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.
Sydney PollackRead
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.
Interpretation
Filmmakers often lose perspective during production and need trusted feedback from experienced colleagues.
This quote by Sydney Pollack highlights the importance of collaboration and external perspectives in the creative process of filmmaking. As filmmakers become deeply involved in their projects, they may struggle to maintain an objective view of their work. Therefore, seeking input from those who understand the intricacies of filmmaking and who have faced similar challenges can provide valuable insights and improve the final product.
In practice
During a film industry seminar discussing the importance of feedback.
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.
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
I think music is about our internal life. Itβs part of the way people touch each other. Thatβs very precious to me. And astronomy is, in a sense, the very opposite thing. Instead of looking inwards, you are looking out, to things beyond our grasp.
By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to... take yourself out of the game.
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