Quotes from Sydney Pollack

You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.

I'm not going to pretend to know one more thing than I know.

Kubrick and I were pretty good friends.

It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly.

I try not to get depressed about stuff I can't do anything about.

I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.

There are very few Westerns that have ever made really giant money.

It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!

By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.

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

I really think that people never go wrong by telling the truth.

If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.

One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.

I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.

People ask me over and over how is it that I work with stars. How do you work with Barbra Streisand, with Paul Newman, with Al Pacino, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda, you work with all these people. Isn't this a problem? And it isn't a problem at all. It's terrific. It's great fun. And I don't know what the answer is.

American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.

Like a lot of New Yorkers, I assumed that I knew all about the U.N. I was shocked to find out it's not like anything I had in mind. There are only six languages accepted there. It's considered international territory.

I feel no terror when I'm acting. There's no tension. It's just a part.

Depicting a terrorist act in a film isn't going to incite terrorism.

I learned that creativity is all about being frustrated.

If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.

The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.

Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you've got to get to it and get to it now - get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.

When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.