'By Sidney Lumet' Clip: Watch the 'Dog Day Afternoon' Director Discuss His Classic '70s Crime Drama
If you were looking to tell the story of 20th century New York exclusively through movie clips, you could fill the entire reel with Sidney Lumet films. To watch the storied director’s output — from 1957’s 12 Angry Men through 2007’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — is to see his beloved hometown evolve and change over five decades. “I’m a New Yorker and watching his films always make me feel like I’m home,” Nancy Buirski, director of the new documentary By Sidney Lumet, tells Yahoo Movies.
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One of the quintessential New York director’s most quintessentially New York films is Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 bank heist drama starring Al Pacino. That’s the subject of the exclusive clip above from By Sidney Lumet, which opens in New York on Oct. 28, before expanding to Los Angeles on Nov. 4. Shooting on the streets of Brooklyn where the real life incident the film was based on took place, Lumet admits that he essentially discovered the movie as he was making it. “When you have to find out what your film is about and let that drive your decisions, [it results] in a very naturalistic film,” explains Buirski. “Dog Day Afternoon doesn’t have a specific style or look — it is what it is because this is how it all happened.”
Lumet’s working methods behind Dog Day Afternoon aren’t entirely dissimilar to how Buirski approached her documentary, a project she inherited from its original director Daniel Anker, who passed away in 2013. Anker recorded a 14-hour interview with Lumet in 2008, three years before the director’s own death at age 86. Sifting through that wealth of material, Buirski located a narrative throughline to the director’s career, one framed by a traumatic incident he witnessed while stationed in India during World War II as a U.S. Army radar technician.
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You’ll have to watch By Sidney Lumet to learn the specific details of that event, but the ramifications are clearly evident in many of his movies, where characters — whether it’s Serpico’s Frank Serpico or The Verdict’s Frank Galvin — frequently wrestle with dire moral questions in the face of injustice or corruption. “I don’t think Lumet ever would have said, ‘I make films because this moment happened,’” Buirski tells us. “But it is a touchstone in his life that’s kind of like a Rosebud moment. Those moral questions are what allow his films to resonate through the years.”
Sidney Lumet’s ‘Dog Day Afternoon’: Watch the trailer:
