LUMET: Hi, this is Sidney Lumet. I directed The Verdict,
and might have some stories that could interest you about the way we did the film.
When dealing with Frank Galvin,
the name of the character that Paul Newman is playing,
we are dealing with a very depressed man.
Because The Verdict is actually a tale of redemption,
and he starts off at a very low point in his life.
I don't know about you, but I do know that for myself,
when I've had that kind of depression in my life,
one of the things I've done always is try to throw it into the,
"Well, how are the Fates treating me today?"
So I would get to a pinball machine, or solitaire, or any other game,
and really hope that I could make a good score.
If I broke 20,000 or 25,000, the day would be okay,
and if I came in under 15,000, the day was going to be in trouble.
And that was sort of the idea behind this whole opening shot.
We winded up with Frank Galvin feeling definitely in trouble.
A lot of the individual characteristics of Frank Galvin, Paul just created on his own,
like the use of the breath refresher.
Because he's a drinker
and when you see him drinking a beer, early in the morning,
and then spraying so that his mouth doesn't reek of beer,
we immediately know an awful lot about him.
It was something that Paul brought to it completely on his own.
One of the things that's hardest for an actor to portray is what looks like sincerity,
but is actually completely fake.
And what Paul does in that quick little scene there is so strong,
because you don't know where you are, you don't know whether he's conning you,
whether he means what he's saying, but you believe him.
You believe something sincere about him.
And then, when you get to this portion and see that shaking hand,
and the fact that he has to take the top off the drink, you know exactly where he's at
and that it was fake.
In other words, the character starts off unbelievably unpleasant.
And that was one of the interesting things,
one of the things that attracted me to it and that attracted Paul to it.
For a long time... When Zanuck and Brown, who produced this, brought me the script,
they'd been working on it for a long time, with a writer and a star,
who more or less took the project over and began working on their own script.
And part of what developed was that
Zanuck and Brown, bless them, were dissatisfied,
because the writer and the star kept
pushing it toward a more pleasant character.
A little bit more of a hero.
None of the unpleasant characteristics that Paul was willing to play.
Paul is wonderfully brave that way. He's honest in terms of the character.
So, when they asked me to do it...
I had read the Mamet script, funnily enough, a long time ago.
We had been working on a picture and he said,
"I know the kind of style that should be done",
and he gave me the script of The Verdict.
He said, "They won't use this script. They have thrown it out."
"But this is the style in which I think we should do this film."
So, when Zanuck and Brown approached me,
I said, "I've read it and I'll be happy to do it,
"if you'll go back to the Mamet script."
They asked me to read the intervening ones.
I did, and they were not very good.
In fact, they kept getting worse.
And, again, hurray for their courage,
they went back to a script that had been previously thrown out.
And we went back to Mamet's script.
This bar, it's on 10th Street and Avenue A.
It's one of my favourite bars in New York.
I never repeat a location, or try not to.
This one bar, this is the second picture I've used it in.
The other one I used it in was Serpico,
and I used it very sparingly in that, so that I don't think you would recognise it.
I think, by the way, also, that Francis Coppola used it in Godfather I.
It's a great ol' bar.
This is what I mean about Paul
not being afraid to play the worst parts of an alcoholic.
He doesn't spare himself. He doesn't spare the character he's playing.
That is Jack Warden, one of my favourite actors.
I think this is maybe our fifth, sixth picture together.
It was the first time I worked with Paul, by the way, except for live TV days.
We used to do a lot of work in the early '50s, in live television.
I love this set of his office.
When we were in Boston, looking for locations, we saw this building,
right around the corner from the Ritz hotel,
and it was a big ol' building that had pretty well gone to seed by now,
and was running rapidly downhill.
And the art director and I came up with this idea of "They're on such hard times,
the building, that they've taken what used to be a high floor,
with maybe a 20-foot ceiling,
and they've cut it in half, so that they could have twice the rental space."
One of the joys about Jack is that he's got a reality about him.
You just believe everything.
It's one of the reasons actors love working with him so,
because he really provides a good part of their performance, because he's so real,
all you have to do is just listen to him and talk to him,
and your own performance falls into place easily.
Now listen to me, Frankie.
Frankie, listen to me, cos I'm done fuckin' with ya.
I can't take this any more.
I mean, you're not gonna change.
Look around ya. I mean, what's gonna change?
You think it's gonna be any different next week, next month?
It's gonna be the same goddamn thing.
Now I got you a good case.
It's a moneymaker.
LUMET: That's what I mean, just that little moment of
"I got you a good case. It's a moneymaker."
He breaks your heart with anything he does,
because it's so simple and so honest.
