"If I had to do a movie and there was no love story in it, I would just get bored!"

"In movies, you're reinventing the art form every time you make it. You can't just find a recipe and stick to it."

Sydney Pollack


BIOGRAPHY

Sydney Pollack holds a truly singular place in contemporary cinema. He is the youngest of the classics and the eldest of the modern. Heir of Kazan and Minnelli by his sense of the romantic and taste of aestheticism, he announces as well, through his original genre work and sensitivity to contemporary problems, the generation of the Hollywoodian renaissance, that of Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg.

In twenty films spanning some forty years of cinema, he has brilliantly illustrated the western (Jeremiah Johnson) the socially conscious film (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) the paranoiac thriller (Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice) the comedy (Tootsie) as well as the melodrama (The Way We Were). Like many great American artists, he finds his roots in the history of his country, from the Great Depression to McCarthyism and modern capitalism, while opening up to the world from Havana to Bobby Deerfield and Out of Africa.

His capacity to subtly treat emotions in great polyphonic frescoes is paralleled solely his talent to extract the best from his actors. He himself is a remarkable actor, as proved in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut as well under his own direction (Tootsie).

Remaining in the background of his brilliant and varied work, Sydney Pollack continues to be a secretive man, like all his heroes, an individualist in love with freedom, both solitary and solidary.