Quotes from Sydney Pollack


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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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


You are not an active creator of the 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.


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


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


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


Film is a collective experience, as you know.


Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.


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


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


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


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.


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