A biography for Sydney Pollackhasn’t been written yet.
“I feel no terror when I'm acting. There's no tension. It's just a part.”
“I don't particularly want to go to a film to make me think, though I want it to be about something.”
“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.”
“Depicting a terrorist act in a film isn't going to incite terrorism.”
“American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.”
“I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.”
“We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.”
“My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.”
“There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer.”
“The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.”
“It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!”
“I don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.”
“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.”
“All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.”
“When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.”
“I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.”
“Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me, and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.”
“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.”
“I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.”
“I don't care much about acting.”