A biography for Sydney Pollackhasn’t been written yet.
“I am not a visual innovator.”
“I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor - the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend.”
“When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.”
“I do have a responsibility, but I would make the most boring films in the world if I woke up every morning worrying about my social responsibility.”
“The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.”
“I try not to get depressed about stuff I can't do anything about.”
“I love having made a movie.”
“Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.”
“The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling - and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody's really ready.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.”
“I learned everything, right or wrong, about honor and love, all those things, when I was a kid watching movies. I learned as much there as I did from my parents or my schooling or anything else.”
“You can't stop traffic on Times Square.”
“This thing called chemistry, which I can't define and wouldn't know how to, either works or it doesn't. Sometimes a love story can involve very talented actors, but we are not invested emotionally in whether they end up together.”
“I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film.”
“I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.”
“I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.”
“I think a lot of creative people are uncomfortable with therapy. Because you're basically trying to 'solve' the unconscious. And the unconscious is where it all comes from.”