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A Conversation with Sydney Pollack

THINK TANK

WITH HOST: BEN WATTENBERG

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 2000

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: This is the old Columbia Pictures lot in Hollywood, California. Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg, we're here to talk with one of America's great film directors, Sydney Pollack. Pollack was born in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1934. He began his career in television in the early 1960s and directed popular series like Ben Casey, and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His 1969 film They Shoot Horses Don't They firmly established Pollack's career as a hands-on director for the big screen. Since then his credits have included such memorable films as The Way We Were, Tootsie, and in 1985 Out Of Africa, which won him Oscars for best picture and best director. Pollack's motion picture and television production company, Mirage Enterprises, is now located here at the Sony Picture Studios where it develops and produces several feature films each year.

The topic before the house, Sydney Pollack making movies this week on Think Tank.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Sydney Pollack, thank you for joining us on Think Tank.

MR. POLLACK: A pleasure.

MR. WATTENBERG: So many people in America now are interested in the film arts and making movies, I want to talk to you about making movies. But, let me ask first just a few biographical questions. Where are you from, what's the story?

MR. POLLACK: Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies. I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

MR. WATTENBERG: It cost a dime.

MR. POLLACK: Yes, you know, it cost a dime or a quarter, something, is what I remember. Then I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and left there right out of high school, I was interested in acting, I thought. I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor. And as a matter of fact, I never did until I gave up acting, that's the irony of life. But, I went away to New York, and I went to a very good acting school, by sheer luck, not because I was smart or knew about it.

MR. WATTENBERG: Sanford Meissner.

MR. POLLACK: That's right, I studied with a man named Sanford Meissner, and I studied dance with Martha Graham, and all these people taught at this wonderful school called the Neighborhood Playhouse. It was extraordinary and I just sort of fell into it. And I came back after two years there, I was 19 years old when I finished, and I became Meissner's assistant, so I was like a coach. And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

MR. WATTENBERG: Did you go to college?

MR. POLLACK: No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.

MR. WATTENBERG: And here your works are being taught not only in college, but at the graduate level, at the Ph.D. level. They do Ph.D. theses on what are Sydney Pollack movies like.

MR. POLLACK: Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field. If I make a film about 1850 in America, and mountain men, let's say, I spend a year researching like crazy until I know exactly who you make a trap for a beaver, what did a beaver pelt cost, how long could you go up into the mountains, what roots could you eat, what roots couldn't you eat, what was poison, what wasn't poison. I'm going to read every book there was, I read all the journals of Jim Bridger, and these guys who got mauled by grizzly bears, read all kinds of stuff about the Indians, and what the tribes were and what the various characteristics were. So when I finish that picture I've done a sort of graduate course in that field, in that area, that's highly motivated.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why do they say that movies is a director's medium? I mean, it's sort of this big argument in Hollywood, the writers kind of get shrift, and I sort of can't imagine that the key guy has got to be the writer at some point.

MR. POLLACK: Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie. But, they say that it's a director's medium because all of the major decisions are made by the director, including who the writer is most of the time, or whether the writer will be rewritten. I mean, there isn't a single decision really, unless you're a beginning director and you have a very strong producer who is a creative producer, who's going to make those decisions, and that can happen, not often but it can. But, normally the director decides things like cast, where you'll shoot, when you'll shoot, is it going to be a long shot, is it going to be a close shot, is it going to go round and round the people, who's going to play the part, how fast are they going to talk, what's the pacing of the scene, what are they going to wear, where are you going to shoot it. All those decisions are directorial decisions, just as they are in the editing room.

MR. WATTENBERG: That's true to some extent, a large extent, on the legitimate stage, and people say Shakespeare wrote it, or Eugene O'Neill wrote it. They don't say who directed it. They do sometimes, but ﷓﷓

MR. POLLACK: You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it. You're not doing Julius Caesar, you're not going Romeo And Juliette, you're not doing The Glass Menagerie, which has already an existence and lives as a work of art before you come to it as a director.

MR. WATTENBERG: You redid Sabrina?

MR. POLLACK: Yes, you can redo it, it wasn't a good idea by the way. I got clobbered for redoing Sabrina. I thought I could add something because of the time that went by. But, it turned out that people really didn't want to see a remake of Sabrina. But, I'm not a big fan of remakes. 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. 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. You know, they don't start out that way. They may start out that way in the mind of the film makers, but from a studio point of view they're product.

MR. WATTENBERG: The art or craft or both of motion pictures is a 20th Century phenomenon, and a huge one.

MR. POLLACK: Maybe the most important one of the 20th Century.

MR. WATTENBERG: Of the technological inventions. Why would you say the most important?

