And you did some film work as well?

Only one, a picture called One Third of a Nation, with Sylvia Sidney.

Why only one?

I was a “theater person.” A theater snob, at that. In those days, movies were not serious work—you went to movies to make money.

How did you get into television?

Sheer luck. Sheer luck with it. I was good friends with Yul Brynner, who was working for CBS. I’d been teaching at the High School of Performing Arts, where I had set up the drama department. I was in my second year, and it was not fun anymore—there’s a limit to teaching for me; it’s the law of diminishing returns.

You were teaching acting?

Yeah. So I was talking to Yul one day about this TV thing, and he said, “C’mon in, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, and we can have a ball.”

What year was that?

It was ’49, ’50, something like that—maybe ’51. There was a wonderful guy at CBS by the name of Charlie Underhill, who thought that the best way to get directors for the television dramas was to take people from the theater, because they knew scripts and they knew acting. And then they could teach us the technological end of it, which they did. And he hired Marty Ritt, he hired Yul and me and Johnny Frankenheimer and Bobby Mulligan. He got himself quite a group of people that he put to work.

You were directing episodes of Danger and You Are There?

Right. And then, after the CBS contract, I did some freelancing, mostly on the hour-long shows.

I know that you were involved with Walter Bernstein, among other “off-limits” writers, during the blacklist period. Do you think there was any difference between here and L.A. with regards to the industry’s dealings with blacklisted writers?

I thought—although I’m not absolutely sure about this—that we were better at getting blacklisted writers working under the table than they were on the Coast, but I don’t really know. I know in movies there were instances of people like Albert Maltz being hired and so on. There was certainly a real underground of blacklisted writers.

And if the writers found fronts, you would hire them?

Yeah. It was complicated, because there was the income-tax issue. And there always had to be someone at the studio who knew. It would always someone quite high up, because their influence had to spread over a lot of departments—payroll, for instance, because these shows were CBS packages, not outside packages. You had to be very careful who you picked. In this case it was a wonderful guy by the name of Bill Dozier, who ran RKO for a while. And of course, if Bill were alive today, he would say, “I didn’t know a thing about it”—but he knew and he took very good care of us.

Didn’t you start up an actors’ workshop on Irving Place around this time?

Right. That was where I had started directing, actually. I was in the Actors Studio, and I had had a quarrel with Bobby Lewis, who was conducting the advanced class, and got thrown out, so I went down to the Village and formed my own workshop.

Why were you thrown out?

My quarrel with the Studio was that I thought we were the best realistic actors in the world, but realism is only one style. I thought that it was very important in a workshop atmosphere to work on other theatrical styles as well—to work on high comedy, to work on Shaw, to work on Chekhov, to work on Shakespeare, to work on the Greek writers. And there’s a very organized way that one can go about it, and that’s what we did over the course of three years. It was wonderful.

Who was involved with that?

Yul was there, Richard Kylie, a wonderful actress named Mary Welch, Annie Jackson, Ruby Dee—that’s who I remember at the moment. It was a good professional group.

When you started working in film, was it a fairly easy transition for you to make from TV?

Yeah. No problem whatsoever.

Were you shooting in film for TV, too?

No, everything I did in TV was live. I didn’t do any film work for television, because it was the worst of both mediums—you didn’t have time for the perfection of film, and you didn’t have the spontaneity of a live show. So the fortunate thing is—and I’ve said this so often—that the laws of optics are constant: a 35-millimeter lens is the same whether it’s on a movie camera, a still camera, or anything. So the amount of live work taught you everything you needed to know about lenses and editing, especially, because you were editing as you went. There is no substitute for live TV time in terms of training.

Is that why you’ve attached such importance to the rehearsal process in your films?

Yes, I’m sure. I got a tremendous value out of it.

One more New York question: Before John Lindsay became mayor here in the mid-sixties, didn’t film crews have to pay off policemen to “guarantee” a problem-free shoot?

