Veteran film director Sidney Lumet knows his way around a lean, mean New York story.
Just check out some his credits from the past 50 years: Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince Of The City, The Verdict, Q&A, etc.
So it come as no surprise that the 83-year-old filmmaker was attracted to the script for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead which is about a New York heist-gone-horribly-wrong.
"The wonderful thing is I love melodrama and it's fallen into such disrepute because it's considered a lesser kind of movie," said Lumet during a visit to the Toronto International Flim Festival back in September.
"I mean that's just not true. Hamlet is a pretty good melodrama. Five bodies left on the stage at the end of act five."
Lumet knows of which he speaks.
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, which has been getting rave reviews stateside and generating Oscar talk for Lumet and his stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, is now being seen as his "comeback" film after a dry spell that ran through most of the late '80s and '90s.
Hoffman and Hawke play troubled brothers whose individual money struggles -- Hoffman's a real-estate office payroll manager deeply in debt due to his heroin addiction, while Hawke's a divorced loser who works in the same office and can't pay his child support -- lead them to knock over their parent's jewelry store with tragic, ultimately catastrophic results.
Marisa Tomei plays the woman stuck between the two siblings and Albert Finney plays the tough family patriarch.
It's a dream cast and Lumet knows it.
"About as close as you can get to it," he said. "In this, the first one I thought of was Philip because I knew the level of intensity that I would want from a lead, and that paired with the fact that he's just a marvellous actor."
As it turned out, Hoffman arrived on the set fresh off his Oscar win for Capote.
"One thing that he's got is a startling originality," Lumet said. "By the very nature of it, a very original actor can't remind you of anyone except other original actors. They're not doing the same thing but they have this extraordinary originality and Philip's got that (like) Marlon, Pacino -- constantly surprising."
Lumet began his career as an actor in New York theatre and a director in live television and is known as an "actor's director" who can extract the best performances, often Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning.
He has worked with most of the greats including Finney, whom he directed in 1974's Murder On The Orient Express.
"It was old home week," said Lumet of collaborating with Finney again. "He's a remarkable man because he's actually got a life outside acting and loves the life outside of acting. A lot of actors don't. First of all the job itself is so consuming and a lot of actors prefer that. Albert always had that kind of reserve somewhere. He loves horses, breeding and raising them, not betting."
Lumet, who has always rehearsed his actors before filming actually begins, seems to have developed a system that works.
The director received an honorary Oscar in 2005, after being nominated five times previously.
He said despite the relentlessly dark tone of the film there was no gallows humour on the set.
"It was tougher in this instance because their concentration had to be so relegated toward unpleasant things, coming up and past, so the characters were already in this pressure cooker," he said. "So it kept the jokes down, but not out of anything other than staying concentrated on your job."
Lumet said the biggest challenge was keeping the intensity level going, week in, week out.
"I mean it doesn't blow its top until pretty close to the ending," he said. "Everybody's sitting on it, sitting on it."
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