MR. POLLACK: Well, look at the influence it has, look at the economics it commands, look at the preoccupation in all cultures of the world, look at its power to spread ideas, look at it as a political tool, look at it as entertainment, no matter what point of view you look at it from it would be hard, other than the Internet, let's say, to find something that's changed and affected the world strongly. 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.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is there something inherently different from the art forms it replaced, or now stands with them, from the novel, or the play, or the opera, or whatever it is that was ﷓﷓

MR. POLLACK: It's deeply different from all of them. Number one, film is the one art form that combines all art forms. Every single art form is involved in film, in a way. 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. Film is a collective experience, as you know. Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different. The reader supplies all of the finishing touches in a novel. Exactly how the character looks is up to you. Exactly how the character sounds is up to you. Exactly the way they make love in a novel is really up to you, I don't care what's described. None of that is up to you in a film. Every little bit is given to you.

MR. WATTENBERG: Except you impute emotions into those actors who you see graphically?

MR. POLLACK: Or you are stimulated by the film to have certain emotions.

MR. WATTENBERG: It's not wholly passive.

MR. POLLACK: No, it isn't passive, but it's done to you. You are not an active creator of the film.

MR. WATTENBERG: Maybe that's a big reason it has such potency?

MR. POLLACK: Well, but this is true of opera, this is true of plays, too. These collective experiences where it's shown to you. But, something about film has to do with the immediacy of what the 20th Century is. It has the ability not only to show us a fantasy of ourselves, but to show us exactly the truth of ourselves. You know, years ago we measured the success of films by the distance they lived from our own life. You said, gee, I'm never going to look like Humphrey Bogart, and have a trench coat, and stand on a fog enshrouded runway and say goodbye to Ingrid Bergman, but god I wish I could. Now, we look at these movies and we say that's right, that's the way it is, I had a thing like that happen to me yesterday. They've become closer, and closer, and closer to a literal reality of our own lives.

MR. WATTENBERG: The movies of today?

MR. POLLACK: Yes, I think so. I mean, that's why movie stars have changed. It's not all Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper, and Burt Lancaster. It's Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman, and it's people that look like ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: Burt Lancaster went to my High School, to Deward (sp) Clinton High School in the Bronx.

MR. POLLACK: Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director. And I'm going down to Union Settlement, to do a tribute for him, because a new book has just come out about him.

MR. WATTENBERG: So, needless to say, given this enormous power of this art form, you love it?

MR. POLLACK: Well, I do love it. I mean, I'm driven crazy by it, because it's so hard to do well. I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people. It's very difficult to do. I mean, I'm not a cinematographer ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: Those 200 people are ﷓﷓

MR. POLLACK: Well, the cinematographer, the sound men, the actors ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: I thought you were talking about the audience, because that's a ﷓﷓

MR. POLLACK: No, the audience, of course. But, what I mean is in order just to get on the screen what it is you're daydreaming about, you can't do it. You have to go through the creative minds of so many other people. It is a collaborative business. I mean, I have to try to communicate to a cinematographer what I want it to look like, I have to try to communicate to the actors, without making them feel raped, by the way, that they're puppets, or that they're being pushed around, because it is collaborative, all those people are your partners when you make a film. But, the objective in some way is to get what you've spent a year, or two years, or three years sometimes preparing and imagining on screen as precisely as you can. And it is ﷓﷓ I personally find it very tough, and very frustrating. I don't know whether all directors would say the same thing, everybody is different. But, yes, I do love it.

MR. WATTENBERG: When you're directing a movie, as opposed to producing a movie, I mean, I understand you don't give interviews, you're out of here for a while, I mean, is that about right?

MR. POLLACK: Well, at some point you have to go underground and begin to live in the world of that movie.

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, it's like a novelist or something?

MR. POLLACK: Well, every director is different. 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. I can't handle that dichotomy. I mean, that's a weird thing, but it's the truth. I suppose I could, but I prefer to go where the only thing I'm there for is the movie. I've left this life behind.

MR. WATTENBERG: Where did you shoot Out Of Africa?

MR. POLLACK: In Africa.

MR. WATTENBERG: Where?

MR. POLLACK: Well, in Tanzania, and in Nairobi, and in the Masai Mara and Ambicelli (sp) National Park, and Gorongoro (sp) Crater, and Victoria Falls.

MR. WATTENBERG: And you won two Academy Awards for that?

MR. POLLACK: I did, the picture won seven awards. I personally got two, one is the best picture as the producer, and one is the best director as the director. But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.

MR. WATTENBERG: What do you tell young kids who have fallen in love with this thing, and they want to do it, and they have their editing machine, and start making movies, and they really want to do it?

MR. POLLACK: It's a lot easier now, because the business is hungry for new talent, it's look always. That started with film schools. It's a lot easier now because technologically people can actually make a sample of work, and show it, which they could never do before. The director is the teller of the film, the director tells the movie, like you would tell a story, except in this case you're telling a movie.

MR. WATTENBERG: Tell me about some scenes from some of your movies that illustrate some of the things we've been talking about?

MR. POLLACK: When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea. It has a story, but it has an idea. We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman. Now, you say how do you dramatize that idea? Well, first you have to show that he's kind of a bad man. One of the ways we chose to do it is to see him hitting on three different women with the same lying dialogue, over, and over, and over. Another way is to see him absolutely bored with and not know what to do with a baby, because as the picture wears on he's going to see what it's like from the woman's point of view when his best friend, Jessica Lange, gets mistreated by Dabney Coleman in the same way he used to treat women. And Jessica Lange is going to hand him a baby, and he's suddenly, from not knowing what to do with it, is going to be touched and hold it. So knowing what the idea that you're dramatizing is helps you to structure it so that it has some sort of aesthetic shape that illustrates the idea. Life doesn't always do that.

