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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Sydney Pollack

Mind

You

Play

" The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype. "

" I love having made a movie. "

" You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself. "

" I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid. "

" I am not a visual innovator. "

Sydney Pollack

I Am

Innovator

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You are not an active creator of the film. "

" There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer. "

" 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. "

Sydney Pollack

Fun

Great

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Film is a collective experience, as you know. "

" Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie. "

" I sort of straddle the line... between personal movies and mainstream Hollywood. "

" I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people. "

" And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing. "

Sydney Pollack

Knowing

Real

" 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. "

" For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would. "

" I guess all my films are about resolving conflicts - and they're all love stories. If they weren't, I couldn't make them. "

" I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part. "

" There aren't rules in a romance, so they can be played any number of ways. "

" 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. "

Sydney Pollack

Love

Life

" You have to go by your instincts in casting. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't particularly want to go to a film to make me think, though I want it to be about something. "

Sydney Pollack

Film

Want

" Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman? "