Sydney Pollack

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.

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

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.

It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.

You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.