213 Quotes by Sydney Pollack

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.

I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I've made a disaster.

I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor - the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend.

I don't care much about acting.

I've always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from 'The Way We Were' and Jeremiah Johnson. He is this ultimate individualist.

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 am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.

I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.

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