Top 99 Sydney Pollack Quotes

Like a lot of New Yorkers, I assumed that I knew all about the U.N. I was shocked to find out it’s not like anything I had in mind. There are only six languages accepted there. It’s considered international territory.

It was a different time in the 1970s. Movies didn’t have to make as much money.

Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you’ve got to get to it and get to it now – get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.

The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling – and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody’s really ready.

Even in ‘Victor/Victoria,’ there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn’t get that in the old days, in ‘Charley’s Aunt’ or ‘Some Like It Hot.’

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

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.

You can’t trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

There aren’t rules in a romance, so they can be played any number of ways.

I learned that creativity is all about being frustrated.

I’ve always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from ‘The Way We Were’ and Jeremiah Johnson. He is this ultimate individualist.

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.

Every time I am directing, I question why in God’s name I’m doing it again. It’s like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer.

This thing called chemistry, which I can’t define and wouldn’t know how to, either works or it doesn’t. Sometimes a love story can involve very talented actors, but we are not invested emotionally in whether they end up together.

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.

When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind – to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.

From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

You can’t stop traffic on Times Square.

There are very few Westerns that have ever made really giant money.

I try not to get depressed about stuff I can’t do anything about.

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

When you’re shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don’t want accidents; you want to know exactly what’s going to happen. But with a documentary, you don’t, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.

There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.

It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren’t directing it. But to do it while you’re directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn’t do that again.

Depicting a terrorist act in a film isn’t going to incite terrorism.

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.

I think it’s a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don’t want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.

If you list the qualities that we consider feminine, they are patience, understanding, empathy, supportiveness, a desire to nurture. Our culture tells us those are feminine traits, but they’re really just human.

The essence to me of all good drama is argument.

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

Making a movie is a network of decisions that keep multiplying as you go. You leave a trail of decisions behind you, and that’s how you start to see the shape of what you’ve done. When you get far enough, you turn around and say, ‘Ha, that’s the movie.’ It’s only then that you find out if it’s going to work or not.

I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I’ve made a disaster.

I don’t get nervous talking about my films, but if I’m the subject, it’s hard.

People sense when you’re pretending, when you’re worried about your own ego.

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.

I love having made a movie.

Film is a collective experience, as you know.

Good actors aren’t enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine ‘Casablanca’ without Bogart and Bergman?

When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.

I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it’s only the world that doesn’t like the failures.

You have to go by your instincts in casting.

Even if it’s a thriller or a comedy, it’s always a love story for me, and that’s what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.

All the movies I’ve made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I’m interested in.

I do not have a good control of running sight gags. I laugh like hell when I see them, but I don’t know how to invent those jokes.

There isn’t a studio in the world that wouldn’t burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.

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

I’d get bored if I… if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.

I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.

The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can’t be done.

For reasons which I can’t logically explain, in all of the films I’ve done, I’ve ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.

I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don’t. I want a guy down there who’s just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it’s going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.

We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.

Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.

Even with ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.

It’s impossible for me to go into a room or look at a location without a part of my brain photographing it – picking the best angle or looking at the way the light hits.

I feel no terror when I’m acting. There’s no tension. It’s just a part.

South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase – ‘I was homesick even when I was home.’

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

Kubrick and I were pretty good friends.

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

I don’t know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.

You are not an active creator of the film.

It doesn’t matter what I’m doing – I wish it was something else. If I’m producing, I wish I was directing. If I’m directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!

It’s my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.

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

It’s when the lawyers themselves become bad guys that you begin to have a serious problem.

You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.

With a movie you’re creating from the beginning this particular work, let’s not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let’s just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

My strength is with actors. I think I’m good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.