One of the interesting things about the whole approach, visually,
we'll talk about the light later, but, just in terms of the colours used,
I don't like when these things show,
but it's a very carefully controlled colour palette.
This is a man who is haunted by the past.
He's hung up on the past. Who can't get rid of the past.
And so we just decided as a colour palette for the whole movie,
to use nothing but autumnal colours.
Reds, browns, ochres, yellows, never any of the brighter colours.
There's only one shot that's got the colour blue in it,
and I'll point that out to you when we get there.
But all the colours, as you see, russet...
You won't see anything bright or springlike in any of the shots.
Newman's characterisations are so complete,
the heaviness of him, the way his whole body functions in terms of a character.
And it's something that's been true of his acting since his earliest work.
He's a complete actor.
I don't remember who won the Oscar that year.
I know Paul was nominated and did not win.
Whoever won it, Paul was robbed.
That little man there is a man by the name of Leib Lensky.
He's a holocaust survivor and I've used him ever since The Pawnbroker, in 1963.
And this was totally Paul's. (LAUGHS)
The whole use of eyedrops to get the red out.
Again, so much a part of an alcoholic's defence.
Oh, Mrs Doneghy. Hi. Frank Galvin.
- Why didn't you go in? - It's locked.
Locked?
And of course he forgets the fact that he locked it and put the sign up himself.
The whisky voice, also, that's such a big part of his characterisation.
Now that you know where he's going, you can see the con job he works on everybody.
Which has, of course, led him into the terrible trap that he's in now.
And one of the things to surround him with was
actors who were totally honest, so that his own falseness stood out even more.
Wonderful actress, Roxy Hart.
I love the name, because Roxy Hart was a great '20s musical comedy actor.
One of the things, we'll be able to really illustrate it later,
in Paul's last address to the jury,
but one of the things that's surprising in this movie,
is an element in Mamet's writing that most people would never associate with Mamet.
He can, as you see in the dialogue here...
He's got a whole spiritual side to his talent that not many people have seen.
It's not something he reveals very often.
And he really treated Frank Galvin, Paul's character,
as someone in search of redemption,
in the religious sense as well as the psychological sense.
That was one of the reasons that he wanted to set it in Boston,
a city with a strong religious feeling about it,
where the Church plays a very predominant role in the life of the city and its politics.
And it worked wonderfully for David to place it there.
There's Eddie Binns,
one of the best actors that we've had for so many years.
Aside from live television, the first time we worked together in a movie was
in Twelve Angry Men.
He was much younger then, and I guess I was too.
This scene, all of it, the office, the hall outside, this hall downstairs
and the exterior we're coming to,
was shot at Marymount School on 91st Street and Fifth Avenue.
This is also part of the same building, and believe it or not,
it's a school now, but it actually was, once, a private residence.
It was the home of Otto Kahn,
who then left it to Marymount College.
On your right, with the cigar, is Lou Stadlen, a superb actor,
who has played so many roles on Broadway,
particularly in musicals.
Again, in terms of the choice of set, here,
the point is to surround Frank Galvin with majesty.
Everything that he's up against is enormous,
whether it's the Church, whether it's the hospital.
This location, in Boston, is actually the State House in Boston,
but we dressed it to look like a hospital.
Because again, I just wanted the grandeur of what Frank Galvin is up against.
Yeah, I read the file. Marx and Towler. I know who they were.
- Two of the most respected... - I thought you wanted to do something.
I've no interest in the woman's estate.
No offence, we all know where the money is going.
I have an interest in hospitals. I don't want those bozos in the same profession as me.
They gave her the wrong anaesthetic, they killed her and her kid, and you caught 'em.
You want a cigar?
That's where Mamet is so perfect. (LAUGHS)
Going through a life-and-death conversation ending up with
"Do you want a cigar?"
For those of you who think moviemaking is easy,
it was four degrees above zero the night we shot this.
We were all very, very cold.
And here we are back at the bar.
Coming into your shot in a minute will be Burtt Harris,
playing the bartender.
And he's on the left of the screen. It's hard to see him now.
He's sort of hidden behind the guy on the left, in the brown jacket.
But Burtt was a gofer for me, again, as far back as The Pawnbroker in '63.
Over the years has become one of the best assistant directors in the business
and a very good line producer as well, which he does now.
But he still likes to get his hand in at acting every now and then.
That's Burtt, handing Paul a drink.
A classy guy. Notice the uplifted pinkie.
An improvised joke and, boy, was it bad. And I left it in.
Again, just notice the colours in the apartment,
in terms of everything we were talking about.
The burgundy-red chair, the red-brown rug.
And of course it's a basement apartment in the city, so there are bars on the windows.
