Quotes from Sydney Pollack

I am not a visual innovator.

I don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.

It's when the lawyers themselves become bad guys that you begin to have a serious problem.

What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.

I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.

Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.

I haven't broken any new ground in the form of a film.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

OK, I know this is going to disgust you, Michael, but a lot of people are in this business to make money.

What I really want to do is produce. There isn't much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.

Obviously its a good feeling to know that something you've done has lasted.

I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.

Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.

I guess all my films are about resolving conflicts - and they're all love stories. If they weren't, I couldn't make them.

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

Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.

There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.

Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.

Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'

You are not an active creator of the film.

There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer.

This thing called chemistry, which I can't define and wouldn't know how to, either works or it doesn't. Sometimes a love story can involve very talented actors, but we are not invested emotionally in whether they end up together.

We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.