Al Pacino & Sidney Lumet: 'Dog Day Afternoon' At 50

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm David Biancoole.

Today's show is devoted to a film that was made 50 years ago, but is regarded half a century later as one of the most daring, vibrant, and important movies of the 1970s.

The movie, 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, was based on a real-life Brooklyn bank robbery that had occurred three years earlier.

The bank robber, who was married, was hoping to escape with enough cash to finance the sex change operation for his male lover.

But mid-robbery, the bank was surrounded by police, TV news crews, and Brooklyn onlookers, and escalated into a tense hostage situation and media circus.

Al Pacino, fresh from filming Godfather 2, starred as Sonny the bank robber.

Sidney Lumet, who already had directed Pacino in the intense cop drama Serpico, was the director.

Before staging and photographing the first scene, Lumette held weeks of rehearsal with the cast, encouraging them to improvise.

He carried that same spirit into the on-location filming, and every scene crackles with energy.

Here's an early scene, with Pacino as Sonny inside the bank with his hostages, and with the detective outside, played by Charles Derning, making first contact by phoning the bank.

They're okay.

If you're alone, you got Confederates.

I'm not alone.

I got Sam.

Sam?

What's that for?

Sabotage?

Yeah.

Sam.

He's a killer.

We're Vietnam veterans, so killing don't mean anything to us.

You understand?

In the Army?

In the Army, yeah.

Okay, so there's you.

What's your name?

Why?

What do you want to know my name for?

Well, give me your name, any name, just so I got something to call you.

Come on, let's be reasonable, okay?

Just give me your name.

All right?

Uh, call me Sonny.

Sonny?

Yeah.

Today on Fresh Air, we feature archive interviews with both the star and director of Dog Day Afternoon, beginning with the film's director, Sidney LeMet.

Sidney LeMette cut his teeth as a director in the early days of television, directing both live and filmed productions.

In the early 50s, he directed episodes of the history reenactment series You Are There, the sitcom Mama, the arts series Omnibus, and many installments of live TV anthology drama series.

One of his first of those was the 1952 CBS television workshop production of Don Quixote, starring Boris Karloff and Grace Kelly.

Sidney LeMette made the transition to the big screen by directing the movie version of a live TV drama, 12 Angry Men, in 1957.

But he kept alternating between film and television, doing strong work wherever he went.

In 1960, his brilliant TV adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Ice Man Cometh starred Jason Robards and featured a young Robert Redford.

In the 60s, Sidney LeMette directed a string of classic films, including The Pawnbroker and Failsafe.

In the 70s, after Dog Day Afternoon, his next three films were Patty Chaevsky's Network, Equus, and The Wiz.

And in the 80s, he directed Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine in Death Trap and Paul Newman in The Verdict.

Sidney LeMette was awarded an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2005.

Terry Gross spoke with Sidney LeMette in 1988.

You've made about 38 movies in a little over 30 years.

And it reminds me of the old studio days, in a way, when there were a lot of movies being made and when directors and actors used to do a lot of movies per year.

How have you managed to keep that pace up, especially considering how the movie industry has changed?

Lucky, Terry.

I love work and I love movies.

I think if I had, if I could ever, and these things are clearly

impossible, but if I could have had the artistic freedom that I enjoy now

under the old studio system, which would have been impossible, by the way, I think I would have been very happy working in a studio because I love going from one project to another.

I love

when I work with actors who

I find exciting to work with.

I love repeating with them and working with them again and again.

Trevor Burrus: So you think of yourself as having more artistic freedom now than you did when you were starting because of how the movie industry has changed?

Not partially, I don't know.

Or because of your stature.

Part of it is muscle.

You get a couple of hits behind you and

you can slowly start encroaching into that area.

But

I think you're right.

I think the studio system has changed.

I don't think that

Louis B.

Mayer would have given me final cut no matter how many hits I'd had.

He would have never given up that prerogative.

Now, you insist on that, right, when you take on a movie, you must have final cut.

Which means what exactly?

Well, it means that there can be nothing ⁇ the film cannot be touched after you finish editing it, whether in the soundtrack or visually, it's yours.