It was serious enough that you’d have to pay off all three shifts. The shifts in those days were 4-12, 12-8 and 8-4. So on a normal movie day starting at 6:30 or 7:00, you’d hit all three shifts. [Laughs.] And there was a standard rate for the sergeant, a standard rate for the patrolman and a standard rate for the lieutenants. But Lindsay knocked all that out—he really did a tremendous amount. He assigned tactical-force policemen to you, and these guys wouldn’t take a cup of coffee. The corruption literally disappeared overnight—it wasn’t even weaned away, it just disappeared. He is responsible as much as anyone is for the amount of movies being made in New York.

Was that your first exposure to police corruption?

No, because I grew up poor in New York. [Laughs.] If you grow up poor in New York, you get exposed to it.

You have to be one of the most prolific directors in film history—can you talk about why you’ve made so many films?

I don’t know that I can tell you accurately. I love doing the work. I get a tremendous amount back from it. So despite all the energy that it takes, I’m being filled up at the same time that I’m emptying out. I don’t feel that everything has to be a masterpiece. There are many reasons for taking movies. Sometimes I’ve taken movies because I wanted to solve certain problems. One time—I wrote about this in the book—I was having tremendous color problems, and I knew that Carlo Di Palma would get me past them, so I took a movie just so I could work with him.

Is it ever an issue of money?

Sometimes I’ve done it purely for the buck. Absolutely. When I got married and knew we were going to have children and I wanted us to live in a house, I took a movie to pay for the down-payment on the house. To me, a very good reason to do a movie.

Do you remember which film that was?

Yes, it was a movie called Child’s Play, for David Merrick. I took a movie recently just to set up a trust fund for my grandchild. But also, the thing is, you can always find terrifically interesting problems to work on so that you’re expanding your technique all the time, even on those films. And I am interested in the long haul. Again, not to get pretentious about it, but nobody’s career is made from one picture—well, maybe it is for something as extraordinary as Citizen Kane, but that’s the exception.
   Also, I never joined “the club”—not just in terms of not working out there, either. There’s a whole kind of movie existence that one can lead—you can lead it here, too—and I have never been a part of that. Because of that, I knew that if I ever didn’t work for a period of time, I’d be very rapidly shunted aside. So, to sort of to keep my oar in, it was important to keep going, keep going, keep going. If there wasn’t a magnificent script, I’d take a very good script. If there wasn’t a very good script, I’d take a good script. I never knowingly took a bad script, but as I say, it wasn’t important that they be home runs every time, critically or commercially.

Can you talk about who belongs to that “club” in New York?

It depends on the decade. First of all, when I began, there wasn’t a club—Kazan worked here and I worked here, period. That was it. [Laughs.] Now I guess it’s represented by the Weinstein group, and before then, it was that first wave of Hollywood refugees—the ones who had broken away from there and come to work here. This would include a lot of actors, by the way. I can’t really analyze it for you because I don’t know enough about it—I’m that detached from it. I know it exists and I know I’m not part of it.

Some of these projects you’ve taken on for “ulterior” motives—how often do they turn out to be better than expected?

It happens all the time. The good ones turn out surprisingly bad, and the ones that are loaded with problems turn out to be superb. It’s by no means an axiom. The thing is, no one really knows. Maybe Steven Spielberg knows, and he’s the only one since Disney. For the rest of us, that’s why the process is so important—all we can do is work well and then hope for the best. And I’m not being falsely modest here. Good work is an accident. Now, there’s a reason the accident happens to some of us and will never happen to other people. You have to know how to prepare the groundwork. But whether or not it happens is an accident. There are too many elements—too many people, too many techniques. Who can depend on that?

Can you see some sort of pattern to your career?

No. It’s partially because I’ve never worked from any preconceived notion of what the work should be. I would take something because it interested me. And sometimes I would look back and see a pattern over the years—“Oh, I was interested in that during those years—look what I picked, and the way I did it.” But at the time I didn’t see it, and now, looking back, I don’t see it.

The seventies were a pretty extraordinary decade for you—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network—do you feel like you were working with stronger material?

No, I think it has to do with being in tune with the times. Because in my view, I did some work in the eighties that was wonderful, but totally rejected. Daniel, for instance. [Laughs.] And I thought Running on Empty was a very good movie.

Were you surprised by the negative response to Daniel?