One of the main things that we wanted to do with the music,
Johnny Mandel did the score,
and one of the main objects of it was to, in a way, give you his background.
I believe that music should not be doing what the movie's doing.
It shouldn't be what we call "Mickey Mousing" what's going on.
It should provide something else.
And in this instance, what we were trying to provide was a sense of his background.
That it was religious, that he was probably an altar boy,
probably in the chorus as a kid.
And just a sense of
religion as his childhood experience,
which, in a sense, gets revived over the body of the movie.
This is an extraordinary piece of acting that Paul is doing here.
Again, without a word,
without in any way being unreal and without telling you what he is doing,
he provides you with his entire transition.
This is where he begins to believe
that there is something more at stake for him, in this case,
than just the money.
Previous scene, you see him circling the amounts of money
that he thinks he's gonna be able to settle for in this.
And we go into this scene, immediately after,
and all of a sudden, in the process of photographing the person, she becomes
completely real to him.
Again, he's surrounded by power.
And the resolution of this scene
is dependent on what happened in the last scene.
We'll talk about it as soon as we get to it.
As you see, the amount there is within the parameters of what he was circling,
in the previous scene, that he would settle for.
For those of you who are students of movie writing, writing for film,
Mamet's construction here is absolutely perfect.
You go back just two scenes, he's sitting there at home, talking to the woman,
who has brought the case to him, circling figures of what he thinks he might get,
and we see the parameters of what he'll settle for,
into, immediately, a scene without any dialogue in which he just realises
that he's dealing with a human being, not dealing with a photograph,
and the image of
a Polaroid shot becoming real to him and becoming alive.
Then, into the next scene, in which he rejects an offer that, two scenes earlier,
we know he'd have taken.
The economy of that, the beauty of the construction from a writing point of view,
is what makes David Mamet such an extraordinary writer.
Screenwriter, playwright, essay writer, all the good writing he does.
This is a wonderful building in New York, called the Tweed Building,
down on Park Row.
It's an amazing building.
It was built in 1885,
and to this day, this is the way it looks.
It was a totally corrupt building.
Boss Tweed was one of the corrupt bosses in New York.
And in 1885, if you can imagine such a thing,
this building cost seven million dollars,
which meant that it would have cost seven billion dollars today.
It was the greatest source of graft and corruption that the city had ever had,
building this place.
But I'm glad they did it, because it worked perfectly for us.
One of the pleasures of the whole experience
was working with the producers,
who were David Brown and Richard Zanuck.
I had met them when they were both in charge of Fox,
and we almost did a picture together, many years earlier.
And they are everything producers should be.
Number one, they are totally supportive of the director and what you've got in mind.
They don't interfere, they support.
The upshot of it is, you feel thrilled to just keep, hopefully, do your best,
because they themselves have that effect
on you and on everybody else in the production.
They're the best producers I've ever had.
And here comes one of the best actors that ever was.
I've often said it seemed to me that the three best movie actors,
that doesn't mean the greatest actors, but the three best movie actors ever were,
James Mason, Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda.
And I was lucky enough to work with two of them.
Here is James Mason, who, thank heavens, took this part,
wound up with a nomination
and the richness of every character that he creates is thrilling.
There's very little you can give Jim, when you work with him.
His performance arrived full-blown from the head of Zeus.
A great actor.
The humour in James' performance and his sense of irony, a consummate actor.
With the slightest gesture, the slightest look, untold riches pour out.
I go back a long way with James. We worked together in live television days,
in the early '50s.
And I think this is perhaps our fourth, fifth, maybe sixth picture together.
I don't quite remember any more.
But he'd be one of the first actors I'd think of when I knew I was going to do a script.
One of the things I learned very early about locations,
like the previous location, which was James' office and now this one,
which is a library in which they are looking up legal matters,
is, if you have to do a lot to it, if you have to bring in everything,
you've got the wrong place. Keep looking.
The place should not only give you everything you need,
it should even give you more than you need.
Such as these last two rooms.
I love the way Paul uses cigarettes, because Frank Galvin should smoke,
but Paul doesn't smoke.
So, he fakes it beautifully.
He uses everything. The rag happened to be lying there. That was not set.
There was a bar rag lying there and he used it to wipe his mouth.
The ravishing, sexy, mysterious Charlotte Rampling.
I'd been in love with her for so long
and when I finally had a part I thought was right for her,
it thrilled me.
I hadn't seen her in a long time.
And she wanted the part so much, she flew over on her own. She lives in Paris.
And came in, read, put us away, got the job before she even finished reading.
Wonderfully intelligent, sensitive person.
Now, that's two pretty attractive people, I must say.
All of a sudden you realise, movies stars, you know what?
