Sydney Pollack took the direct approach
Sydney Pollack's dad wanted him to become a dentist. Seventeen and living in South Bend, Ind., Sydney had other ideas: He'd take a train to New York and study acting. Well, he never became known as a great actor -- nor did he ever perform a root canal. But he did become a great film director.
The films he has directed have earned more than 40 Academy Award nominations. ''Out of Africa" won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director. The American Film Institute voted Pollack's ''Tootsie" the No. 2 comedy of all time. And ''The Way We Were" and ''Out of Africa" are high on AFI's list of the top 100 romantic films.
Now Pollack has directed ''The Interpreter," an edge-of-your-seat drama of international intrigue and terrorism, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn.
Kidman plays a South African-born United Nations interpreter who overhears a death threat against an African head of state. Penn is the Secret Service agent charged with protecting her when she also becomes a target. But Penn is suspicious of her, and, indeed, she is hiding a deep secret. Things eventually get personal between the unlikely pair.
''The Interpreter" is the first movie ever to be filmed inside the United Nations' New York headquarters. That permission came courtesy of Pollack's connections to folks in high places.
Pollack also owes many of his early career breaks to gaining the attention of people in power.
On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, the bespectacled director and sometime-actor -- who for three seasons played Will's father on ''Will and Grace" -- relates how he got into directing. In 1961, he was an acting coach on ''The Young Savages," starring Burt Lancaster. When the film shoot was over, Lancaster called Pollack into his office.
''I was scared to death of him," says the amiable director, 70. ''He was a big guy physically. He always looked like Michelangelo had sculpted him out of marble. 'You've got to stop screwing around and become a director,' he told me. I thought: 'Oh God! Why is he saying that?' "
The next thing Pollack knew, Lancaster had arranged for him to meet Lew Wasserman, who ran Universal Pictures. Based on the actor's recommendation, Wasserman signed Pollack to a seven-year directing contract.
Decades later, when access to the UN was his goal, Pollack phoned ''everybody [he] knew," including a Wall Street friend who happened to be pals with former senator Bob Kerry, who happened to be buddies with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Kerry called Annan, and he agreed to meet with Pollack. Annan then spoke with the heads of the General Assembly and Security Council. Three weeks later, Pollack got the historic OK.
The 32-day UN shoot last year took place mostly in the General Assembly and Security Council chambers. Pollack was permitted to film on weekends only.
''Once we were cleared [with metal detectors] to come in every day, we couldn't go out and come back without being recleared," he says.
The stars, however, ''could go to their trailers outside. They had to be recleared, but it was a little easier. [They knew] Nicole Kidman wasn't going to blow up the UN!"
Pollack plays a small role in the film simply because ''it was going to cost half a million dollars to get a really good actor to do it. I tried some big names, but I couldn't make it work because the shoot was spread out over four months [in Manhattan and Brooklyn]. So I ended up doing it myself," says Pollack, who's been in ''Husbands and Wives" and ''Eyes Wide Shut," among other films.
His secret to getting the best performances out of A-list stars? ''Creating an atmosphere where they feel they can make a fool of themselves," Pollack says. ''It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly. You can't start emotionally wrestling and say, 'Now look here, I'm the boss!' "
Born in Lafayette, Ind., Pollack got a yen for acting in grade school. Right after high school graduation, he was accepted to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. By his third year there, Sanford Meisner, the acting school's famed director, named him his teaching assistant. Then Pollack began to coach professional actors privately. When he auditioned for a ''Playhouse 90" TV drama, the director, John Frankenheimer, asked him to coach on his upcoming TV production of ''The Turn of the Screw." That led to work on Frankenheimer's feature ''The Young Savages," and then the Universal contract.
But ''they owned me," he says. ''I couldn't work anywhere else without their approval. However, they didn't put in anything about directing movies!"
So after four years of TV directing, he broke the contract and helmed 1965's ''The Slender Thread," with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. With ''The Interpreter," Pollack returns to the thriller mode he excelled at in such provocative films as ''Three Days of the Condor" and ''Absence of Malice." Still, he says that suspense should be a component of all movies, even comedies.
''You need to really wonder and want to know what's going to happen next," he says. ''Every story needs an element of suspense -- or it's lousy."
