Sydney was a friend, teacher, and guest instructor at my workshop. He was known as an actor’s director. Indeed, he directed an unprecedented twelve different actors to Oscar winning performances. He could see the essence of a person. Of Paul Newman, he said, “There’s a stillness in his acting now that is quite magnetic. You can feel his intelligence, you can see him thinking. He has the depth of a clear pool of water.” Sydney seemed impervious to the Hollywood veneer. He performed his work with stunning eloquence and grace. Thank you , Sydney!
1935 - 2008
FILMS INCLUDE: Out of Africa, The Firm, The Way We Were, Tootsie, The Interpreter, Jeremiah Johnson, The Electric Horseman, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, Bobby Deerfield, Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice, Havana, Sabrina, Random Hearts ...
Below are a few of Sydney’s most popular quotations.
Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.
[On working with Al Pacino on Bobby Deerfield (1977)] He's always asking questions. He's very hard on a director. In a nightclub scene he wanted to know, "Is this the first or second time we've been here?" He wants to know what day of the week it is for a scene. He wants to know the entire background to the relationship with the character played by 'Anny Duperey': "Did I pick her up? Did she pick me up?"
The director is the teller of the film, the director tells the movie, like you would tell a story, except in this case you're telling a movie.
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
So when I finish that picture I've done a sort of graduate course in that field, in that area
The idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
You are not an active creator of the film.
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
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.
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
That's right, I studied with a man named Sanford Meisner, and I studied dance with Martha Graham, and all these people taught at this wonderful school called the Neighborhood Playhouse.
I would go back and make Havana again if it came to me, I would go back and make Random Hearts, both pictures were failures.
movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
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.
it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.
From my point of view I work just as hard, I care just as much, if the films fail it doesn't make me suddenly disown them, it just doesn't.
I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
I didn't have the faintest idea Tootsie would be a hit, or Out Of Africa would be a hit, or The Firm would be a hit. You don't know. You just don't know.
I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.
I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
Sydney Pollack