They deserve to be movie stars.
The weak,
the weak have got to have somebody to fight for 'em.
LUMET: There is such a dangerous line.
It's a wonderful line, but you have to carry it off.
"The weak have to have someone to fight for them."
There aren't many actors who could say that and make you believe they mean it.
The kind of grandiosity of it would be the thing that occurred to you first.
I know I keep talking about
how extraordinary an actor I think Paul Newman is,
but it's a great part of the pleasure that I had on this picture,
discovering how far his talent would go.
Now we can start to talk about the lighting, because you can begin to see it.
You see the pattern emerging here.
The light is coming from the left side on Paul.
And on the shots on Charlotte, there they are, the light is coming from the right side.
Of course the light basically has to come from
the same direction for both characters.
As part of the reinforcement for everything old, the thing we talked about before,
of a man haunted by the past and so the colours are autumnal,
we also decided on a lighting pattern,
which we got, funnily enough, off the paintings of an artist whose work I love.
I think one of the greatest painters who ever lived.
An Italian artist, called Caravaggio.
And I had said to Andrzej Bartkowiak, who photographed this,
and this was maybe the fifth or sixth picture Andrzej and I had done together,
we did some wonderful pictures together,
that I couldn't analyse the light that Caravaggio provided,
but that feel, that look is what I wanted.
And I went out and bought one of the most expensive books of Caravaggio prints,
from Rizzoli bookstores,
and Andrzej and I looked at them, looked at them,
spent a lot of time looking at them.
And he said, "What it is,
is that almost all of his light is always coming from the side."
He said it's a style that many painters used, called chiaroscuro,
literally, clear and obscure,
where you don't worry about balanced light on the subject.
You let the side of the face go dark. You don't worry about it.
One side with a lot of highlight, the other side with nothing to it, not even fill light.
And that pattern, we tried to fulfil in the lighting, whenever we could.
Among other things that Newman has, he's charming.
No director can give that to anybody. No actor can learn to be charming.
It's either you've got it or you don't, and Paul is charming.
Now, as his life is getting better, so is his score.
On your left is Milo O'Shea, one of the grand old Irish actors.
I believe he was with the Abbey Theatre before he came to the United States.
A great favourite of mine.
It was mostly from stage work that I became acquainted with him
and was very happy to be able to get him for this.
He is the most corrupt-looking man in the world.
Diabolical, with the black eyebrows and the white hair.
We didn't do anything about it. That's the way Milo looks.
Would you buy a used car from that man?
That's it?
Oh, come on, guys.
Life is too short.
Now you tell me if you're playing chicken, or you really mean it.
Frank, I don't think I'm talking out of school,
but I just heard someone offer you 200 grand.
Now that's a lot of money.
And if I may say, you haven't got the best of records.
Things change.
LUMET: "Things change." (CHUCKLES) Two words that,
that are the most extraordinary words in the language.
I think Mamet titled a movie of his Things Change.
He believes in it.
He believes in it, that things change,
that you have to be ready for it and prepared for it.
Ready to grab an opportunity, because things do change.
Ever since then, whenever things are going badly, we say, "Things change".
And sometimes when they're going well,
we look at each other and say, "Things change".
When Mason was nominated, it was so thrilling.
I was in Italy. He was in Switzerland. He lived in Switzerland.
And I called him. I had just gotten the news from David Brown.
And it was lovely.
This is a man with I don't know how many hundreds of pictures behind him,
to see how thrilled he was and how his enthusiasm was still there.
And his belief.
The whole thing of Academy nominations is, it's a mixed bag.
It's wonderful when it happens.
And one of the interesting things here
is that Sherry Lansing was running Fox at that point.
Sherry is a terrific studio executive.
And when we were shooting, she'd come and visit us on the set.
One day, she was sitting with me in my trailer,
and she said, "You know, this is all going to be nominated."
She said, "The picture will be nominated. You will be. Paul will be."
And you always hear that from the studio execs.
The great joke is they walk into your trailer and you say, "May I have the envelope?"
But Sherry meant it.
She knew what she was talking about.
She's unbelievably knowledgeable about film.
She sees a picture once and will remember almost every frame of it.
When you talk with her afterwards, she'll recall just about every frame of the movie.
And she didn't say it the way a studio exec said it.
She said it out of complete conviction.
And when it actually happened, I just sent her a wire that said, "You were right."
Again, one of the things that Mamet does so brilliantly, his structure.
Just before things start going downhill,
which they are going to very soon,
he raises the stakes emotionally.
He puts in a scene like this, with two people who move you,
who are simple, who are in desperate trouble,
and reintroduces them just so that the stakes are raised, for you as the audience,
and for Galvin as a character.