Stunned. Amazed. Commercially, I didn’t expect it ever to be anything—we all did it for minimum, and nobody took any money or expected any money. But I was amazed at the critical reception, because I think it’s a startlingly original movie, and I find it deeply moving. I generally don’t look back at my stuff at all, but the few times I’ve seen it since, I just—if I come in and see two minutes of it I can’t tear myself away from it.

I remember a couple of the reviews for the film seeming almost hostile—as if the movie had more of an effect on the reviewers than they cared to admit.

I wish I felt that. I felt they were just hostile. I know there was a campaign against it. The New York Times worked very hard to defeat it. I remember that year, after the reviews came out, I was so shocked by the response that I began to really think back on the period before the film was released. And I remember, for instance, that twice that year the Sunday Times Magazine section published articles by Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided over the trial of the Rosenbergs. I’m pretty sure this was part of an attempt to rehabilitate him—I mean, I’d like to know when the New York Times Magazine has ever published two articles in one year by the same author.

Particularly a relatively obscure one.

Right. Then I remember when we were getting ready to open, I was really surprised that there wasn’t even a request for one of those boring Sunday articles in the Arts & Leisure section about the movie. And we’re talking about E.L. Doctorow, one of the major American novelists—not to mention the fact that it was one of the few instances, possibly even the first instance, of a writer of his stature adapting his own book. But the Times didn’t even inquire about it. Also, that Sunday before we opened, there was a very prominent review in the Book Review section about a non-fiction book that had come out by somebody named Ronald Radosh, an historian, and another person about the Rosenbergs. The two authors were very right-wing people, and the book tried to establish the guilt of the Rosenbergs. And then, finally, on the last page of that same Book Review, Walter Goodman wrote an article—I still haven’t forgiven him—the essence of which was “A plague on both your houses—those of you who say they were innocent, those who say they were guilty. Let’s just drop it, already.”

But in Daniel, the Isaacsons—the couple based on the Rosenbergs—are never shown to be innocent.

The movie never said innocent or guilty—for all I know, the Rosenbergs were guilty. The movie—in my view and certainly in Edgar’s—was not about the Rosenbergs; it was about the consequences to children when parents become deeply committed to anything. Who pays for the parents’ commitment? That’s what that piece is about thematically. To me, the book was about that, the movie was about that. But with Daniel, people said, “Oh, you’re just trying to avoid the politics of it.” Avoid the politics?! How can you do that movie and say you’re avoiding the politics, when you show the FBI storming into these peoples’ apartment and ripping everything apart? Anyway, I’m quite convinced that the reason for the Times’s campaign against the film is related to that old German-Jewish vs. Russian-Jewish fight. I think the Ochses and the Adlers were embarrassed about some Jews who were vulgar enough to make such a fuss. I could never prove it, of course, but I’m absolutely certain that it was a decision made above the level of the editors. I don’t know which member of the Ochs or Adler family it was, but I’m sure it was decided on that level.

How often do you think politics has played a role in reviews of your films?

Never. I think that was the only time it ever happened. Because it’s a horrendous thing to do, and you save your shot for when you think it might matter.

Don’t you think Daniel will eventually be reconsidered critically? It’s such a good movie.

I don’t know, because in all honesty, I don’t pay that much attention. One can always be surprised. You know, they just had this live performance of Fail-Safe on CBS. According to all the publicity surrounding it, I got some of my best reviews on that picture. [Laughs.] Everyone keeps talking about the “classic 1961 film.” The only thing is, I don’t remember that picture getting very good notices. Go figure.

One more review question: I recently read Pauline Kael’s piece on Network. Do you remember that one?

Oh, yeah. The pits.

I felt she really missed the point of the film on that one.

