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
You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.
Interpretation
Expecting moral choices from those in power can lead to disappointment.
Sydney Pollack's quote reflects a philosophical perspective on the nature of power and decision-making in the entertainment industry. It suggests that individuals or entities in control, such as studio owners, are often driven by profit and commercial interests rather than ethical considerations, leading to a futile effort for advocates who hope for moral integrity in their decisions.
In practice
In a discussion about ethical filmmaking, this quote can illustrate the challenges faced by filmmakers.
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'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.
liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.
The guts carry the feet, not the feet the guts.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
Listen, O drop, give yourself up without regret, and in exchange gain the Ocean. Listen, O drop, bestow upon yourself this honor, and in the arms of the Sea be secure. Who indeed should be so fortunate? An Ocean wooing a drop! In God's name, in God's name, sell and buy at once! Give a drop, and take this Sea full of pearls.
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