What kind of problem had you run into with previous movies that taught you you needed to demand final cut?

Well, as an example, many, many years ago, I did a very,

very interesting picture, I think a very good picture.

It's one of the few that i like better now than at the time that i did it a picture called the hill with sean connery and

it uh it was not much of a success in america but a good picture and

at that time met i did it for metro gold with mayor and at that time um

they were

being owned by a new person.

They were changing hands almost daily.

There were three new managements

in the period of a year.

And at one point they just said it as a matter of company policy that a picture had to run one hour and 55 minutes because

they thought that this would work well for their relationships with the exhibitors.

And the picture ran two hours and two minutes, and they just insisted that I take seven minutes out.

They didn't care where it came from.

It didn't matter to them that there were no seven minutes to take out without destroying the movie.

And it was a hell of a battle, and the only reason I won it, actually, actually, was because management changed hands again and the new management came in, which was listened with slightly more sympathetic ears.

But if the old management had

continued running Metro, they simply would have taken the film and removed seven minutes, period.

Right.

And that kind of thing goes on constantly.

A great many directors have suffered very severely from that.

And that's still going on.

Oh, yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about your first film, made in 1957, and this was 12 Angry Men, a courtroom drama.

You had before that that been directing television, live television dramas.

Was this a good transition to make since it was basically a one-set movie, it's a courtroom drama, it's a jury drama, they're in the deliberation room most of the movie.

Was that a good place to start?

It was good and

it was a great problem, except that I was dumb enough not to know what the problem was.

I found out after I had done the movie and people liked it, that it was very difficult to shoot a movie in one room.

That never occurred to me.

Really?

I had just plunged in with complete ignorance, knowing what I wanted to do with camera, knowing that I could make the camera a good interpretive part of the movie itself, and just blithely went ahead, shot it in 19 days,

happy as a lark, and

didn't know what the problem was.

I may have felt enormously secure at the confinement of it because my background, as you say, had been live television and the theater.

So

so the idea of staging something in one room was something that came very easily to me.

Well, the movie starred Henry Fonda and Lee J.

Cobb.

Fonda is the only juror initially convinced of the defendant's innocent.

Cobb is the last holdout.

I want to play a clip from this movie, 12 Angry Men.

Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks?

Okay,

she had marks on her nose.

I'm giving you that.

From glasses, right?

She didn't want to wear him out of the house of people who think she's gorgeous.

But when she saw this kid killing his father, she was in the house alone.

That's all.

Do you wear glasses when you go to bed?

No, I don't.

No one wears eyeglasses to bed.

It's logical to assume that she wasn't wearing them when she was in bed, tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep.

How do you know?

I don't know.

I'm guessing.

I'm also guessing that she probably didn't put her glasses on when she turned to look casually out of the window.

And she herself testified the killing took place just as she looked out.

The lights went off a split second later.

She couldn't have had time to put them on there.

Wait a second.

Here's another guess.

Maybe she honestly thought she saw the boy kill his father.

I say she only saw a blur.

How do you know what she saw?

How does he know all that?

How do you know what kind of glasses she wore?

Maybe there was sunglasses.

Maybe she was far-sighted.

What do you know about it?

I only know the woman's eyesight is in question now.

She had to be able to identify a person 60 feet away at night without glasses.

You can't send someone off to die on evidence like that.

Oh, don't give me that.

Don't you think the woman might have made a mistake?

No.

It's not possible.

No, it's not possible.

It's a heck of a cast.

In addition to Fonda and Lee J.

Cobb, you have Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, E.G.

Marshall at Begley.

You were you directed them your first time out on film, and you've since directed Paul Newman and younger actors like Al Pacino and Treat Williams.

Is there a difference in the acting styles of the actors who you were directing in the 50s and the actors who came of age in, say, the 70s?

Not really, Terry.

The basic craft of acting is,

in the United States, has been set for some years, really, even before the method came in.

Basically, people like Fonda worked out a profound sense of truth.

In fact, a man like Fonda didn't know how to do anything falsely and used himself, used himself brilliantly.

Both of those elements are foundations of the method.