She’s so bright, so that you know when she misses it’s deliberate. And what she could not stand—because she was a very good writer—was, number one, another really good writer. [Laughs.] Her attack on Paddy Chayefsky in that review is unspeakable.
   All the directors she loved continually did, in my view, dumb movies. I think De Palma is a wonderful director who has done one bad script after another, starting with Carrie. But she liked that. She liked crap surrounded in elegance. She, like so many critics, was in a real power struggle. What she wanted out of her career was the Times, and when she didn’t get it, she was going to attract the attention whichever way she could. But she never did affect the box office of a movie; the New Yorker doesn’t do that.
   She also had a perennial pattern of falling in love with a director and then destroying him. She did it with me. When she was still on the San Francisco Quarterly—that’s where she began—she sent me her review of Long Day’s Journey into Night, comparing it to Carl Dreyer—it was that kind of review. And then, after The Group, and after a personal meeting between us, things kept getting worse and worse.

I can’t believe how prophetic Network was.

Oh, absolutely. News as entertainment.

Not to mention corporate ownership of the networks, live TV news, “Reality TV”—you can just go down the list…

He was prescient, Paddy. He was nuts. You can say the same thing about The Hospital, too.

Peter Finch’s character keeps making these incredibly pungent observations about the dangers of what he sees happening around him, and even as the “spectacle” of his tirades is applauded by the rapt audiences, absolutely no one is listening to his message. I guess you could argue in some sense that the same situation occurred with the film, which attracted enormous attention, but which obviously failed as a cautionary tale, since virtually everything depicted in it happened anyway…

That’s right. Well, it’s my old belief—art never changes anything. [Laughs.]

I was wondering, why did you use a voiceover in the film?

Because Paddy wrote it. It never occurred to me to question it. That’s not as naïve as it sounds. Clearly, he wanted to set this picture at a distance from you. In order for him to say what he wanted to say, he wanted you to laugh, and the nature of the laughter had to be from outside. I think that’s why he used a narrator—he wanted a certain amount of detachment. The only one that you really lock in with, and that takes quite bit of time, is Bill Holden. Everybody else is “over there,” including Peter Finch.

Do you think of Prince of the City, Q&A, and Night Falls on Manhattan as a “trilogy”?

I never set out to do that. People do lump them together.

Perhaps one reason for that is the fact that, as far as I know, they’re the only three scripts you’ve had a hand in writing.

Right.

Why those three in particular?

Well, starting with Prince of the City, the minute I read the book, I knew how to do the movie. I knew it. And I wanted Jay Presson Allen to adapt it, but she was working on another picture, so she said, “Sidney, why don’t you do the breakdown”—which is when you take from the novel what you’ll keep and what you’ll throw out. I finished in two, three days, and she read it and said, “This is great. Why don’t you start writing while I’m finishing up this other picture?” And there was no fear in it, because a lot of the book was simply transcriptions of the tapes, so that provided an awful lot of good dialogue—like, “I’m going to clip him,” I mean, “clip,” what a word! That’s right off the tapes. Then when Jay finished, she came in, did a polish on it, and very generously said to me afterwards—she didn’t have to do this—“Look Sidney, I think you should get screenwriting credit on it because you’ve really done the donkey work on it.” So I said fine.
   Then, because I know the life of cops so well—not just from that but from Serpico—when I got to Q&A, it was just quicker and easier to do it myself. I didn’t have to explain it to a writer. And the same is true of Night Falls on Manhattan. I read the galleys of Bob Daley’s book—he wrote the original book of Prince of the City, too. Night Falls was not very good, actually, but it began with a recounting of this big dope dealer in Harlem who took out five cops when they came to get him, and escaped. He was eventually caught and William Kunstler defended him. The nature of Kunstler’s defense was he didn’t kill the cops—it was self-defense, because a number of them who were themselves involved in the drug trade had come up there to execute him. And then the book went on to some cockamamie romance between the detective and a lady DA—you know, a totally conventional book. But as I was reading the galleys, I thought, “Well, what if this were true? What if the cops were really on their way up there to kill him? What if Kunstler was right?”—I mean, he was right about an awful lot of things. So the script was really my own development of the first three or four pages of what had happened in that novel, and it became easy to write myself.

All three films share themes that I know are important to you, particularly that whole personal/political dissonance that occurs when an individual’s ideals are challenged by his or her involvement in an institutional framework—

And can you hold on to them? The endless problem.

Of course, more specifically, all three share the backdrop of corruption in the NYPD…

But in a sense, for something like Night Falls, that’s just the propelling incident. By the way, I’m so happy for Jimmy Gandolfini.

