A biography for Sydney Pollackhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“There's no money in documentaries.”
“I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.”
“When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.”
“I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.”
“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 hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.”
“People sense when you're pretending, when you're worried about your own ego.”
“Kubrick and I were pretty good friends.”
“There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.”
“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.”
“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 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 always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.”
“I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I've made a disaster.”
“From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.”