Happy Birthday, Sidney Lumet: The Anti-Auteur

Sidney Lumet (right) on set with Marlon Brando (Left)

There are some filmmakers whose work is immediately identifiable. You can spot a Wes Anderson picture from a single, symmetrical frame. A certain stare from Jack Nicholson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Malcolm McDowell, et al. tells you you’re watching part of Kubrick’s oeuvre. There are some directors whose indelible, unmistakable stamp is a core part of what makes their work popular.

Then there are other directors who seem to have a more invisible touch, but their body of work is equally iconic. Sidney Lumet is one such director. From gritty, naturalistic Al Pacino vehicles like Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, to classically claustrophobic ensemble dramas like 12 Angry Men, to elegant period spectacles like Murder on the Orient Express, or expertly crafted, darkly comedic satires like Network, there’s a good chance he is the man who directed some of your favourite movies. But so diverse is his body of work that you may not have even realised these different films were directed by the same person.

On today, 25th June 2026 — what would have been his 102nd birthday — I want to take a bit of time to celebrate the career of the late, great Sidney Lumet and work through a little thought experiment to see if there is indeed some unifying ‘style’ to his filmmaking we can pin down.

Let’s take a second to sit with that word: style. In Lumet’s own words from his 1995 book Making Movies, style is “the most misused word since love”. He argues that much of what film critics identify as style is surface-level decoration. “The decorators,” he says, “are easy to recognize. That’s why critics love them so”. Lumet’s definition of cinematic style is something more complex and intrinsically linked to, not detached from, the content of the movie. “Form does follow function,” he explains, and since making a movie is fundamentally about telling a story, style is “the way you tell a particular story,” which will always depend first and foremost on what the story is. Style is not about long lenses and Dutch angles.

So, to find a unifier for Lumet’s work, we may need to look beyond the superficial stylistic identity of his movies to something harder to pin down, but ultimately more substantive.

I’ll take a moment right now to point out that a lot of what I intend to cover here comes straight out of Making Movies, and it is a book I cannot recommend enough. It’s a fascinating, honest insight into his filmmaking approach that somehow both demystifies and romanticises the entire process of making a movie. It’s a very tangible-feeling portrait of the often-hyperbolised magic of filmmaking.

Very early on in the book, he directly addresses the elephant in the room of his own artistic identity. He speaks of how he had been accused of being “all over the place” and “lacking an overwhelming theme that applies to all my work”. With the benefit of being able to look back at his entire D.W. Griffith Award-winning body of work, we can revisit this accusation and see if it really was the case, or if looking at his artistic expression as a whole reveals a crystallised identity.

The easiest place to start is with the ‘why’ of his filmmaking. Lumet would more often than not make the decision of whether to make a movie instinctively, very often after just one reading of the script. This is not to say he was always sitting waiting for ‘great’ material, but rather that the most important factor in his decision-making process was that the material involved him personally on some level. Precisely what this ‘level’ was, however, did not seem to be set in stone.

For some films, it was a reflection of his interests — his fascination with the legal system with 12 Angry Men, or his background in theatre when adapting The Seagull and Long Day’s Journey into Night for the screen. For others, it was to learn something or correct some fault he perceived there to be in his filmmaking. He signed on to direct The Appointment, for example, because he had been unsatisfied with his previous efforts to move to colour filmmaking from black and white. The script for The Appointment was, in his words, passable with “fine dialogue” but a “dreadful storyline”, but he was nevertheless personally involved because the film was to be shot in Rome. This gave him the opportunity to work with cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, whose colour photography he admired, and offered him a chance to gain an education and work through the “colour block” he felt he had.

Without wishing to render the rest of this piece totally irrelevant, this one anecdote really speaks to what I think defined Lumet’s directorial identity. As does the way he structured his book. The chapters cover the essential tools required to put a movie together: “The Director”, “The Script”, “Actors”, “The Camera”, “Art Direction”, etc. Now, this might seem a logical way to arrange an explanatory text for how to make a movie, but that’s not what Making Movies is — it’s more a memoir of how he directed movies. Right at the very core of his personal philosophy, he saw movie-making as a mix of artisanal crafts that he must somehow coordinate. This might seem an obvious way to describe a director, but it becomes more personal to Lumet specifically when we start to consider what this mix is all in service of.

