I guess all my films are about resolving conflicts - and they're all love stories. If they weren't, I couldn't make them.
— Sydney Pollack
It's hard for me to fall in love with a piece of material enough to want to direct it.
I learned that creativity is all about being frustrated.
I always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.
It's when the lawyers themselves become bad guys that you begin to have a serious problem.
It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn't do that again.
If you list the qualities that we consider feminine, they are patience, understanding, empathy, supportiveness, a desire to nurture. Our culture tells us those are feminine traits, but they're really just human.
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.
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 am not a visual innovator.
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!
You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.
If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.
When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.
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.
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.
I don't particularly want to go to a film to make me think, though I want it to be about something.
American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.
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.
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.
No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.
I do not have a good control of running sight gags. I laugh like hell when I see them, but I don't know how to invent those jokes.
There are very few Westerns that have ever made really giant money.
I'd get bored if I... if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.
When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.
The essence to me of all good drama is argument.
I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film.
South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'
I don't care much about acting.
Stars are like thoroughbreds. Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best - whatever it is that's made them a star - it's really exciting.
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.
What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.
There isn't a studio in the world that wouldn't burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.
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 feel no terror when I'm acting. There's no tension. It's just a part.
There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer.
I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.
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 progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically - we can live longer, we can... but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.
I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.
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.
From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.
I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.
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.
There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.
I've spent most of my life trying to make actors comfortable, which I think is 90 percent of getting a good performance.
The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.
