Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by Sydney Pollack - Page 2

Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'

American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.

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.

Each time I make a movie, it's a little bit like taking another course in something because there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to.

By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.

I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.

It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly.

I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.

I think a lot of creative people are uncomfortable with therapy. Because you're basically trying to 'solve' the unconscious. And the unconscious is where it all comes from.

At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.

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

If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.

Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.

There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer.

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

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

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

We progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically - we can live longer, we can... but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.

It's hard for me to fall in love with a piece of material enough to want to direct it.

The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.

I guess all my films are about resolving conflicts - and they're all love stories. If they weren't, I couldn't make them.

I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.

What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.

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

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.

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.

I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.

You have to go by your instincts in casting.

Kubrick and I were pretty good friends.

I sort of straddle the line... between personal movies and mainstream Hollywood.

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

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

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 love having made a movie.

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

In terms of level of difficulty, it would go comedy, thriller, and then romantic drama.

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

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

I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.

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.

I don't particularly want to go to a film to make me think, though I want it to be about something.

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

The essence to me of all good drama is argument.

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.

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

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

There's no money in documentaries.