And even though he wasn't called a method actor in the sense of having studied the method, he basically worked out of that as most good actors did.

Do you think of yourself as a method director?

No, I become the kind of director that

becomes whatever his actors needs.

When I did Murder on the Orient Express, I could work

the way the English actors work.

When we did Long Day's Journey in Tonight, there was a perfect example.

Kate Hepburn has a very specific way of working, her own technique.

Ralph Richardson is a prime example of British technique, which is primarily from what we call the outside-in.

Dean Stockwell works completely method from the inside out, and Jason has his own glorious world of

creating something from inside himself and heaven knows where it comes from.

But

I think part of the job of directing is to not

make the actors work your way, but for you to work as a director any way that makes them comfortable.

You directed Al Pacino in two of his first big movie roles, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.

I want to play a short scene from Dog Day Afternoon, and maybe you could tell me what you think Al Pacino needed when he was getting started.

This is a scene from the very opening of the movie when Pacino walks into a New York bank and he holds it up and he wants the money to buy a sex change operation for his lover.

Nobody moves!

Get over there!

Okay.

All right, get away from those alarms.

Come on!

Get in the center.

He moves, take his head off.

Put the gun on him!

Get out of the center!

Sonny?

I can't do it, Sonny.

I'm not gonna make it, Sonny.

What are you talking about?

Put it on it.

You can't do it, Sonny.

Sal.

Sal, why?

Where are you?

You can't make it.

It's an interesting performance because Piccino is so manic in it and yet so insecure and incompetent at robbing this bank.

What did he need when he was getting started?

You were talking before, about giving actors what you think they need.

Primarily what he needed was

he needed a great sense of freedom and a great sense of restriction.

That

the creation of the character is really Al's own.

He understood something about that man that is irreplaceable, and I don't think a director can ever give.

He understood him down to his bone marrow.

What he needed was

a sense of release, the confidence to know that as extreme as he got in the performance, that it was right,

that it went...

For example, there's a scene toward the end of the movie where he's talking to his female wife his real wife on the telephone trying to decide what to do

and the scene is extraordinary in the sense that it requires a level of emotion that I've seen very rarely in movies we did the scene in one take

because I

with two cameras because I didn't want him to have to repeat that emotion over and over again.

And when he finished it the first time, it was wonderful.

And without waiting an instant, I didn't even cut the cameras.

I said, Al, go again.

And he looked at me like I was crazy because he was exhausted.

He was spent.

And I said, right now, action.

And what I was driving at was that he had reached such a height at the end of the first take.

such an emotional peak, but that's really where I wanted the scene to begin.

And

he, it's one of the best pieces of movie acting I've ever seen.

It was

blinding in its intensity, agonizingly painful, and

just reached a level of emotion that I, as I say, that I don't think I've seen often in movie acting.

And

that knowledge that...

he could go as far as he wanted to within the confines of this this situation and that man, the situation created by the script, the man created by Pacino.

But that confidence to know that he could go as far as

his feelings would carry him was very important to him, and that was really the biggest single directing relationship to his performance.

Here's the scene from Dog Day Afternoon that Lumette was just talking about.

Al Pacino's character, Sonny, is doing his best to keep it together.

The bank robbery is falling apart.

He has a bank full of hostages, and he's dealing with the police and the hostage negotiator.

In the midst of the chaos, he calls his wife.

I'm dying, you know that?

I'm dying here.

Sonny, I blame myself.

I notice you've been tense like something is happening.

Like night before last, you're yelling at the kids like a madman.

And then you want me to go on that ride that caterpillar from here to there full of those kids.

It's ridiculous.

I'm not about to go on the ride.

See, you yell at me.

You pig, get on the fing ride.

Well, everything fell out of me.

My heart and my liver just fell to the floor.

I mean, everything was.

You know what it felt like you yelled at me like that in front of all them people?

I mean, because you never talked to me like that before, Sonny.

I think he's gonna shoot me.

He's gonna dump my body in the back.

Will you just shut up?

I mean, I was scared of you.

I was scared.

Will you shut the f and listen to me?

Just listen to me.

You see?

