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
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.
Interpretation
Movies serve as a means of exploring complex arguments and perspectives.
In this quote, Sydney Pollack reflects on the process of making films as an educational experience. He suggests that each movie tackles intricate discussions among characters that may not have clear resolutions, thus allowing filmmakers and audiences to engage with various viewpoints and societal issues through the art of storytelling.
In practice
In a film analysis class, this quote can be used to discuss the complexities of character development.
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.
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.
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