Brilliant structure.
All the positive feelings have disappeared. He's back in trouble and sinking rapidly.
I don't know if you've noticed, but it's a very sparse musical score.
Very simply, we didn't need it.
Other than that hint that you got,
there was not much opportunity for the score to contribute to what was going on.
And I was also very afraid that it might interfere with the reality of it.
The reality of the picture, that is.
Because I'm such a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker,
whenever I can, I just want to do things as close to my own bedroom as possible.
So, this sure looks like Boston, doesn't it?
It's actually Brooklyn Heights.
A very expensive area in Brooklyn.
I defy anyone to tell me that's not Back Bay.
Directing students, this is interesting.
The normal thing, as you know, on these things, is to shoot his side, at him,
and then over him, to her, and then intercut the two.
But, for me, it's always a question of
"What's the most important thing going on?"
And obviously the most important thing is the effect that the information
is having on Newman's character.
So, I just didn't bother at all
with intercutting the person who was playing the maid.
When you see a picture like this, which is based completely on character,
although the plot is wonderful,
and, by the way, the plot was a complete invention of David's,
the book is so totally different.
I don't know why David ever accepted it, based on the book,
because he had such a different point of view.
You see a piece like this, which is based on character, based on language,
and you wonder how prevalent this kind of movie will be.
It's not very prevalent now, as we know. There are very different values.
This is the kind of movie that, of course, they aim for around Christmastime,
three or four movies of this sort.
But basically, it's a very different kind of market for movies now,
and I don't know whether this would have ever gotten through,
if it were presented as a possibility now.
Maybe because Paul is such a big star, it would have still happened.
But it would have been a pity if it had not gotten done.
And I'm glad we did get it done.
Everything that you imagine about Charlotte Rampling, when you look at her,
that whole sense of mystery she projects,
all turns out to be true, except for the fact that she's extremely simple.
I don't mean simple mentally.
She's just very unassuming and not grand.
A very direct and open person.
One of my favourite shots is not an intercut.
For you directing students, we just... Camera static. Just let the actors do it.
The situation is clear without close-ups.
And this is why thinking of these things in advance helps,
it would have been impossible to get this shot if the set had been built on the floor.
But I had an idea that this was the way I might want to shoot it.
And so I had the whole set built on six-foot platforms,
so we could shoot from this angle.
I've known several alcoholics who hyperventilate
when they get into what seems like an impossible situation.
We decided to use it for him. We used it once more in the movie.
It's so interesting what actors can convey over distance,
just in terms of the body language, in terms of the way they play a scene
so that you need just the simplest kind of shot and the whole thing is clear.
And you're giving yourself room for moving in later, when you're really going to need it.
Courage is so important in anybody's work,
and Andrzej said to me, here, "I've got an idea for the way I want to light this scene,
but you'll just feel Paul,
and you won't see her at all. Is that OK?"
And I said, "Go". And it's an absolutely beautifully lit scene.
The doctor is Wesley Addy.
We worked together for many years in live television and in other movies.
The way this is set up, expensive law firms do this,
and you'd better be able to pay a lot.
They try to create a situation for witnesses
that are as close to trial conditions as possible,
including six young law students, or eight, acting as a jury.
They do a cross-examination, rougher or less rough, just to get you used to it.
And you may have noticed at the beginning a video camera in the background.
There, you just saw it briefly.
The point being that they'll then show it to the witness and say,
"You've got to do this. You've got to smile more. You look a little grim here."
But a lot of testimony is rehearsed very heavily.
A wonderfully subtle piece of acting by Paul.
His shock that his witness turns out to be black.
He wants him to stay at the apartment because he can't pay for a hotel for him.
Boston's a wonderful city, but it's very tough to shoot in in winter, let me tell you.
Like London. Cold, damp.
The only time in the movie when I had blue in the background, I could not eliminate it.
Between the sky and the water, I got stuck with it.
When I had looked at the location originally, it was a very overcast day,
and none of that sprang out that well.
And as luck would have it, the day we got to shoot it,
sun was out and the blue was as strong as could be.
Julie Bovasso, one of the best actresses we've ever had in this country.
This is our second or third movie together.
She was a great acting teacher, a playwright.
When she died some years ago, hundreds of actors went into mourning.
Not only the quality of her work, but her whole belief in the theatre
and what acting had to offer.
Boy, did she have power. (LAUGHS)
Another fascinating thing that Mamet does,
he never lets the emotional state of a character just rest.
There is Galvin now,
in desperate straits
and trying to function as best he can against these enormous odds,
and he just has this brief scene,
which not only introduces a character who's gonna be very important later,
but emotionally, he just restarts that whole element of doubt.