His performance as the “fallen” cop is astonishing in that film.

He’s marvelous, isn’t he?

He had a much smaller role in A Stranger Among Us.

That was his first job. We stayed close because I gave him his first job. But in Night Falls, when he got up from the couch and went, “I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar,” I mean, ahhh, that smile on his face…

In Prince of the City, there’s that sublime moment when Treat Williams’s character, standing in the elevator, says to his partner, “Don’t hate me, Joe” and, as the door begins to close, his partner responds, “I could never hate you, Danny.” And we see Williams’ pained reflection in the closing elevator door. How many takes did you do on that one?

One, I think. On something like that, when you know how much the actors are putting out, you want to be certain before you start rolling about the mechanics of where and when the door hits. Of course, you need a little bit of luck, but I knew I had it right away.

You always had that image in your mind?

No, not until I got there. Because you never know in those city buildings, sometimes you can find gates that close in the elevators instead of doors. And a gate would have been just as good.

But you’d already used gates to great effect in The Pawnbroker...

[Laughs.] Right. No, it was right there on the set.

It’s interesting to think of Prince, Q&A, and Night Falls almost as one film—each one as a sort of variation on a theme. Many images—motifs, almost—repeat themselves: ruined policemen sitting in cars, revolvers in their mouths; characters being patted down for wires; bodies being dredged up from the East River. There are even repeated bits of dialogue, like where the somewhat naïve protagonist is complimented, and is then caught blushing. There’s a scene like that with Timothy Hutton in Q&A—

Right, and it’s in Night Falls, when Dreyfuss says it to Andy Garcia.

And there are always clandestine meetings taking place in some abandoned lot by the river.

Usually it’s noisy there, that’s why. And of course, it’s so strong, visually. When Phil Rosenberg, the production designer, found that location with the burnt-out pier for Night Falls, in the scene with Gandolfini and Andy Garcia, I could have kissed him. It was great, with that twisted pier behind them.

Why did you chose to open Q&A with the crane shot of the traffic light going from red to green? It’s such a great analogy for a movie starting.

I don’t know, from the minute I got onto that location I knew that was the way I wanted to do it. I did think it was a marvelous shot. On the pictures that you feel the closest to, that kind of thing happens extremely often. You know the opening shot and/or the closing shot—you don’t know anything else, you don’t even know what you think about the picture, but very often you know what those two are.

I was wondering how you got involved with The Morning After?

I had been dying to work with Jane Fonda all my life, because Hank and I were so close and I had known her since she was 17. Loved her work, always have—she’s a marvelous actress. She had been after me for years to do that script, but the beginning wasn’t very good. Anyway, she kept working on it and making it better and better. I was getting older, and she is very persuasive. So finally we said, “We’d better get it done, because there may not be that much time left….” [Laughs.]

It’s a basic thriller in some respects, but it still manages be layered with all of the themes that run through so much of your work—how prejudice poisons relationships, the unfair advantages of the privileged classes, etc. Were those elements that you brought into it?

No, that was all there.

That film really “got” L.A. in a visual sense. I was struck by use of saturated colors, for instance, like that crimson façade of the building where the murder takes place…

We were reinforcing all of it with filters. You know what’s interesting? When you’re a resident of a place, everything becomes ordinary, because you see it all the time. When you’re not, it’s all exotic. Johnny Schlesinger once told me that I shot London better than any British director. And I remember telling Sandy MacKendrick that he did more with the Orange Julius stand on Broadway in Sweet Smell of Success than I had ever done with the city in a lifetime of shooting there. That’s because it comes at you absolutely freshly.

You’ve had final cut on all of your pictures since when?

Murder on the Orient Express.

But I’m assuming you’re still often asked by a studio to go back and do cuts?

Yeah. And in those instances, it’s like anything else—if push comes to shove, you just put your feet down.

