Sydney Pollack Quotes on Movies (18 Quotes)

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.

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

Film is a collective experience, as you know.

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

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.

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.

You are not an active creator of the film.

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

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.

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.