Self-doubt, self-doubt.
Reintroduces that.
Get the record of his testimony in the 12 malpractice cases.
Do that. We'll be at Locke-Ober's.
LUMET: I didn't even get a free meal at Locke-Ober's over that plug, I was furious.
A very good restaurant in Boston, fish restaurant.
Again, Mamet's construction, we had this rehearsal scene,
versus the rehearsal scene that we saw before in James Mason's office.
Notice what Mamet is doing,
which is that having built Frank Galvin up so that all of his energy is engaged again,
and he's now pulled him down again through this entire,
for what amounts really, the second act.
And he's right back where he was at the beginning of the picture.
Only worse,
because he's already made a tremendous outpouring of effort and feeling.
And it hasn't worked.
You want me to tell you it's your fault.
OK, it probably is. But what are you gonna do about it?
- I wanted to talk to you. I thought maybe... - You maybe could get some sympathy?
You came to the wrong place.
What makes you so tough?
- Maybe I'll tell you later. - Is there gonna be a later?
Not if you don't grow up.
You're like a kid, coming in here like it's Sunday night.
You want me to say you have a fever so you don't have to go back to school.
- Why won't you understand? - I do understand, Frank.
Believe me, I do!
You say, you say you're gonna lose."Is it my fault?"
The damn case starts tomorrow, and already it's over for you.
- It is over. - You wanna be a failure?
Then do it someplace else! I can't invest in failure, Frank, any more.
I can't.
LUMET: Again, it's so superbly written how he...
What should be the normal transition scene where he asks for help
and she opens up and cries and they hold each other and that gives them strength.
There's no way Mamet goes in for that kind of a cliché.
He stays true to the characters. He reveals something about her
with that extraordinary line, "I can't invest in failure any more",
which tells you really all you have to know about her.
And that becomes that tough scene.
That unresolved scene becomes the source of transition,
giving him the strength to go into the trial the next morning.
And here he's just thinking about what she said. Realising that she's right.
A completely internal decision not done on any sort of sentimental level.
Magnificent writer.
The scene of him sitting silently and looking at her was not in the original script.
We talked about it, Paul and I. About whether there was enough to,
in the previous scene, to have given him the transition.
And just decided to shoot this. It was Paul's idea.
Just decided to shoot this, of him staring at her.
And then later decide in the editing whether we needed it.
And then when I finished the first cut, I decided to keep it in.
Cos I thought we did need it.
This is a built set, not on location,
because one of the joys of courtrooms is that they're dramatically so alive,
because you've automatically got an adversarial situation.
So tension is present, drama is present, and as a result it's thrilling to shoot it.
And so we built this because I needed a lot more angles
than a real place would have let me use.
But it is an exact duplication of the courthouse
in which this trial would have taken place if we had shot in on location in Boston.
Listen to those words that Mamet's using.
Merciful, just, prayer, pure.
These are not words that one associates with Mamet,
and yet he's capable of writing all of them in relation to the truth of a character.
It's these words that give you a hint about what the music should be
in the sense of a religious upbringing.
Why did he go to see Maureen Rooney?
She's the only nurse who isn't testifying.
- And what did he find? - Nothing.
How good's your intelligence?
Very good.
LUMET: The subtle way that David sets up plot things that he'll need for later.
Just a casual sentence,
"How good's your intelligence?"
And yet, of course, it's the heart of a plot that'll be revealed later.
You always have to be very careful in shooting scenes like this,
courtroom scenes, that you don't use up your fuel too soon.
You've got a lot of time to spend here and you've gotta spare yourself
from getting into the close-ups, from blowing it too early.
Otherwise it becomes rather hysterical and everything starts losing its effect.
(LUMET LAUGHS)
Mason has such a wonderful sense of irony in his acting,
that he can absolutely undermine the witness
without ever seeming disrespectful.
This is interesting. Massachusetts law is very interesting.
It's very different than law in a lot of the other parts of the country.
The judge is empowered to join in, the way he is here.
That's a hangover from English law, where judges are free to ask whatever they want.
There's another interesting thing in Massachusetts law,
if you appeal your case, it comes up before the same judge who tried it.
Which creates a rather interesting situation
if you're ever appealing on the basis that
you think the judge was mistaken or prejudiced.
Structurally, what Mamet keeps doing,
whenever there's a moment of self-assertion and strength,
he finds a way of shaking the man's confidence.
Here it is.
I don't know why nobody had thought of that shot before,
of starting on them drawing.
Now it's used all the time. But I was so proud of myself for starting a scene
with the artists making the drawings of the people talking.
I didn't do too well for you.
