Sydney Pollack Quotes (35 Quotes)

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.

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

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.

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.

The director is the teller of the film, the director tells the movie, like you would tell a story, except in this case you're telling a movie.

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

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

I'm making a plea for my colleagues and myself, who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell you the story in the best possible way visually. And then someone else has to come in and cut the edges off of all that and pan and scan it. So you're not seeing what story we tried to tell you.

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.

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

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.

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

I'm hands-on in areas where I can make a difference. There's no sense in me standing on set the director doesn't need me there.

Film is a collective experience, as you know.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 are not an active creator of the film.

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

From my point of view I work just as hard, I care just as much, if the films fail it doesn't make me suddenly disown them, it just doesn't.

On the one hand, the businessman in me understands it. But the lover of movies in me wants desperately to hang on to the movie house as a collective experience with the audience.

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

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

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