IN HIS OWN WORDS: SYDNEY POLLACK AS A DIRECTOR, producer and actor, Sydney Pollack’s career has
spanned over 50 years. His work includes films such as Out of
Africa (1985,) for which he won an Oscar for directing, The
Quiet American (1999) starring Michael Cane and most recently
The Interpreter, released this April. Here Pollack talks about the
process of movie making and the purpose of his work.
‘THE FIRST THING you ask as a director is: what is this about? The answer to this can’t be: the story of a film. The idea of what it’s about for me is not something that has to be visible to an audience. But it serves as a superstructure like the studs and the steel girders in a building that are not visible when the building is finished, but which really hold it up. I’m doing a film now, a thriller [The Interpreter], so I can say to myself that this picture is about diplomacy versus violence; and that is a picture about one person that believes in the power of words and another person who’s totally cynical and believes words are used to lie – like politicians and world leaders – and that action is the only thing that counts. That gives me some sort of structure around which to build a movie. It doesn’t mean that I ever say those words, or that I ever let the audience know that’s what it’s about, but if you were to analyze it you’d know. It’s giving me a path to go down.
“Each genre has certain demands, but that doesn’t mean that the central concerns can’t be similar. I am the same man when I direct whatever it is. I am trying to observe certain rules of the genre but I’m also trying to explore what interests me primarily: men and women and the central argument that separates them – the thing that keeps permanent committed relationships almost impossibly difficult. They happen, but they are always difficult. The greatest love stories have been about irreconcilable obstacles that can’t be overcome. Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde, or Doctor Zhivago: they do not resolve themselves where the lovers walk into the sunset. It doesn’t matter whether I am making a thriller or a comedy, I’m always doing love-stories.
“In all candor, I’d say that I am not a director that enjoys directing. I find it full of too much anxiety to say it is enjoyable. I obviously enjoy having made a movie I enjoy when it’s over with, I’m glad I did it, I’m happy that I did it. But the process itself seems extremely difficult to me and I go through hell every time I make a movie
“To be a good director you have to have patience; you have to be fluid inside your own personality in the sense that you have to be all of the characters. You can’t take sides. You have to be the man and the woman and the crook and the bad guy and so on to make a really complex film that reflects life in some way. But you need to be able to have the kind of imagination that allows you to be somebody else, completely. And that’s not always easy.
“You also have to have lots of stamina as a director. I have stamina because one life isn’t really enough. Being one person isn’t being enough, for me. I am just one person at a time, I have one age, one family, one marriage I have one relationship: I want more than that. Making films is two years out of my life and a way of living with a whole other group of people and becoming them in a way and that broadens my life enormously. It’s a way of vicariously becoming all these other people and seeing the world through their eyes; and that’s a very enriching experience.
“I think film directors of my generation are somewhat saddened by the industry’s consolidation– there are a lot of movies that I have made that I wouldn’t be able to make today. The fact that the studios are all owned by multinational corporations has created a sort of Blockbuster mentality where all the studio films are looking to be Blockbuster movies. Whereas the movies of the seventies – let’s say that 20 year period from the middle sixties to the middle eighties – was as great a period America has ever had: some of the greatest movies were made because the variety was limitless. Studios were still individual small houses; movies did not have to make 100 million dollars prior to Jaws. A movie would cost two or three million dollars and if it earned back ten million dollars that was hugely profitable. Now everybody in the world has become movie conscious. Everybody knows about movies, everybody knows the grosses of movies, everybody knows the technicians in movies – it’s a movie-literal world. I simply think that’s kind of fun.”
Sydney Pollack was interviewed by Stephan Littger, who is a student at Keble College Oxford. The full interview will be available in book form later this year in The Art of Becoming a Hollywood Director – conversations with 20 Hollywood directors
