Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.
Sydney Pollack
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
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 love having made a movie.
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.
When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.
If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
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.'
I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don't want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.
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.
American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.
I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.
Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?
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.
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!
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
There isn't a studio in the world that wouldn't burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.
I try not to get depressed about stuff I can't do anything about.
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 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.
Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'
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.
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.
The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.
There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.
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.
Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me, and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.
I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.
Film is a collective experience, as you know.
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.
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.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it's only the world that doesn't like the failures.
It's hard for me to fall in love with a piece of material enough to want to direct it.
The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.
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.
People sense when you're pretending, when you're worried about your own ego.
Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.
You can't stop traffic on Times Square.
South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'
Depicting a terrorist act in a film isn't going to incite terrorism.
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.
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.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.
I don't care much about acting.
