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Home
Authors
Sydney Pollack
American
Director
About the author
You are not an active creator of the film.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Business
#Politics
#Shame
I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Talk
#Now
#People
#Years
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#People
#College
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Experience
#Reading
#Nature
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Failure
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Man
#Woman
#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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Movies
#Childhood
#Weekend
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Movies
Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Question
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Want
#Life
#Hollywood
#Home
#Night
#Bed
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Years
#Today
#President
#Man
#Washington
#Example
#Charisma
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Idea
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#World
#Truth
I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Kids
#Pretty
#Movies
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#People
#Fantasy
#Trying
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Dance
#Architecture
#Art
#Writing
#Photography
#Painting
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Art
#Popular
#Entertainment
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#People
#Conservative
#Numbers
#Liberal
I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Living
#Actor
Film is a collective experience, as you know.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Experience
Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Art
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Focus
#Sound
#Politics
#Heroes
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Hollywood
#Europe
#states
#United
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Acting
#Years
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Work
#Art
#Play
I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Film
#Art
#Thinking
#Movies
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.
Sydney Pollack,
American
Director
#Work
#Art
#Popular
#Culture
#Movies
#Beginning
#Accident