Sydney Pollack Quotes

I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.

I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

Film is a collective experience, as you know.

I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.

You mustn't regret decisions that you make. Because the decisions are made out of your gut in a way and you have to stick with them.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people.

There isn't any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn't is a fool. It's a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.

You are not an active creator of the film.

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.

Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.

The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That's what acting is.

I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don't want to glorify a killer. I don't want to glorify a rapist. I don't want to do those things, but on the other hand I don't want to lecture to you, either.

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.

Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It's politics.

It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.

People aren't interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I'm not either. So I don't try to make those kinds of films.

My films ought to be judged on whether they're entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

What I really want to do is produce. There isn't much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.

OK, I know this is going to disgust you, Michael, but a lot of people are in this business to make money.

Once I start to do a film, it has inferences. If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you're saying something about that guy. A guy walks down the street and somebody's about to be run over and he shoves him out of his way and gets hit by the car himself, you're saying that guy's a hero. You can't avoid making certain statements.

Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.

I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.

But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.

When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.

I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

Three Days of the Condor is still an interesting film to watch not because it's political. It happens to be political. But that's not why the sales of the DVDs are as high as they are. It's because it's an entertaining thriller. In my opinion, Tootsie is a very political movie but truck drivers can go and laugh at it.

Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.

Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.

When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.

You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.

Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.