SIDNEY LUMET on MAKING MOVIES (Thread)

1) Creative work is very hard and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to begin. To start, you have to believe that it’s going to turn out well. And so often it doesn’t. I’ve talked to novelists, conductors, painters

2) about this. Unfailingly, they all admitted that self-deception was important to them. Perhaps a better word is “belief.” But I tend to be a bit more cynical about it, so I use “self-deception.” The dangers are obvious. All good work is self-revelation.

3) When you’ve deceived yourself, you wind up feeling very foolish indeed. You dove into the pool, but there was no water there. Perfect Buster Keaton.

4) Another great danger in self-deception is that it easily leads to pretension. “My God, did we [or I] do that? Wow!” And you start to believe that you are that good. That’s the most dangerous feeling of all. I think most of us feel like fakes.

5) At some point “they” will get onto us and expose us for what we are: know-nothings, hustlers, and charlatans. It’s not a totally destructive feeling. It tends to keep us honest.

6) The other side of that coin, though, the feeling that we own the work, that it exists only because of us, that we are the vessel through which some divine message is being passed, is lunacy.