You see that scene with the language and everything?

What I'm talking?

I'm trying to talk to you.

And I personally can't communicate with you.

I wonder if you ever run into conflicts where there's one actor in a scene who works really well on that first or second take, and another actor who sees it as their style to go for 15 or 16 takes until they really get it perfect.

What do you do if you run into that?

I have run into it, and so far, if there were a piece of wood around the studio, I'd knock on it.

But so far,

I've been able to convince the 15 or 16 take actor that the other works.

The early takes are not imperfect.

They are usually the freshest,

truest.

The repetition I find, and I think for most good actors, the repetitions tend to become mechanical.

One doesn't find

more

truth in it as it goes on.

Now, that partially has to do with the way I work, because, as you know, or may know, I rehearse very heavily.

I rehearse two to three weeks, depending on the complexity of the characters, before we begin.

And those rehearsals are conducted like theater rehearsals in the sense that people learn their lines completely.

They're working without scripts.

They're completely blocked to the degree that we're having run-throughs by the end of it.

So it's not as if

once we get on camera that this is their first exposure.

Is that uncommon?

Yes, it is.

It is.

It is not done often.

I think mostly those of us who were trained in television do it.

I think Arthur Penn does it.

I know Arthur Penn does it.

John Frankenheimer and so on.

Oh, because you had to do it for the live drama.

That's right.

But it turned out for all of us, I think, in movies to have other advantages.

You know, between Twelve Angry Men, The Verdict, Serpico, and Prince of the City, you've done your share of

police and legal dramas.

Is this a special interest of yours, or did you just like those scripts and want to do them?

It's funny, Terry.

You know, I don't really analyze these things.

I just respond instinctively to a piece of material.

But obviously, something in me somewhere is very involved with that level of life.

Where it comes from, I don't know, but on looking back on it, boy, there are an awful lot of

what I call justice stories.

They somehow involve me very viscerally.

Have you been affected by the new craze of market research?

Yes, and

fortunately, I've had my artistic controls in place before they ever came along because I think they are disastrous.

I think they're destructive.

I also think they're untrue.

I think a person changes as soon as you ask them something.

So do you have a no market research clause when you take on

no, because I can't prevent the studio from doing it, but I sure in hell don't let it affect any of my decisions about what I'm going to do with the picture.

You obviously love film directing.

When you're doing a movie, what's the part that you most look forward to and the part that you know you have to do but you really don't enjoy at all?

There's only one part that I have to do.

All of it is

a thrilling process to me.

Pre-production, shooting, post-production, editing, music.

The only part that's a bit of a drag is what we call the mix, which is when we come in and do the final soundtrack and put every chair squeak in and every door slam in.

It requires enormous concentration because it's largely a mechanical process rather than a creative one.

Although some directors use it very creatively.

The soundtrack that I keep remembering particularly is the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now,

which was a brilliant piece of work and a totally creative piece of work.

However, you do have to do it.

I feel I have to do it myself because if the mix is a bad mix, if the wrong thing is emphasized, it can seriously affect the movie and be very destructive to a movie.

So I have to do it, but it's the only non-joyful part of movie making to me.

Sidney Lement speaking to Terry Gross in 1988.

He died in 2011 at age 86.

Coming up, we'll hear from the star of Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino, as we continue our look at the film, which is 50 years old this year.

This is Fresh Air.

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We're continuing our golden anniversary anniversary salute to Dog Day Afternoon by hearing from Al Pacino, who starred as the bank robber Sonny in that landmark 1975 film.

For Pacino, it was a brilliant performance, but only one among many.

The movies in which he has starred and shown brightly include The Godfather films, Scarface, Glengarry Glen Ross, Serpico, Scent of a Woman, and The Devil's Advocate.

For TV, he's played the title role in Phil Spectre, Roy Cohn in Angels in America, and starred in the series Hunters.

In 2024, he wrote a memoir called Sunnyboy, which is when Terry Gross spoke with him.

She started by asking Al Pacino about the first Godfather film, and played a scene which featured not only him as Michael Corleone, but John Cazal as Michael's brother Fredo.

