By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Seeing something and being moved by it: Sydney Pollack
Sydney Pollack talks to LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas about how money and independence don’t mix: During “the 20 years when I was most productive as a director. you could make more eclectic films… a lot of that was economics. The cost of… movies is out of control, at least for movies with big stars… That’s why I’ve turned to independent films as a producer, and I’m eventually going to find my way [there] as a director. I want very much to make a $15-million to $20-million movie where I don’t have this daunting, and inhibiting, pressure to reach everyone in the world or the picture’s not considered a success… It makes you worry when… you want to have two characters sit down for 7 pages of dialogue—which they do in this movie, frequently.” For his phalanx of screenwriters, Pollack tells Foundas he drew from Tom Stoppard: “It comes from the speech in ‘The Real Thing,’ where the playwright admonishes this girl because of her faith in a lousy writer, and talks about how the butchering of words by someone who isn’t able to make adequate use of them is a crime. I took that speech and dictated it to every one of the writers on this project. It’s one of my favorite speeches in all of literature, because it speaks to the reason why your hair raises in a certain moment in a film or a piece of theater, or why you laugh, or why you cry. It’s all done with writing, by people who can really write and create that kind of response in you… Seeing something and being moved by it — that’s a powerful weapon.”