Sydney Pollack Interview

Director Sydney Pollack has been in show business for more than four decades. 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.

At seventy-one, Pollack, who is also a producer and an actor, shows no signs of slowing down.

Last year, he directed The Interpreter, starring Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman, a film about international espionage and assassination at the United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan granted Pollack unprecedented access to the U.N. headquarters to shoot the film, believing perhaps that it would lend prestige to the institution so beleaguered by the Bush Administration. Last year, Pollack also completed the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, and he was the guest director at the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival.

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. He warned of the danger of making generalities.

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. Each of them has strong political content. How important is that to you in a film?

Sydney Pollack:All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It’s just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others. Relationship films are political. 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. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It’s politics. These movies you just mentioned are more overtly political. But their victory, if you will, is in accomplishing the politics cloaked within a story that’s totally engrossing.

Q: Can liberal politics and profit-driven motives coincide? And if they can’t, which is the first to give?

Pollack: There isn’t any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn’t is a fool. It’s a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money. It was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don’t think it’s a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal. However, most enormously successful businessmen tend to be more conservative.

Q: Would that go for Hollywood as well?

Pollack: Yes. Yes, I think so. I mean, there are exceptions. You know, generalities are really not only boring, they’re dangerous.

Q: What kind of pressures do you get from the industry about diluting a film’s political message?

Pollack: I haven’t gotten any pressure from a studio about it. I know myself better: People aren’t interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I’m not either. So I don’t try to make those kinds of films. Three Days of the Condor is still an interesting film to watch not because it’s political. It happens to be political. But that’s not why the sales of the DVDs are as high as they are. It’s because it’s an entertaining thriller. In my opinion, Tootsie is a very political movie but truck drivers can go and laugh at it.

I don’t consider myself a teacher of moral and political positions. I don’t want to be that. I can’t help but have a point of view when I make a film, but my first job is to entertain you. If I’ve failed to do that, the films flop, and I’ve had those, too.

Once I start to do a film, it has inferences. If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you’re saying something about that guy. 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. You can’t avoid making certain statements.

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. I’m interested in it. I’m interested in those people. I thought a thriller made inside the U.N. would be engrossing to watch. It was a setting I’d never seen before.

Every film I’ve made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I’ve ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.

Q: U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to the shoot because the film might be seen by millions of people the organization could never reach otherwise. Did that influence the storyline?

Pollack: I think the storyline influenced his decision.

Q: What do you think of the United Nations?

Pollack: Probably pretty much what everybody thinks, which is that it’s a great and glorious and noble idea. And like all great and glorious and noble ideas it’s had a lot more difficulty than anticipated in being practically effective. That it hasn’t worked as successfully as it was intended to, that we hope it will. But I also feel that it’s a mistake to junk it because what’s the alternative? 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? That would be a sad truth.

Q: A few years ago, you produced The Quiet American, which is about Vietnam. Do you see parallels between Vietnam and Iraq?

Pollack: I just try to look at Iraq for what it is. Were we justified? Did we do it in the best possible way? What’s the right thing to do now? Are we hurting ourselves in the world by the agenda we have now? Is the world, in fact, better off?

Q: Have you come to any conclusions regarding those questions?

Pollack: I feel a little uncomfortable about the way we went in, and we’re in an uncomfortable spot now. I don’t see what the end of this is. We can’t just leave. That would make it worse than when we went in. And what is it going to mean to stay until it’s OK to leave?

Q: What do you make of Bush and Cheney?

Pollack: There’s a religious basis to their kind of conservatism. It’s rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I’m afraid of that. I don’t like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect. I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive. You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It’s the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.

Q: What is your reaction when people assert that Hollywood is some great liberal establishment?

Pollack: The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That’s what acting is. I’m not going to be an interpreter at the U.N. 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. Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative. I have one life. I am a certain age. I’m married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won’t have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films. 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. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form. 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. That what you thought was true isn’t necessarily true if you switch sides. That doesn’t mean you should go around understanding Hitler. It does mean that there are all kinds of people and they look at life in different ways.

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.

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?

Pollack: This is much more political than I ever get into in an interview. I’m not trying to push my political agenda on anybody. I’ll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in. I don’t mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in.

But when we’re talking about my films, I don’t think my politics should have anything to do with it. My films ought to be judged on whether they’re entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I’m trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don’t have an agenda I’m trying to push. 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. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!”

And that’s the truth. I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don’t want to glorify a killer. I don’t want to glorify a rapist. I don’t want to do those things, but on the other hand I don’t want to lecture to you, either.

John Esther is a Los Angeles-based writer specializing in culture studies.