Cazal would share the screen with Pacino once more as his bank-robbing accomplice in Dog Day Afternoon.

Here's the scene from Godfather 1.

Pacino as Michael, has begun his transformation into the hardened Michael.

His father is still alive, but Michael is preparing to take over for him.

He's with Mo Green, a Vegas casino owner kind of modeled on Bugsy Siegel, and the Corleone family has helped back him.

Also in the scene are Michael's not very bright brother Fredo and the family lawyer Tom played by Robert Duvall.

Mo Green is played by Alex Rocco.

Michael speaks first.

Corleone family wants to buy you out.

The Corleone family wants to buy me out.

No.

I buy you out.

You don't buy me out.

Your casino loses money.

Maybe we can do better.

You think I'm skimming off the top, Mike?

You're unlucky.

You damn guineas really make me laugh.

I do you a favor and take Freddie in when you're having a bad time, and then you try to push me out.

Wait a minute.

You took Freddie in because the Corleone family bankrolled your casino, because the Mullinari family on the coast guaranteed his safety.

Now, we're talking business.

Let's talk business.

Yeah, let's talk business, Mike.

First of all, you're all done.

The Coyote family don't even have that kind of muscle anymore.

The godfather is sick, right?

You're getting chased out of New York by Barzini and the other families.

What do you think is going on here?

You think you can come to my hotel and take over?

I talked to Barzini.

I can make a deal with him and still keep my hotel.

Is that why you slap my brother around in public?

Oh, now, that was nothing, Mike.

Now, now,

Moe didn't mean nothing by that.

Sure, he flies off the handle once in a while, but Mo and me were good friends, right, Mo, huh?

I got a business to run.

I gotta kick asses sometimes to make a run right.

We had a little argument, Freddie and I, so I had to straighten him out.

You straighten my brother out.

He was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time.

Players couldn't get a drink at the table.

What's wrong with you?

I leave for New York tomorrow.

Think about a price.

Do you know who I am?

I'm Mo Green.

I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders.

Wait a minute, Mo.

Oh, I get an idea.

Tom, I'm your conciliary.

Now, you can talk to the Don.

You can explain.

Just a minute.

Don is semi-retired, and Mike is in charge of the family business now.

Have anything to say?

Say it to Michael.

I just love that scene so much.

Yeah, it's interesting on on radio, too.

It works.

Just hearing it and that's it.

Doesn't it work though?

Yeah, it does.

Yeah.

It really does.

I was thinking maybe they'll do the godfather on radio someday.

That's a great idea.

Yeah.

You know, I interviewed Michael Caine years ago and the great actor Michael Caine, and he was saying,

when you're playing a powerful person, you don't wave your hands around.

Because

when you have the power, people are looking at your every subtle gesture.

They're trying to read you.

They're trying to stay in your good graces and stay safe.

And so weak people move their hands around.

Powerful people don't.

When we started talking, you were moving around a lot.

So I'm thinking, well, is it hard for you to be as still as Michael is when he is exerting his power?

Because he knows how to not be still when he needs to,

but he can be very still and very opaque and very threatening at the same time.

I know.

I don't know how I did that.

Yeah, I was wondering.

I don't know to this day what possessed me.

You literally, like, don't blink in that scene.

I think you blinked once.

How do you do that?

Well, I was in the situation, as they say, and I guess

it came to me, you know, because things like that happen

if you

stay the course, meaning if you are with whoever you are when you're playing it and

your instincts are operating.

I guess

I was lucky and I just went in that direction.

I didn't do it consciously.

You were nearly fired from the movie after the opening scene.

And you write in the book that the opening scene was such a stupid scene for the audition because Michael is so not a part of the family.

He doesn't really know who he is yet.

His future is uncharted.

And he's naive.

Judgment was off on picking that scene, I think, because it's a scene of, you know, quasi-exposition.

So

when you're going through it,

what are you supposed to do?

He's just describing to his girlfriend, Kay, who later becomes his wife, like, who's here and who his family is and who they've helped kill.

I know.

So these wonderful people, all dish, and I remember them all, all of us,

the young actors just doing that scene.

And I thought, well, what can they see from that?

