Quotes from Sydney Pollack

I'd get bored if I... if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.

From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

I remembered myself as an unpopular and rather sad kid.

For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.

I always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.

Even in 'Victor/Victoria,' there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn't get that in the old days, in 'Charley's Aunt' or 'Some Like It Hot.'

It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn't do that again.

The dance that happens, between actor and director, is a very delicate thing...it's why people tend to work together on many films over and over.

You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.

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

I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.

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.

You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

There's no money in documentaries.

Each time I make a movie, it's a little bit like taking another course in something because there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to.

The essence to me of all good drama is argument.

All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.