Sidney Lumet speaks about his work with Katharine Hepburn and describes a particularly charged and emotional moment on-screen between a mother and her child.
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TRANSCRIPT
I think when Katharine Hepburn slaps Dean Stockwell, what he's just done is say mama I'm sick i've got TB. In other words, he's told her that he has a death sentence - which it was in those days - and she, instead of grabbing him and saying oh my baby, she slaps him. And I mean Katie slapped him. His eyes went 'bwoing.'
And then she grabs him and says, 'my baby.' That moment of the slap itself when we were rehearsing, and I told Kate I would like her to slap him, and she said 'oh, I can't do that.'
Well, Kate never had any children.
That's the only thing missing from her arsenal of total knowledge about human beings. And I said to her, Kate, you - I want you to know that I have seen all my life, and I think anybody who's had children will tell you that on a piece of disastrous news, the first thing you try to do is blame it on somebody else besides yourself, and that very often what happens as a result of that is you physically strike out the person. The kid runs across the street; a car almost hits it; gets to the other side - mama says, 'You dope!' Bang! Hits it.
This is a constant in human behavior and to me, one of the most revelatory things about human behavior.
At any rate, Hepburn was deeply intelligent and she took that in and literally nobody said a word for good 30 seconds - that's a long time for a director and two actors to be standing there not saying anything, and she says, 'let me try it.' And she did it and right after the slap she stopped, she said, 'that's wonderful.' And I said good, let's not do it again till we shoot it, and we never rehearsed it again. We just kept it for the take and it's to me one of the great moments in the movie.