But somehow I was the lucky one because Francis always wanted me before there was a script.

Francis Ford Cobla.

Yeah, he always wanted me to play Michael.

That was in his vision.

Even though it wasn't in mine, I'll tell you that.

I thought he might be making a mistake.

You thought he was kidding and I was making a phony phone call.

Well, I did think when he called me and told me that he was given the Godfather to direct,'cause I knew him like a year ago before that, where I went out to San Francisco to do something with him.

And I I saw where he worked and the the the zootrope that w with Spielberg there and Lucas and all those DePalma and all those seventies filmmakers that were about to explode on the scene.

And I I had met them in San Francisco.

I and he was

getting to know me for another role.

He was doing in a movie that he wrote, Love Story, which never got off the ground.

And I went back to New York, and I hadn't heard from him in about a year.

And then he called me, and I said, oh, Francis,

I spent some time with him, three or four days, so I got to know him a little bit.

And I thought, this guy's got something very special.

And he called me and told me he had the godfather.

I thought, now he's gone too far.

I thought,

what life can do to you, you know?

Now he's fantasizing things.

So I said, okay, I went along with it.

But after a while, I started to think, wait a minute, I think Paramount is pretty smart to pick this guy because this guy knows his stuff.

And it's an Italian, American.

He understands it somewhere.

They picked him.

You know, he had won won an Oscar already for the script of Patton, the George C.

Scott film that was so wonderful.

And

so he already was starting to establish himself in Hollywood.

And then I started to think maybe he is going to do it.

But when he said he wanted me to play Michael, then I thought, you know,

he's really in a fantasy.

So you start with Robert De Niro in Godfather 2, but you're not in any scenes together because he's of a different generation from before you were born.

And

however, you do have scenes together in Heat and also in The Irishman.

And I want to play a great scene from The Irishman.

Sure.

Okay, so here's a scene with you and De Niro toward the end of the film.

And you've just gotten out of prison.

He plays Frank Sheeran, and Frank Sheeran is somebody who got very connected to the mob and then he became,

you played Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamsters union.

He became your bodyguard.

So in this scene you've only recently gotten out of prison.

There was a big kind of ceremony in your honor and then De Niro as Frank Sheeran comes up to you and explains that

basically that your time's up, that the mob wants you out of the Teamsters, out of the leadership position that you want to return to.

But you're both talking between the lines.

You're not coming right out and saying anything.

You're talking between the lines.

It's a great scene.

You ping-pong back and forth.

So let's hear it.

It starts with De Niro.

Tony told me, old man, to tell me, to tell you,

it's what it is.

What it is.

It's what it is.

Please listen to me.

They wouldn't dare.

They wouldn't dare.

Please, Frank, come on.

Don't say they wouldn't dare.

No, don't, don't tell me that kind of...

That's fairy tales.

Please don't say they wouldn't dare.

Please.

Something funny happens to me.

They're done.

You understand it.

And they know it.

Because I got files.

I got proof.

I got got records.

I got tapes.

Anytime I want, they'll be gone.

These

spend the rest of your lives in jail.

And they know it.

They know it?

But what you're saying is what they're concerned about.

What I'm saying is I know things.

I know things.

They don't know.

I know.

Please.

Are you going to take that chance?

What chance am I?

Why should I be taking a chance?

They're saying this is it and then it's it?

Jimmy, I'm trying to tell you something.

I know you are.

You're telling me they're threaten me, and I got to do what they say, which is

absolutely

what it is.

They do something to me, I do something to them.

That's all I know.

I don't know anything else.

Do you?

You don't get that.

De Niro is telling you they're going to kill you unless you do it.

And they do.

Al Pacino, speaking to Terry Gross in 2024.

We'll continue their conversation after a break.

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I just want to end with one more scene.

And

it's another very famous scene.

And this is from Dog Day Afternoon, and it's the Attica scene.

So you've been holding up a bank, you've been trying to rob a bank to get money for your lover's gender affirmation surgery.

Your lover is transgender, a transgender woman, and wants the surgery.

Everything has gone wrong with the bank robbery, so now you're holding everybody in the bank hostage.