You did fine.
No, I'm afraid that's not true.
Will you want me to stay on till Monday?
No, thank you. You can go on home.
You know, Mr Galvin,
sometimes people can surprise you.
Sometimes they have a great capacity to hear the truth.
LUMET: There's a very simple moment
in which David prepares us for what's eventually going to happen.
The process... I think one of the reasons I love pictures about the justice system,
I've done so many of them, and now, 100 Centre Street is about that completely,
is that it's endlessly interesting to me how, somehow, the truth is
discerned by juries.
I don't know how many of you have served on juries.
I never try to get out of it. I love it.
And I'm always stunned at the faith with which people act, and the...
It's as if the best of them comes out.
When you're in that room and you're debating stuff,
of course, there are personalities and personality issues come up,
and you start arguing sheerly on a personality basis,
but most of the time it's as if the best of people comes out in that jury room.
I've just seen it so often.
And so that the ending doesn't come out as a sentimental thing here,
Mamet prepares it very gently
by giving you that one moment with this doctor who has lost.
He comes up and says "I wasn't very good for you."
So he lost the case for him
and yet he prepares you for the eventual ending,
with that thing of, he's always had faith in people.
Here, of course, is the heart of the whole plot.
And, again, Mamet's skill in not only having a scene about the heart of a plot,
but interweaving within it all of the background material you need to know
about James Mason's character. So that no scene is ever just plot by itself.
It's always got another value from a character point of view.
And I must say I was very skilful, too, by not revealing her until the very end of it.
Hey! You with me? You awake?
- Yeah, I'm awake. - She's protecting somebody.
Who is she protecting?
Doctors?
If she's protecting the doctors, she'd be on the witness stand.
Read me what she said.
"You guys are a bunch of whores... Loyalty... Don't care who you hurt...
- "You guys got no loyalty." - One of the nurses?
Who? Everybody who was in the operating room is testifying.
All right. Who wasn't in the operating room?
The admitting nurse?
- What does she do? - Uh, she took down the history.
And she signed it here. "K. C." Kaitlin Costello.
- The history? - Yeah.
"How old are you? How many children do you have?"
"When did you last eat?"
LUMET: Again, how skilful Mamet is that the most important point, he just delays it,
he stretches the tension out.
He could just as easily have had Galvin say "When did you last eat?"
and then, bang, idea bulb would go off in his head.
But no. He has the idea bulb go off in his head,
gets up, hands the paper to his partner,
his partner reads it, now you see what he's excited about.
Again, Mamet's skill of... (CHUCKLES) She wants to talk to him because...
This is so you don't cut loose from her completely.
She obviously wants to talk to him about what she's doing
and there's just no opportunity now.
So that he creates tension out of character over and over again.
Also, this is one of the reasons I love actors.
What Charlotte is doing here...
She keeps the same woman intact, but ever so subtly you read guilt in her.
Such guilt.
And this is without doing anything different than she's been doing before.
It's done completely internally.
Beautiful actress.
When you're working on a picture, you know if it's going well or badly,
but I don't know about other directors.
Sometimes I know how good it's getting.
And sometimes what happens on the best of them
is it starts taking on a life that you never thought, never saw.
It starts telling you what to do rather than you telling it what to do.
The picture itself does. And that happened on The Verdict.
All of a sudden I could just completely rely on my own instincts,
without thinking anything through in advance,
and have the feeling that it would be the right thing,
the right place to put the camera,
the right moment to talk to the actors and so on.
Also, again, the way Mamet's mind works. The device is so simple.
(CHUCKLES) Get the phone number. That's all you need.
The voice you hear is Lindsay Crouse. She was married to David at the time.
That's not why she got the job. She is one of the best young actresses we have.
Incredibly thorough, always loves to work on...
We worked together in Prince of the City,
and she always loves to use, as part of her character, some sort of an accent.
She had a great accent teacher
and really learns it and does it with incredible authenticity.
He put so many forces and counterforces going on into a simple scene.
It's quite clear from what he set up in the previous scene
and from that appointment that she makes to meet Galvin in New York,
that she wants to confess this whole thing to him.
Yet, at the same time, he goes about making the whole situation between them,
is going to be impossible because it'll all be too late.
This is what you save the close-ups for. That's why you don't use them in court.
I don't know where this idea came from of not hearing him deliver the news,
but knowing that he is delivering the news of her betrayal.
And playing it all this far away and the traffic sounds overtaking everything.
You never know where these things come from.
I realised years later that I had stolen it completely from what Kazan did
in On the Waterfront, in the scene between Brando and Eva Marie Saint.
Let's not call it stolen. Let's say it was my homage to Kazan.