MR. WATTENBERG: What are your favorite movies, and your favorite scenes, particularly of the more recent ones?

MR. POLLACK: Well, it's hard, Ben. I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites. 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. I don't have sense enough to distinguish between the two, because I do the same thing when I make a failure as I do when I make a success. I really do. From my point of view I work just as hard, I care just as much, if the films fail it doesn't make me suddenly disown them, it just doesn't. I would go back and make Havana again if it came to me, I would go back and make Random Hearts, both pictures were failures. I mean, they were certainly failures financially.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, were they failures in your mind, did you say, oh boy, all this work and it doesn't work, or you thought it worked?

MR. POLLACK: No, they were not at all failures in my mind. I mean, in Random Hearts I badly misjudged the audience's ability to accept Harrison Ford in a role other than what they really want to see him in. And looking back you can see that in everything. You can see it in Frantic, Mosquito Coast, these were all failures, not artistic failures, but they weren't as financially successful. When Harrison is in an action picture he's so good and that's what we want to see. We don't want to see him in pain, and in misery, and suffering.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure. I mean I wanted Harrison in a different role. I wanted to explore a dark relationship that happened when two people were thrown together because of a tragedy. These were all things that the audience wasn't in the market for. That's what exciting about it, though. I don't have the faintest idea. I didn't have the faintest idea Tootsie would be a hit, or Out Of Africa would be a hit, or The Firm would be a hit. You don't know. You just don't know.

MR. WATTENBERG: I'm just reading the biography of Ronald Reagan by Lou Cannon, who used to cover him for the Washington Post, and I guess for some of the California papers here. And the title is very interesting, it's called President Reagan, The Role Of A Lifetime.

MR. POLLACK: Great title.

MR. WATTENBERG: And it describes how Reagan had a very high opinion of acting. He thought that the skills that an actor, and guess by extension a movie, brings to an event was itself extremely important, and became substance.

MR. POLLACK: I think that that's true and sad, frankly. By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do. For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would. I don't have any idea, but they weren't subject to what we subject politicians to today, where they do have to act. You've got to say, Al, we want the image of the strong guy, let's photograph him from the side, that's a great angle. Get the jaw, get the collar open so he's one of us.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, George Washington was six-foot four, built like a rock, he designed his own uniforms, and he's got diaries where he says, I'm going to shut up because everybody is looking up to me.

MR. POLLACK: But, tried to hide his wooden teeth when he spoke, which probably would make a lousy sound bite, is what I'm saying. What I mean is, it's too bad that you can't judge the woman or the man in terms of substantive knowledge, morality, and character, you can't. You judge them by a kind of projection of slickness ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: What Lou was saying about Reagan was, it was not content free. Reagan was saying that the identification of the presidency through what we call photo-ops can create substance and policy.

MR. POLLACK: Yes, it can, but if the implication here is that there is a certain amount of acting in all of that, I would say yes, of course there is, but is that necessarily good? Well, it's effective, it's effective and it gets results, it creates impressions, and the impressions that it creates are politically useful to achieve a goal. I still remain convinced that the truth of character, and the truth of substantive knowledge is in the long run more valuable to me as somebody I'm going to trust with my life, and my kid's lives, and my grandchildren's lives, than the sort of sound bite, positiveness that we're all preoccupied with now. I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

MR. WATTENBERG: In my neck of the woods they say it the other way around, that the movies have become politicized, and it's principally left of center.

MR. POLLACK: Well, the movies have become politicized, but politics has also become ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: Is there a liberal bias in movies?

MR. POLLACK: 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 would just say that if you took a poll, whether it's novelists or playwrights, or whatever ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: Journalists.

MR. POLLACK: Journalists, I don't know journalists so well, I know the others. I would say that people who tend to think more liberally in greater numbers are drawn to those arts. You have to try to be fair. You have to try not to unfairly use the power that you have for propaganda, as such.
MR. WATTENBERG: And basically this business is a market driven business in spades.

MR. POLLACK: Completely market driven, so if the ﷓﷓

MR. WATTENBERG: Whatever the ideology is, if it doesn't sell, forget about it.

MR. POLLACK: Unfortunately, that's the truth. And there are just as many conservatives going to the movies as there are liberals.

MR. WATTENBERG: And there have been a few conservative stars like John Wayne, and Gary Cooper, and Charlton Heston.

MR. POLLACK: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone, you get a lot of people.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. But, not you. Sydney Pollack, thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank.

MR. POLLACK: A pleasure, Ben, always a pleasure.

MR. WATTENBERG: And thank you for joining us. Once again, we appreciate and depend on your communication with us to make this a better program. You can reach us via email at thinktank@pbs.org. For Think Tank I'm Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.

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Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(End of program.)

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