Sydney Pollack Was One of the Great Directors of His Generation — A New Book Breaks Down His Approach

When Sydney Pollack was a young acting teacher in 1960, he got a job coaching teenage performers on John Frankenheimer‘s debut feature, “The Young Savages.” The movie’s star, Burt Lancaster, told Pollack that he was a born director. When Pollack protested that he knew nothing about lenses, cameras, or lighting, Lancaster shot back that there were plenty of directors who had a firm command of those tools but were completely ignorant when it came to performance. The actor made a phone call to Universal studio chief Lew Wasserman to recommend Pollack as a television director, and the career of the filmmaker who would go on to helm classics like “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie,” and “Out of Africa” began.

Right up to his final interviews before he died in 2008, Pollack referred to himself as a director primarily interested in actors and the problems between two people — usually a man and a woman, but occasionally two men, as in the Burt Lancaster-Ossie Davis Western “The Scalphunters” or the Paul Schrader-scripted action flick “The Yakuza.” (In the case of “Jeremiah Johnson,” the conflict was between a man and his environment more than a lover or male adversary.) Yet the fact is that over the course of his career, Pollack acquired and developed all those skills he claimed ignorance of when he started, ultimately becoming one of the great directors of his generation.

Pollack’s evolution is beautifully delineated in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Cronin’s new book “Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews,” which assembles 21 interviews with Pollack conducted from 1970 to 2017. The breadth and depth of the interviews and their arrangement in chronological order give the book the quality of an autobiography told in real time, as Pollack forms, tests, rejects, and rediscovers his own theories about filmmaking from his breakthrough hit, the harrowing Depression-era tragedy “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” to his final triumph, the smart and bittersweet thriller “The Interpreter.”

To watch each of Pollack’s 19 feature films while reading the book is to gain a profound understanding not only of one filmmaker’s work but also of the complex personal, aesthetic, economic, and cultural forces that interact and respond to one another over time to shape a career. And of how even the most unified filmography can be the result of completely haphazard circumstances. In retrospect, Pollack’s oeuvre is remarkably consistent in its preoccupations and strengths (there are even key lines of dialogue repeated across decades), but the choices he makes about what films to pursue and how to execute them are often, in the moment, random and born of chaos.

Pollack’s journey consists of several parallel and sometimes intersecting evolutions: his development as a visual artist whose command of lenses and composition yielded the startling graphic effects of movies as wide-ranging as “The Yakuza,” “Bobby Deerfield,” and “The Firm”; his ongoing collaboration with actor Robert Redford, which ultimately resulted in seven of the best films either man ever made; and the evolution of the industry itself from the classical studio system that gave so many of Pollack’s best films their shape to the New Hollywood that allowed some of his wilder experiments (most notably “Jeremiah Johnson,” but also the truly weird World War II movie “Castle Keep”) to be made.

Pollack refers to himself as “a kind of a traditionalist,” and this is more or less how he’s still viewed, largely thanks to the fact that several of his most popular and enduring movies (“Condor,” “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie”) have a sturdy professionalism in their structures, driven by clear — and clearly expressed — ideas, or what Pollack repeatedly called “the armature.” Yet many of Pollack’s best movies are those that mix their classical attributes with more radical ideas and forms; “Jeremiah Johnson,” for example, is both more hallucinatory and more realistic than traditional Hollywood Westerns — it feels right at home among other innovative 1970s Westerns like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “The Hired Hand.”

‘Jeremiah Johnson’Courtesy Everett Collection

“Out of Africa” is even bolder in its storytelling approach and, ironically, became the film of Pollack’s most embraced by the establishment (it earned him and his collaborators an armful of Oscars, including Best Picture). As Pollack notes in several of his interviews, it’s a movie with very little action where the tension exists almost entirely between two people’s inner impulses: one woman’s drive to possess, and one man’s compulsion to remain completely free. The characters played by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford aren’t even on screen together for close to two hours of the film’s 160-minute running time, yet somehow “Out of Africa” was anointed one of the great love stories of its era.

What makes the film’s almost mystical impact all the more puzzling is that it wasn’t the result of any careful planning or design. Like virtually all of Pollack’s films, “Out of Africa” went into production without a satisfactory script, and Pollack constructed a masterpiece out of elements found on the fly. One of the funniest refrains throughout Pollack’s interviews is the story he tells multiple times, about multiple different actors and films, of approaching an actor with an unfinished screenplay (or, in some cases, no screenplay) and saying “I wouldn’t do this if I were you.”

It’s something he said to Sean Penn when offering him “The Interpreter,” and Jessica Lange when offering her “Tootsie.” That cross-dressing comedy was famously out of control even for Pollack, with a star (Dustin Hoffman) who was as much a sparring partner as a collaborator and a script in constant flux. It’s also a virtually perfect film, with a comic structure as precise as the inner workings of a Swiss watch and moments of small, delicate observations that are as impactful as the belly laughs the final act so skillfully builds toward.

These contradictions are what make Pollack endlessly fascinating — it’s hard to think of a director both so old-fashioned and so modern, whose smooth and flawlessly executed entertainments emerged from such rocky, risky circumstances. The consistency of his output and the methods that generated it are astonishing; based on his interviews, it seems like he was never anywhere close to being confident that the film he was working on at any given time would work, yet almost all of them did. (Two of his later movies, a miscast remake of Billy Wilder’s “Sabrina” and a dreary romance called “Random Hearts,” were the rare exceptions.)

Pollack got in at the exact right time for a director with his skill set, and “The Interpreter” came out just as the studio system was ready to pull way back on making that kind of heady, well-resourced thriller for adults. He remains such a distinctive figure, and such a product of his time and place, that it’s hard to say if all the lessons one learns from studying his career are readily applicable to filmmaking in the 2020s. But just as his movies were both of their moment and timeless, so are many of his insights, particularly when it comes to working with actors.

Tom Cruise, Stanley Kubrick, and Sydney Pollack on the ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ setBros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Over the course of 50 years in the business, Pollack advanced a lot of theories about performance, and most of them, particularly his reasoning for why an actor should always be kept a little off balance, hold true. Pollack himself was an awfully good actor on the rare occasions when his peers enlisted him, most famously and effectively in Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

There are interviews about both of those assignments in “Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews,” alongside all the conversations about Pollack’s own movies, meaning you get insights not only into his approach but also Allen’s and Kubrick’s. At one point in the book’s final interview, Pollack asserts that there’s no one right way to direct and that everyone does it differently; “Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews” provides an invaluable look at the methods of a master.

“Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews” is currently available from the University Press of Kentucky.