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.
— Sydney Pollack
People sense when you're pretending, when you're worried about your own ego.
Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.
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.
Kubrick and I were pretty good friends.
What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.
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.
Depicting a terrorist act in a film isn't going to incite terrorism.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, I assumed that I knew all about the U.N. I was shocked to find out it's not like anything I had in mind. There are only six languages accepted there. It's considered international territory.
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.
When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.
It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.
I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.
I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I've made a disaster.
I try not to get depressed about stuff I can't do anything about.
Every time I am directing, I question why in God's name I'm doing it again. It's like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer.
Even with 'Three Days of the Condor,' I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.
For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.
I'm not going to pretend to know one more thing than I know.
It was a different time in the 1970s. Movies didn't have to make as much money.
You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.
All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.
I sort of straddle the line... between personal movies and mainstream Hollywood.
I don't get nervous talking about my films, but if I'm the subject, it's hard.
There aren't rules in a romance, so they can be played any number of ways.
There's no money in documentaries.
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.
The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.
You can't stop traffic on Times Square.
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.
Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'
Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.
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 love having made a movie.
People ask me over and over how is it that I work with stars. How do you work with Barbra Streisand, with Paul Newman, with Al Pacino, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda, you work with all these people. Isn't this a problem? And it isn't a problem at all. It's terrific. It's great fun. And I don't know what the answer is.
I really think that people never go wrong by telling the truth.
You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.
At some point during the filmmaking process, you lose objectivity, and you need the eyes of someone who understands the process and has been in the trenches.
Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.
You have to go by your instincts in casting.
Compliments aren't really a journalistic angle.
In terms of level of difficulty, it would go comedy, thriller, and then romantic drama.
When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.
If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.
Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?
I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.
I've always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from 'The Way We Were' and Jeremiah Johnson. He is this ultimate individualist.
Even in 'Victor/Victoria,' there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn't get that in the old days, in 'Charley's Aunt' or 'Some Like It Hot.'
It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly.
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.
