Sydney Pollack
Esther, John
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by John Esther Sydney Pollack Director Sydney Pollack has been in show business for more than four decades. His films resonate with politics: They Shoot Horses, Don't...
...Pollack: I think the storyline influenced his decision...
...They'll just want us to get it for 'em...
...We can't just leave...
...I know myself better: People aren't interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically...
...Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold...
...Q: What is your reaction when people assert that Hollywood is some great liberal establishment...
...I'm not going to live in Africa on a farm or whatever, but I am going to see the world through those eyes when I make those films...
...I don't consider myself a teacher of moral and political positions...
...Sydney Pollack: All films are political, whether they mean to be or not...
...Pollack: This is much more political than I ever get into in an interview...
...I am a certain age...
...Q: What kind of pressures do you get from the industry about diluting a film's political message...
...Q: Do you think it serves your films if people know more about Sydney Pollack, or do you think your work should just speak for itself...
...They won't want us to ask 'em...
...Did that influence the storyline...
...It's a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl...
...How important is that to you in a film...
...I'm afraid of that...
...John Esther is a Los Angeles-based writer specializing in culture studies...
...Pollack: There isn't any question that Hollywood is profit driven...
...It's politics...
...I don't like that idea...
...I can't help but have a point of view when I make a film, but my first job is to entertain you...
...I don't want to do those things, but on the other hand I don't want to lecture to you, either...
...I don't want to glorify a rapist...
...You know, generalities are really not only boring, they're dangerous...
...I'm not trying to push my political agenda on anybody...
...And that's the truth...
...At seventy-one, Pollack, who is also a producer and an actor, shows no signs of slowing down...
...They do not see their job as being philanthropists...
...Relationship films are political...
...But I also feel that it's a mistake to junk it because what's the alternative...
...I don't see what the end of this is...
...Is the world, in fact, better off...
...You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views...
...It was a setting I'd never seen before...
...It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism...
...I spoke to Pollack by phone about a few of his latest endeavors, some of his old films, Hollywood liberalism, the business of making movies, Iraq, and his own political views...
...I'm not going to be an interpreter at the U.N...
...Were we justified...
...It happens to be political...
...Three Days of the Condor is still an interesting film to watch not because it's political...
...I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive...
...Last year, Pollack also completed the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, and he was the guest director at the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival...
...And what is it going to mean to stay until it's OK to leave...
...Q: As guest director for the Los Angeles Film Festival, you picked Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, and Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront as three films that inspired you...
...Once I start to do a film, it has inferences...
...Pollack: Probably pretty much what everybody thinks, which is that it's a great and glorious and noble idea...
...It's a business...
...I don't mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in...
...I think that's just one of the reasons why people that are in this profession tend to lean toward the liberal side rather than the conservative side...
...If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you're saying something about that guy...
...It's the extremism that gets frightening...
...I don't want to be that...
...You can't avoid making certain statements...
...However, most enormously successful businessmen tend to be more conservative...
...That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides...
...I'll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in...
...I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push...
...If I've failed to do that, the films flop, and I've had those, too...
...I mean, there are exceptions...
...Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to the shoot because the film might be seen by millions of people the organization could never reach otherwise...
...Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative...
...Yes, I think so...
...Q: U.N...
...Last year, he directed The Interpreter, starring Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman, a film about international espionage and assassination at the United Nations...
...Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry...
...Are we hurting ourselves in the world by the agenda we have now...
...Each of them has strong political content...
...I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more...
...Q: Would that go for Hollywood as well...
...But that's not why the sales of the DVDs are as high as they are...
...Do you see parallels between Vietnam and Iraq...
...Did we do it in the best possible way...
...You want to know something...
...The only purpose it had was making money...
...Should we assume diplomacy is not a viable way of handling the problems of the world and the only way of handling the problems of the world is force...
...His films resonate with politics: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie, Three Days of the Condor, The Way We Were, Absence of Malice, and Out of Africa, for which he won an Academy Award...
...Hollywood was never philanthropy...
...Q: Have you come to any conclusions regarding those questions...
...I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal...
...I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films...
...I have one life...
...These movies you just mentioned are more overtly political...
...I'm interested in it...
...As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics...
...So when you spend your life being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white...
...Q: Why did you want to make The Interpreter ? Pollack: I don't know how to answer that other than to point to the film...
...Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it...
...But when we're talking about my films, I don't think my politics should have anything to do with it...
...the only purpose it still has is to make money...
...would be engrossing to watch...
...Pollack: The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view...
...They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done...
...People talk about Three Days of the Condor as being anti-government but the last statement in that movie is the CIA guy saying to Robert Redford, "Ask 'em when they're running out...
...And like all great and glorious and noble ideas it's had a lot more difficulty than anticipated in being practically effective...
...That would make it worse than when we went in...
...headquarters to shoot the film, believing perhaps that it would lend prestige to the institution so beleaguered by the Bush Administration...
...I think all extremism is suspect...
...Secretary-General Kofi Annan granted Pollack unprecedented access to the U.N...
...Pollack: Yes...
...It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others...
...I can do all of that through the practice of an art form...
...It does mean that there are all kinds of people and they look at life in different ways...
...A guy walks down the street and somebody's about to be run over and he shoves him out of his way and gets hit by the car himself, you're saying that guy's a hero...
...Q: What do you think of the United Nations...
...What's the right thing to do now...
...It was set up by a bunch of businessmen...
...That's what acting is...
...Pollack: I feel a little uncomfortable about the way we went in, and we're in an uncomfortable spot now...
...But their victory, if you will, is in accomplishing the politics cloaked within a story that's totally engrossing...
...In my opinion, Tootsie is a very political movie but truck drivers can go and laugh at it...
...Q: Can liberal politics and profit-driven motives coincide...
...If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation...
...That would be a sad truth...
...Q: What do you make of Bush and Cheney...
...Anybody that thinks it isn't is a fool...
...Ask 'em when their engines stop...
...religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy...
...Q: A few years ago, you produced The Quiet American, which is about Vietnam...
...I'm married to one person...
...It's because it's an entertaining thriller...
...I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible...
...And if they can't, which is the first to give...
...That it hasn't worked as successfully as it was intended to, that we hope it will...
...Pollack: There's a religious basis to their kind of conservatism...
...Pollack: I just try to look at Iraq for what it is...
...He warned of the danger of making generalities...
...It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do...
...Pollack: I haven't gotten any pressure from a studio about it...
...Star Wars is political...
...That doesn't mean you should go around understanding Hitler...
...I'm interested in those people...
...If he lights up, what does she do...
...If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up...
...My films ought to be judged on whether they're entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily...
...I have a certain number of children...
...I thought a thriller made inside the U.N...
...I'm not either...
...So I don't try to make those kinds of films...
...I don't want to glorify a killer...
Vol. 70 • February 2006 • No. 2
