Sydney Pollack

Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence (Sydney Pollack) (2008)

*** (out of 4)

Film critic Elvis Mitchell sits down with Sydney Pollack to discuss the influences on him as a director and an actor. As to be expecting considering when he grew up, Pollack names Marlon Brando and James Dean as his influential actors. An American in Paris actually gets mentioned as his most influential movie and the one he remembers watching the most. This thirty-minute interview is pretty entertaining, although I was hoping Pollack would go into more details and discussion on the films he liked watching when he was younger. There's a lot of talk about filmmakers of the 1960's and how they were influenced by the French, Italian and Spanish directors of the era. Pollack also goes into detail about some of his own films including The Way We Were and offers up a nice story on how Dustin Hoffman talked him into acting in Tootsie.