213 Quotes by Sydney Pollack

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they’re sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It’s the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.

There isn’t any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn’t is a fool. It’s a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.

I didn’t grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That’s what acting is.

I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it’s gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.

People aren’t interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I’m not either. So I don’t try to make those kinds of films.

With a movie you’re creating from the beginning this particular work, let’s not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let’s just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don’t, I pay a big price. But I can’t make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.