I hate to interrupt the mood of this scene, but,
there's an extraordinary story about shooting that shot of Paul at the window.
It became the poster, in a way, for the show. The logo for the movie.
The source of light being the windows,
Andrzej Bartkowiak, of course had lights rigged directly above the windows,
to bring the light into the room.
The lights were rigged on wood which had been stored outside,
it was a real apartment,
been stored outside the apartment overnight.
And there had been a terrible rain.
And as you know, wood swells up when it gets wet.
So, when the wood was put up to hold the lights, as the batten, it was damp.
As the lights heated up and warmed the room, the dampness started to dry out.
The wood shrank and as we were just ready to shoot and Paul was in position,
the entire batten with about seven or eight lights on it came crashing down.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it missed Paul by perhaps four inches at the most.
Our hearts stopped.
The chief grip who had rigged it,
just literally went into a corner and started to cry because he was so upset.
It was his responsibility.
And the fact that he hadn't figured on the wood drying out and, therefore,
shrinking, which is what happened,
is what caused that almost horrendous accident, which would have...
It could have killed Paul, literally.
Here, coming up,
is just one of the best-acted scenes I've seen in movies for a long time.
Lindsay is an extraordinary actress and personality.
When she finished her scene where James Mason cross-examines her,
I, of course, had kept the people, the spectators, in the courtroom,
because it would have made a difference the way they played it.
And even though they weren't on camera, every person was watching the scene.
When Lindsay finished her take with James Mason cross-examining her,
all of the actors burst into applause. I've never seen that happen on a set.
I've heard of it happening with crews and I've seen crews applaud,
but I've never seen other actors applaud.
One of the reasons we're so able
to gather the intensity that we do in the performances
is that I, for myself, if it's not true of other directors, I don't know, or some others,
I rehearse extensively. We rehearsed The Verdict for three weeks.
Wound up the rehearsal without scripts. Everybody had their lines memorised.
It was completely staged. The actors were up on their feet in duplications of the sets.
And that rehearsal process is not only critical for the actors,
I feel, but critical for me.
Because it's my investigating time too.
So, we're all kind of finding our answers together.
And because of our familiarity with the material,
we're able to be very free once we get on camera,
which allows all of the spontaneous things to happen.
A lot of people think that by rehearsing you kill spontaneity.
In truth, in actuality, it works the exact reverse.
I'd like to welcome Paul Newman now and his commentary.
It's an amazing performance
and I think everything he might have to say is going to be of terrific interest to you.
NEWMAN: Hello, this is Paul Newman
and welcome to the audio comments on The Verdict.
Sidney Lumet sent me the script of The Verdict
and my response was absolutely immediate.
It was a very compelling and difficult character
and I just had a picnic attacking it.
One of the marvellous things working with Sidney is,
you come in, you sit around a table for the first morning and you start reading
and in the afternoon you're on your feet.
And by about Friday of that first week, you're not carrying your scripts any more,
and by the final Friday of the two weeks of rehearsal,
you have a full run-through, like it was a play.
So, I think after we finished that run-through,
I realised that I still had a tremendous amount of work to do.
And I would have to accomplish that in the shooting.
I've been lucky to have people that kind of propelled you into a scene
and propped you up
and insisted that you don't give anything less
than the maximum you are capable of.
They're marvellous, they're professional. They're like litmus paper.
You throw something at 'em
and they flash back an extraordinary colour you respond to.
LUMET: The old legal adage of never ask a question if you don't know the answer,
sure holds true.
By the way, James Mason is completely correct there legally
despite what we all wish.
The scene coming up is a complete illustration of what I meant before,
when I said about the sense of faith that David has,
which is so rarely exhibited in his work.
You listen to this speech carefully.
And it also had another... It was one of those agonising moments.
Paul did a brilliant take.
I'll tell you about it, after he's finished.
Paul had done a brilliant take of this and when we got into rushes the next day,
we had what we call a hair in the gate, which had resulted in a scratch on the film.
And it was agony to have to go back and tell him that we have to do it again.
And almost always when that happens,
and it happens not often, but it happens from time to time in movies,
you almost never get as good a result the second time as you had the first time.
And he just wound up, did it again,
and it's the only time, in my experience, where I've had to redo a shot,
and the performance came out better the second time than it had been the first.
In the original script, this is where the movie ended, as Paul leaves the room.
I put this in afterwards.
I talked to Paul and Charlotte and felt that we needed one more step.
To just carry what David had been doing even further to see that she was drinking
and that hopefully he would not be.
So, this was just a staged ending.
When David saw it, I think he liked it very much.
This is Sidney Lumet and thank you for watching.
I hope it was informative
and helpful.