By Sidney Lumet Page #4

contributed to it by giving me that operatic sense,

by Herman Yablokoff singing the last act of

"Madame Butterfly" in Yiddish. That taste is both my

strength and my weakness. I see through you, lady. I see through you. What do you see? You'd like me to tell you? I'd love for you to. I see a not so young,

not so satisfied woman who hires a guy

in off the highway to do double-duty without even

giving him overtime for it. Being a store clerk

by day and by night, you know, whatever

you want to call it. You cheap. Hmm? Who you calling cheap? Who you calling cheap? [sobbing] Why'd you come back? Why? To put back the money I took so

you wouldn't remember me as not being honest or grateful. [sobbing] Don't! Don't go! I need you to live,

to go on living. [music playing] SIDNEY LUMET: I'm

not afraid, in fact, almost seek out confined

physical areas to work in. I don't know where

it comes from. I don't know Whether it's

because I'm a city rat, and in a city that's even

as wide open as New York, it's basically a confined area. I wouldn't know what

to do with a Western. I wouldn't know where to begin. I never bought into

the idea that a face is more interesting

against a mountaintop than against the wall. It never seemed to me to be so. The face was what

was interesting. The mountain was going to

be pretty much unchanged. It probably comes from

a limited visual palette in terms of the way

I grew up, which were small rooms, tight areas. I remember when we moved out

to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Well I'd never seen anything

like that-- cars instead of trucks, an island

where you could sit under the trees, a four

lane street, another island, another single street. That width, I've

never seen it before, and that was to me and to

other Jews who moved there, it was are equivalent in the

'30s of moving to suburbia, of the great outdoors. Well folks, what

can I tell you? You're all so smug

in your certainty. Well let's see. We got over the Depression. We got over Hitler! SIDNEY LUMET: New York as a

setting is capable of whatever mood or dramatic statement you

want to make-- architecturally, in its light. Boy, talk about winter

light, as Mr. Bergman did. New York's winter

light is ravishing. I'm not comfortable

any place but New York. When I leave New York

for any other place in the United States,

my nose starts to bleed. [music playing] ANNOUNCER: An announcement

from the great and powerful Oz. THE WIZ: I thought it

over and green is dead. Till I change my mind,

the color is red. [gong] [music playing] SIDNEY LUMET: We had a scene

where Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Cowardly

Lion and Toto arrive in Oz, and I could think of

no location in New York that I found more

fantastic and that I thought would be worthy of being

Oz than the World Trade Center. When the World Trade

Center first opened, it was attacked mercilessly

architecturally. The critics were-- oh,

just these two big piles of concrete, et cetera. I found them beautiful, so we

decided to do Oz down there. We had to add certain

things for the dancers-- this enormous platform

which would change color because, interestingly enough,

photographically, green is a lousy color. And we wanted to

get to red or gold. We worked there I think

for four days and nights. When 9/11 happened and I saw

the second building come down, it really broke

my heart because I had had a working

relationship and I felt that that was my space. [music playing] Hello Dorothy. Please, is there a

way for me to get home? Well Dorothy, you were

wise and good enough to help your friends find what

was inside them all the time. That's true for you also. Home inside me? I don't understand. I don't know for most people

what the idea of there's no place like home means. I think if you've had a

terrible home that it's not particularly wonderful thing. I think one can find a home

in many different places. I think that Baum meant it

quite literally because he came from a simpler background. He came from my more

bucolic background. And Dorothy herself was

in a bucolic setting. To try to apply

it to urban living is dangerous because

in urban living, I don't know that the

literal idea of there's no place like home really works. For me, the whole question of

what was home, what is home, always has the same answer--

wherever I'm working. Hello. I'm Sidney Lumet. I'm the director of this

production of "The Dybbuk" that you're about to see. It's a play that's

very close to me. My father appeared in it

in I think it was 1927. It's the first play that I ever

saw in the Yiddish theater. One of the reasons I rehearse

and one of the reasons I shoot so fast is because

of my training, because I came from

the theater, because I came from live television. In both of those, you have to

make your dramatic selection in advance. When you're doing a

play, a point comes, you may go into

rehearsal this way or it may happen at the

end of the first week, the second week,

but at some point, the director or

somebody has to say this is what this play is about. And now we channel everything

into that one river. Very often it has to be done

in advance by the director because by then you've

committed to sets. You committed to a color scheme. You committed to costumes. And all of those are part

of what is this play about or what is this movie about. So I automatically do that

when I'm doing a movie. I don't mean what is it

about in a plot sense, because that becomes--

that's self-evident. But what is it

about emotionally? [music playing] SIDNEY LUMET: Can

you survive-- can one survive total destruction,

where you are already dead? That's a story of a man

coming back to life, and the only way he can start

back to life is through pain. [music playing] The reason the

Holocaust is unique is not that it

was the first time that a population was killed. That's happened

throughout history. But I think it was the first

time that your next door neighbor killed you, that

six million neighbors killed six million people. There is a scene in the movie

where he goes onto a subway car and the faces in the

subway car are bringing him back to his trip in the

train in the car on the way to Auschwitz. And I just started to think of

how my own memory works when I don't want to face something

and that there's a flash of it and a flash of it. And if it's strong enough, the

flashes get longer and longer and finally it will take over. We just translated that

literally into movie terms. [baby crying] This whole approach was

predicated on the fact that he did not want

to remember that he has spent all of these years

blocking these memories out. Needless to say,

like all good things, it immediately became the

property of Madison Avenue and for the next four

years you could see nothing but-- they even had a phrase

for it, subliminal advertising. Now funnily enough, on "Long

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