Sidney Lumet sits behind his desk at his midtown Manhattan office. On one of the walls are setsketches and portraits of actors (James Spader, Kyra Sedgwick, Helen Mirren, Anne Bancroft, Wallace Shawn, and Albert Brooks) from a film he is making, Critical Care. "It's a no-budget black comedy dealing with the state of health care in America today," he says. Lumet has shot the film in Toronto, a city often used to stand in for New York. "You pick up 17 per cent on the exchange rate," he says.
It is a typically business-like observation. The 73-year-old director is as controlling as he is charming. What else would you expect from someone who is the veteran of live TV drama and 40 movies and who as a performer-friendly director has elicited particularly fine work from Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Al Pacino, Henry Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Sean Connery, Rod Steiger and William Holden?
It seems apt that Lumet is wearing running shoes. The man never slows down. Paul Newman, who starred in Lumet's The Verdict, once said: "He's the only guy who could double-park in front of a whorehouse, he's that fast." Even now, he is talking about juggling the new movies in production.
Meanwhile, Night Falls On Manhattan - two films back for him - is his latest release. Like most of his films, he shot it in New York. Perhaps even more than Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, Lumet is the consummate Big Apple film-maker. "It's not an anti-LA thing," he explains, "I don't like to live in a company town. I need a place where I'm one in eight million not one in 300,000. I'm a better director because I can see a Jerry Robbins ballet tonight. You can only get that in New York or London or Paris, in centres of culture where your work is not very important." Surprising words for someone who exudes such confidence.
Perhaps Lumet takes culture for granted. After all, he grew up in an environment where drama is part of everyday life. His parents were Yiddish actors (he used to be perfectly bilingual, he says) from "the usual, very poor background - Lower East Side" who moved from Philadelphia to New York when he was only a year old and enrolled him in the Professional Children's School. Acting came early on: radio at four, Yiddish stage at five, Broadway as a teen. Directing came later. It's not hard to understand his legendary rapport with great, sometimes tempestuous, performers, and the leeway (sometimes too much) he gives them in his films.
"I was an actor," he says, "therefore I know where it hurts. I know when it's painful for them, when they have to go digging. All good work is self-revelation - they know that, I know that. They know they're not going to be treated unsympathetically nor be ignored nor be altered in any way."
The latest actor to be tempted by Lumet is Sharon Stone, who he will direct in a remake of John Cassavetes's Gloria. It remains to be seen whether the Lumet-Stone combo will come near the perfect fusion of Cassavetes's fragmented style with Gena Rowlands's tour-de-force as a woman as tough as any of the cops and thugs she has to deal with.
Lumet's directorial career has been patchy - often terrific, occasionally embarrassing. It is hard to believe that the man who made Murder On The Orient Express, the misconceived musical The Wiz, and the laughable neighbour hood drama A Stranger Among Us (which tried to make you believe that Melanie Griffith could pass as a Hasidic Jew) was also responsible for great films like Serpico, Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day After- noon, The Verdict and Q&A.
Critics have suggested that Lumet's work has suffered from being over-theatrical. And, perhaps unconsciously, Lumet answered this charge in The Fugi- tive Kind and Long Day's Journey Into Night with some awkward experiments in fancy camera moves, and in The Pawnbroker and The Group with over-elaborate editing techniques.
In fact, Lumet's theatrical grounding has been his cinematic strength - his best films rely on great performances, strong narrative and moral ambivalence. It was with his less intrusive, gritty on-the-streets-of-New York films - Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince Of The City - that he found his rhythm. Pacino has just enough room in the first two to pull the viewer into his world (cop with a conscience, desperate gay bank robber) without dominating proceedings. Lumet follows him, just enough, and brilliantly edits the performance into the whole. Same goes for Prince Of The City (which used mostly non-professional actors).
In the early 1970s, Lumet established himself as the king of the New York police procedural - at the time, the dominant genre in both TV and film. In Night Falls On Manhattan, the director once again tackles, and dramatises beautifully, the blurred world of those fighting on both sides of the law. Cops are on the take and City Hall politicians are more interested in photo opportunities than reform; drugs ruin communities, the upright must balance bending the rules with principle.
Lumet says: "People have told me, `You're anti-cop'. The truth of it is that I'm not. Their lives are sheer hell, absolute hell. You know about the divorce rate, the level of alcoholism. They're living at such a level of intensity - and fear. When guns go off, cops get nervous. When Treat had to pull a gun and take the guy out in Prince Of The City, his hands were shaking.
"The interesting thing is, cops like these movies because they're honest. If you've ever seen an uncoordinated raid, it's total confusion. How many times have you read this year, what is the euphemism, `friendly fire'?"
Lumet himself adapted the book Tainted Evidence by Robert Daley, who also wrote Prince Of The City, another foray into crooked cop land. He bristles when I suggest it's a very loose adaptation.
In Night Falls On Manhattan, Tainted Evidence's protagonist assistant district attorney and suburban mom Karen Henning has become a man, ex-cop Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) is now a model of integrity, Lena Olin inherits what's left of a woman's role, and Lumet expands the role of Daley's patrician DA into Morgenstern (Ron Leibman), a hot-headed Jewish loyalist who enjoys tossing off Yiddish expressions like "Tuchus auf dem Tisch" to his WASP underlings.
"I have to know how they sound, how they talk," Lumet says to justify the change, "and I've known any number of people, including myself, who use their Jewishness and their ethnicity as a way of manipulating."
Lumet has always been interested in New York's ethnic and political melting-pot - in particular the way the city's Hasidic community has united to create its own power base. "One of the reasons that the Hasidic community is so strong in New York is that the late Rabbi Schneerson said that on election day, there would be 74,432 votes by 9 p.m., and there were 74,432 votes by 9 p.m. One of the tragedies of black life here is that they have not formed a power bloc that could deliver votes according to these ethnic unities."
Power-play. City politics. Moral ambiguity. Lumet is back on firm ground. "The two great threats to our lives are racism and dope, This nonsense of a drug czar - Clinton appoints an army general! If you want somebody in charge of a federal drug programme you know what you pick? An ex-addict! Somebody who's been through it.
"Look," he continues, "I'm not a lecturer and I'm not a propagandist. I work on what interests me, and I hope that it makes a difference for somebody." And for what seems to be the first time in an age, Lumet takes a breath. "I don't expect that it does."