And you step outside to make your demands.

And

the sergeant who's overseeing it wants you to just, you know, make a deal with him and end this siege.

So the sergeant is played by Charles Derning.

And in this scene, you get everybody chanting Attica.

And that chant was

an idea that was given to you at the last minute.

I forget by who.

As I was going out, this great assistant director,

Bert Harris, brilliant.

He's done it all.

And he and I made films together because

he was Lement's A.D.,

very clever.

He used to, when I'd come in in the morning,

he'd do all the things that, you know, break a hangover.

You know, to get me ready to play Superco.

He had all these bitters and stuff.

He understood things.

He really worked with so many actors.

And anyway, on my way out to once again confront the crowd and the police and everything going on out there, as I was going out, he said to me, Listen, Al, come here.

Say Attica.

I said, What?

What?

Say Attica.

Go.

I said, Say Attica.

So I go out.

And I don't know.

I know about Attica because it was in the news.

It was a terrible situation that had happened in Attica prison and all that.

So I'm thinking it's in my head.

And I'm going on with the comps.

All of a sudden, they just blurt it out.

Person say, Attica, remember Attica?

You know, oh,

that just got the crowd, man.

They just went with it.

And they start going.

And the next thing you know, everybody's saying, yeah.

And the cops were all there.

And they were saying, what the hell is this?

What are we doing here?

What happened?

Yeah, and of course Attica

Attica referred to in this prison in New York, upstate New York.

Where they went in there and killed prisoners.

Yeah,

the prisoners were demanding more humane conditions in the prison.

And they took some of the workers there hostage.

And then

the police moved in, armed.

There was a riot.

A lot of people got shot, mostly shot by police.

People died.

That's right.

And it was just, it was a disaster.

And so he starts, so your character starts shouting Attica.

And there's a whole crowd of people watching the whole spectacle.

And I don't mean watching the movie being made.

I mean watching the spectacle of the drama of the hostage crisis in the movie.

There's police all around, dozens of police, there's snipers on the rooftop, and you come out of the bank and start talking, and the sergeant's trying to make a deal with you.

And so when we hear the crowd chanting Attica in response to you you chanting Attica, did they know you were going to do that?

No, they didn't.

That's what I was saying.

Go ahead, go ahead.

That's what is so wonderful about films.

You can capture it if you're free, if you allow the set to be free.

You could capture anything on that camera as it happens

within the structure of the context of the film you're doing and the scene you're playing.

You never know what can happen.

And it was, you know, it happened.

And is that the take that you used?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Dee Dee Allen was cutting it.

I would imagine it was.

I mean,

they started doing it again when I went out for other takes, I guess.

It started a trend outside.

I mean, there were hundreds of people who understood what I was saying.

They were all part of the,

you know, they were part of what New York was going through at the time.

I'll just say one more thing about this scene.

It is the opposite of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

He's so, like, still and powerful

and

cold.

And you play this as somebody who's really agitated.

You're pacing back and forth.

You have a handkerchief in your hand, handkerchief in your hand that keeps, like, you're waving it back and forth.

You're just like one ball of impulsive, nervous energy.

And so let's hear the scene.

And before we play it I just want to thank you so much for talking with us always been a pleasure thank you for all your great films all your great performances and for the book

thank you

come on put one of your head all you got is attempted robbery armed robbery all right arm then

nobody's been hurt release the hostages

nobody's gonna worry over kidnapping charges the most you're gonna get is five years you get out in one year huh kiss me what kiss me

when i'm being i like to get kissed Come on, come on, come on.

You're a city cop, right?

Robbing the banks of federal offense.

They got me on kidnapping, armed robbery.

They're going to bury me, man.

I don't want to talk to somebody who's trying to calm me.

Get somebody in charge here.

I am.

I don't want to talk to some flunky pig trying to calm me.

You don't have to be coined.

What's he doing?

Will you get back there?

What are you doing in there for?

What's he doing?

Get back there.

What's he doing?

Look at him, William.

Get over there.

Go back there, man.

Get over there.

Will you?

He wants to kill me so bad he can taste it.

