Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by Sydney Pollack
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Sydney Pollack.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
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 didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
I've spent most of my life trying to make actors comfortable, which I think is 90 percent of getting a good performance.
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.
I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
I learned that creativity is all about being frustrated.
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 can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.
I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.
I really think that people never go wrong by telling the truth.
I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people.
What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.
From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.
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 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.
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.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
You can't stop traffic on Times Square.
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.
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.
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 don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.
I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a 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.
Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
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.
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
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!
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
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.
There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.
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 remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.
I am not a visual innovator.
South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'
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.
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.
No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.
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.
The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.
Stars are like thoroughbreds. Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best - whatever it is that's made them a star - it's really exciting.
Compliments aren't really a journalistic angle.
If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.
For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
You are not an active creator of the film.
You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.
I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor - the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend.
Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.
At some point during the filmmaking process, you lose objectivity, and you need the eyes of someone who understands the process and has been in the trenches.
I don't care much about acting.
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
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.
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