I would guess you’re more inclined to recut something if it’s a film you’re less emotionally invested in—

Absolutely. If it’s something that I’ve done for commercial reasons because I think it’s time I had a hit, sure, I’ll try it. I think I talk about it in the book, but the whole thing now of screenings and focus groups and so on is so hopeless. I don’t know what’s going to be done about it, because we’ll never know how many pictures it’s ruined. And I don’t believe in the whole process, because I think people change their minds as soon as you ask their opinion about something. The minute you’re told your opinion matters, something changes—just look at political polls, which are so often wrong. So I think that those cards are useless and hopeless. They never helped me and as far as I know, and they never helped any movie—except for the classic story of, you know, the Glenn Close movie where she boiled the rabbit. It’s going to get worse, too. We see movies now deliberately made for, and by, focus groups. And that’s despite the fact that it’s been a wonderful year for American movies, I think.

In an interview right before The Fugitive Kind was released, you said, “I hope it’s a hit…because it’ll make the next four much easier to do.”

The next four flops. [Laughs.]

Do you find that still to be true?

I do. It’s important to get a one hit out of every four just to keep going.

Are there any recent films you directed that you suspected would be box-office draws?

I thought Critical Care had a very good chance of being a major hit—although I didn’t do it for that reason. Unfortunately, the company that I made it for got sold between the time I made it and the time it was released, and that’s death—you’re finished when that happens. Believe it or not, it’s always very important for the new owners to make sure that the previous management looks bad. That’s happened to me three times. It happened with a very good picture called The Deadly Affair, with Simone Signoret and James Mason. Marvelous movie. It got caught in that kind of a meat grinder and so did The Hill, a picture I did with Connery. And there’s nothing you can do.

Why did you decide to remake Gloria?

Not a very good decision. [Laughs.]

You mean because of the inevitable comparisons to Cassavetes’s original?

The original is a lousy movie—it’s really not good. It doesn’t even make sense from a plot point of view—it was made because John wanted to give Gena a job. I did the remake for two reasons. First of all, I wanted to work with Sharon. I think she’s talented—a fine actress. And second, I needed a big chunk of dough for a reason that will remain nameless. And I had them over a barrel because there was another director who had been on it for months and hadn’t picked one location. They were six weeks from shooting and Sharon was sitting on top of a big salary, so I could hit them for a lot of money. But I did want to work with Sharon.

Have you ever gone over schedule or over budget on something?

On The Wiz, I think I went over-budget and over-schedule because there was no budget and there was no schedule. [Laughs.] It was also frantic. But that’s the only time.

That must make you all the more marketable.

It’s helped me a lot.

What are you working on now?

I can’t tell you, because I don’t like to talk about it until it’s on the verge of happening.

You said earlier that you “got a lot back” from film. What exactly did you mean?

It’s an enormously, incredibly satisfying way to work. First of all, it’s never lonely. There’s constant contact with other people, and life all around. You are constantly communicating with and dealing in feelings between yourself and others. There’s a sense of energy. There’s enormous reward. And it’s sheer fun—actors are fun, great fun, and always interesting, endlessly interesting. I guess I’ve worked with as many if not more actors than any other director working today.

Are there any you haven’t worked with that you’d like to?

So many. And the time is going, going. I’ve never worked with Meryl and I’d love to. I’ve never worked with Michelle Pfeiffer—I think she’s marvelous. And Julia Roberts is wonderful. I love Matt Damon—God, we’ve got so many good ones coming up. Jude Law, wow. Russell Crowe, wow. De Niro—I’ve never worked with De Niro. Not to mention the older ones I keep seeing all the time, like Paul Newman, for instance. I’d love to work with Pacino again. I send them stuff, they send me stuff, but we’ve never been able to mesh and want to, desperately. Sissy Spacek, I’ve always loved her work. Holly Hunter, love her work. There are so many good actors. I would have loved the old studio days, I tell you, with the stock company. I really would have.

Do you feel that you’re still at the top of your game?

I don’t know. Again, I don’t think in those terms. I know I’m brighter now than I ever was. And I think I’m hipper. [Laughs.] But I’m an old man now. I won’t know until I go back to work, simple as that. I haven’t wanted to work now for well over a year. Very unusual for me. I don’t know why. Maybe I got tired—I have a right to have gotten tired. But now I’m slowly starting to gear up again.