I got always going to kill him.

Anaka!

Anaka!

Anaka!

Anaka!

Anaka!

Anaka!

Anika!

Anika!

Anaka!

Anika!

That was Al Pacino inciting the crowd in the most memorable scene from the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, which is now 50 years old.

Al Pacino, who spoke to Terry last year, is now 85 years old.

After a break, Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel The Loneliness of of Sonia and Sonny by Kirin Desai, which has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

This is Fresh Air.

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The 2006 novel by Kieran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has a review.

It took Kieran Desai nearly 20 years to write her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny.

I mean this as a sincere tribute when I say I'm amazed it only took her that long.

Desai's near 700-page novel is about exile and displacement not only from one's home country, family, and culture, but also from one's own sense of self.

The multi-character, multi-stranded plot roams from locales in India and the U.S., Delhi, Goa, Vermont, Brooklyn, with side trips to Italy and Mexico.

This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story.

Desai's characters inhabit a complex, postmodern, post-colonial world, and yet her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned.

Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story, a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own family's formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them.

Dickens himself might have blushed.

There are plenty of complications, however, before and after that fateful moment.

When the novel opens in the late 1990s, Sonia is a depressed college student in Vermont who hasn't been back to India in two years.

Her grandparents, her lifeline back home, are baffled.

Here's a sampling of a phone conversation a tearful Sonia has with her grandfather.

What are you crying for, you lucky girl?

Sonia tried to explain.

I've ballooned in my own head.

I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems.

I'm dreading the winter.

In the dark and cold, it will get worse.

Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books.

The miscommunication there is generational, cultural, and temperamental.

Tragically, it makes the isolated Sonia ripe for the picking by a visiting art monster, a painter named Ilan.

Early in their affair, Ilan boasts to the impressionable Sonya, maybe I will paint a picture that the whole world will know, and you'll become angry and feel you don't exist outside the painting.

And he does just that, appropriating her body and an intimate moment of shame in his art for all to see.

Just as damaging is Ilon's theft of a treasured amulet that Sonia inherited from her German grandfather.

Without that amulet, depicting a demon protector, Sonia feels bereft.

But what of Sonny, our other protagonist here?

He too has left India for the U.S., where we first meet him working for the Associated Press.

A prime motivation for Sonny's move was his domineering mother, Babita.

We're told Sonny had thought he would be able to love her better from New York.

Instead, Sonny finds himself editing his life for his mother, for instance, hiding the existence of his live-in girlfriend, a Nordic Midwesterner named Ula.

In one of the many black comedy set pieces in this novel, Ulla takes Sonny home to Kansas to meet her folks.

Here are some snippets from that visit, mostly seen from Ula's anxious perspective.

Ula didn't want Sonny to find her father's consumer reports in the basket by his reclining chair.

She didn't want her father to tell Sonny he'd found an excellent deal on his own tombstone.

Ulla had told Sonny he was not to say anything complimentary about Socialism or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton.

Ulla, vigilant to both sides, saw that Sonny was not able to perform to his eccentric self that her parents' body humor was oppressed.

They passed the beans and the cornbread, the tick-tock asserted itself, while her mother wondered whether if it was safe to say she had enjoyed the movie Gandhi.

Maybe enjoyed was not the word.

What hope is there for us to understand each other, let alone ourselves, when so much of human interaction is performance?

Sonia, a writer, considers that question as it applies to art, recognizing the danger of packaging an exotic India in her writing for the enticement of white people.

Would the dilemma vanish, Sonia wonders, if the abundance of stories grew as abundant as life itself?

In the loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, Desai has come close to achieving that ideal.

This is a spectacular novel, nearly as abundant as life itself, to savor, ruminate over, and yes, even reread.

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.

She reviewed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny by Kieran Desai.

On Monday's show, U.S.

poet laureate Ada Limon discusses Startlement, new and selected poems, a collection spanning nearly two decades.

Limon's poetry documents everything from close observations of horses and kingfishers to the cosmos.

One of her poems is engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper bound for Jupiter's moon.

I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Sharock.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman.

Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy Nesper.

Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancoule.

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