For some directors, all the tools at their disposal — be it actors, cinematographers, or whatever else — are in service of realising their ‘vision’. Think of someone like Quentin Tarantino, for example. You could very much describe him as an ‘actor’s director’ — someone who is skilled at collaborating with performers, very often the same performers time and again, and getting magnetic performances out of them. He pulls out of his actors precisely what he wants from them to tell his story and realise his vision. Tim Roth speaks anecdotally in a GQ interview about how Tarantino discourages improvising on his sets, asking for his words to be delivered as written, saying Tarantino had effectively already done their improvising for them when writing the script. The quintessential auteur.

This is very different from Lumet’s approach, who could also be described as an ‘actor’s director’. But actors were not tools to realise his vision, they were craftspeople in their own right doing a job he couldn’t — much like Di Palma and his colour photography — to help realise the shared ‘vision’ of the movie they would create together. That in itself was not necessarily something Lumet had clearly mapped out. The film was not some pre-realised masterpiece just waiting to be chiselled out of the proverbial marble, but rather something everyone was actively moulding under his guidance.

There are phrases that come up time and again in his book — he always comes back to asking “what is this movie about?” as the guiding star for his filmmaking, and he also checks in time and again to see if everyone involved in the picture is “making the same movie”. He proudly appears to take on a leadership role, as any great director should, but that leadership is not dictatorial. And now we really get to the heart of his style. I will not drag it out any longer; to my eyes, Lumet’s filmmaking identity comes down to one word: collaboration.

For many great directors, their closest collaborator is their cinematographer. The way a movie is captured and the visual language of the photography is as much a part of a director’s ‘style’ as anything else. Denis Villeneuve had the incomparable Roger Deakins shoot Prisoners, Sicario, and Blade Runner 2049, and one could be forgiven for thinking he also shot his Dune movies as well, such was the overwhelming influence of Deakins’ sensibilities on Villeneuve’s approach to visual storytelling. Similarly, just try to imagine a Christopher Nolan movie without Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography.

Lumet acknowledged the importance of this relationship, and he himself frequently worked with the same directors of photography, like Boris Kaufman or Andrzej Bartkowiak. But for him, visual ‘style’ meant nothing unless it was in service of the story he was trying to tell.

“What is this movie about?”

“Are we making the same movie?”

Story remained his guiding principle. Cinematic techniques for him needed to come from the material, rather than have a specific, established visual language drive how he would present the material he was given. If the material changed, so should the techniques. He could have worked with the same cinematographer for 10 consecutive films, but if they weren’t right for the story he was trying to tell with film number 11, the collaboration would have to end.

The cinematographer may arguably be the most important collaborator for a director, but for Lumet, there truly were no unimportant decisions, and artistic contribution was to be welcomed from any and all of the talented people he would assemble. He described Tony Walton, art director and costume designer on Murder on the Orient Express, as “the personification of what I mean when I talk about working with the best”. He was someone who made artistic contributions over and above his own departments; someone whose input on everything from script to casting, to editing was valued and welcomed. Someone who, in Lumet’s words, “makes me work harder and better”.

This perfectly crystallises his philosophy and the way he approached his work. Lumet’s view was that every part of filmmaking — be it score, sound effects, or editing — is creative if done right, but must all be done in service of the story. And everyone needed to be aligned on what the story was that they were telling. And that was his job.

The role Lumet appeared to strive to fill as a director was as a catalyst for pure collaboration within the storytelling teams he assembled, with him providing assured creative stewardship. From the first script read to the final mix, he kept a watchful eye on the artistic alchemy that made his movies. There was no set roadmap for how he would do this; as he put story first, the work would be different depending on what would best serve the particular story they were trying to tell. This is why all his movies have an identity all their own, yet remain fundamentally connected. He was the collaborative auteur.

He didn’t always succeed in his stewardship — he freely admits in Making Movies that things got away from him a little on The Wiz and is critical of the sternness of his direction of The Group. Regardless of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of any particular movie, I think when you take his body of work as a whole and look at how he himself described his filmmaking, you find the unifying ‘style’ that defines a Sidney Lumet picture: an almost invisible, but deeply individual, artistic craftsmanship where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

So Happy Birthday, Sidney Lumet.

Do you agree? Do you not? Was this a long-winded way to say something very obvious? (I mean…it was, but I wanted to write a piece about Sidney Lumet, so sue me). Do you just want to add one more complimentary observation of Sidney Lumet’s filmmaking? Please tell me what you think, and wish him a Happy Birthday.