Making Movies

Sidney Lumet was one of the most productive and least pretentious American directors of the twentieth century. The book is his account of how films actually get made — script through release — with a craftsman's attention to the specific collaborations and compromises the process requires. Lumet is the anti-Fellini: American, pragmatic, more interested in the work than the persona. For product direction the book is exceptionally useful because Lumet refuses to romanticise — every decision has a cost, every compromise has a reason, and the result is a film that works. Read him for the same reasons you would read Newey: a serious practitioner describing the actual shape of the work.