Sydney Pollack Quotes

I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

I wouldn't say no to other kinds of musical opportunities. I guess that it just depends on what it was or what it required me to do, and if I felt that it compromised my own soul.

I don't think that artists of any kind would or could sacrifice their artistic freedom by being more responsible with their influence on people, especially young people.

I'm not someone who has to make a film at any cost. I have to find the right way to make it or not at all.

As an artist, we have a big influence, and we should always think if we are doing more harm than good to our viewers. We should serve as a model to them.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.

It's not worth it, it's not about money, especially when you're dealing with a culture. It should be about elevating the idea of what we are and who we are as people in the cinema, and that kind of stuff keeps dragging us back down.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.

As designers, we have a great responsibility.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

It's not often as an actor you get to be involved with a project that seems to be on the right side of history.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

It's not so much that I want to direct but that I have to. When I write something it terrifies me that if I give it to someone else and it doesn't turn out as it could have done, I'd feel as if I'd orphaned my baby.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.