Sydney Pollack Quotations

[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.

It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.

Obviously its a good feeling to know that something you've done has lasted.

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.

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.

When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.

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.

I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.

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.

Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.