Quotes from Sydney Pollack

Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?

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.

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

Even with 'Three Days of the Condor,' I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.

In terms of level of difficulty, it would go comedy, thriller, and then romantic drama.

Stars are like thoroughbreds. Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best - whatever it is that's made them a star - it's really exciting.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.

When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.

Every time I am directing, I question why in God's name I'm doing it again. It's like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer.

I learned everything, right or wrong, about honor and love, all those things, when I was a kid watching movies. I learned as much there as I did from my parents or my schooling or anything else.

We progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically - we can live longer, we can... but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.

People sense when you're pretending, when you're worried about your own ego.

I do have a responsibility, but I would make the most boring films in the world if I woke up every morning worrying about my social responsibility.

At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.

There isn't a studio in the world that wouldn't burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.

The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

You have to go by your instincts in casting.

You can't stop traffic on Times Square.

I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.

The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling - and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody's really ready.