A biography for Sydney Pollackhasn’t been written yet.
“I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.”
“No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.”
“I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.”
“It was a different time in the 1970s. Movies didn't have to make as much money.”
“You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.”
“I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.”
“Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.”
“You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.”
“I learned that creativity is all about being frustrated.”
“Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.”
“It's impossible for me to go into a room or look at a location without a part of my brain photographing it - picking the best angle or looking at the way the light hits.”
“You have to go by your instincts in casting.”
“It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.”
“I've spent most of my life trying to make actors comfortable, which I think is 90 percent of getting a good performance.”
“I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.”
“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.”
“Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you've got to get to it and get to it now - get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.”
“If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.”
“No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.”
“Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?”