Sydney Pollack
I don't care much about acting.
You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.
I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.
South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'
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!
From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.
I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film.
I am not a visual innovator.
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.
The essence to me of all good drama is argument.
Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.Collection: Writing
I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.Collection: Children
Making a film is a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.Collection: Girl
Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.Collection: Views
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.Collection: Views
When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.Collection: Black And White
All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.Collection: Stars
Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.Collection: People
One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.Collection: Reality
I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push. People talk about Three Days of the Condor as being anti-government but the last statement in that movie is the CIA guy saying to Robert Redford, "Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!"Collection: Running
It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.Collection: Play
The dance that happens, between actor and director, is a very delicate thing...it's why people tend to work together on many films over and over.Collection: Delicate Things
You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.Collection: Religious
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative. I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films. It's a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.Collection: Girl
The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That's what acting is.Collection: Views
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.Collection: Reading
Obviously its a good feeling to know that something you've done has lasted.Collection: Feelings
There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.Collection: Religious
I don't consider myself a teacher of moral and political positions. I don't want to be that. I can't help but have a point of view when I make a film, but my first job is to entertain you.Collection: Teacher
Three Days of the Condor is still an interesting film to watch not because it's political. It happens to be political. But that's not why the sales of the DVDs are as high as they are. It's because it's an entertaining thriller. In my opinion, Tootsie is a very political movie but truck drivers can go and laugh at it.Collection: Dvds
I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can't create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.Collection: Vocabulary
Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It's politics.Collection: Men
[Stanley] Kubrick was a fascinating, larger than life guy who had been a friend for many years prior to our working together on that film. I found the best part of working with him to be the long conversations we had between set-ups.Collection: Years
There isn't any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn't is a fool. It's a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.Collection: Thinking
When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.Collection: Way
I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.Collection: Order
You mustn't regret decisions that you make. Because the decisions are made out of your gut in a way and you have to stick with them.Collection: Regret
I'm not going to be an interpreter at the U.N. I'm not going to live in Africa on a farm or whatever, but I am going to see the world through those eyes when I make those films.Collection: Eye
My films ought to be judged on whether they're entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push.Collection: Views
I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive.Collection: Thinking
People aren't interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I'm not either. So I don't try to make those kinds of films.Collection: People
I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don't want to glorify a killer. I don't want to glorify a rapist. I don't want to do those things, but on the other hand I don't want to lecture to you, either.Collection: Jobs
Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal.Collection: Jobs
Once I start to do a film, it has inferences. If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you're saying something about that guy. A guy walks down the street and somebody's about to be run over and he shoves him out of his way and gets hit by the car himself, you're saying that guy's a hero. You can't avoid making certain statements.Collection: Running
I'm not trying to push my political agenda on anybody. I'll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in. I don't mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in. But when we're talking about my films, I don't think my politics should have anything to do with it.Collection: Party
I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.Collection: Fun
I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.Collection: Art
OK, I know this is going to disgust you, Michael, but a lot of people are in this business to make money.Collection: Money
What I really want to do is produce. There isn’t much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.Collection: Stories