When Sydney Pollack passed away last month on May 26, the world lost not only a great filmmaker but a great man as well. More often than not, whether he was in front of the camera as an actor or behind it as a director, what you saw of Sydney Pollack was what you got. Aside from his body of work that includes such memorable films as The Way We Were, Three days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Absence of Malice, Tootsie, Out of Africa, and The Firm, it was his honesty and sincerity that we here at The Deadbolt miss the most. Given his talents and experience as a filmmaker, plus his unique and straightforward view of the world, Sydney Pollack always made for a great interview, whether it was in print, online, or on television.

In 2005, Sydney Pollack stepped behind the camera to make his first documentary, The Sketches of Frank Gehry, about the life of one of the world's most creative, cutting-edge, and visionary architects. As we still think of Sydney Pollack two weeks after his passing, and continue to feel the impact of legacy, we've pulled out Pollack's appearance at the press junket for The Sketches of Frank Gehry to celebrate the life of one of our favorite directors, actors, and Hollywood personalities. We're glad Sydney Pollack's legacy will live forever.

Sydney Pollack on not having done a documentary until The Sketches of Frank Gehry:

"I haven’t. I like documentaries; I’m not an authority at all on them. I don’t see enough of them to know who’s who in the zoo, so to speak, except I know the ones everybody knows - you know, the Errol Morris’ and the Michael Moores and Leacock and the Maysles and, you know, the big names - Ken Burns and those people. But I haven’t seen a lot of documentaries and I don’t consider myself in any way a documentarian, which is one of the reasons I was hesitant to do this. That and the fact I’m not an expert on architecture either."

Pollack on whether doing a documentary on a friend adds another layer to the challenge:

"It’s both. You think that you’re going to be on the spot in some way, and you also think that you’re goning to be judged because you’re not tough enough. But my objective in making this was not to perform an objective evaluation of Frank Gehry, it was, if anything, to get you inside his head and to show you how he thinks and to show you who he is. And in that sense, my friendship with him was essential, because I don’t think he would’ve relaxed as much or I don’t think he would’ve been as candid with just the BBC, let’s say, who had asked to make a documentary of him. Where there’s a more objective approach, where you say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna try to evaluate him,’ first of all - I’m not qualified to evaluate, I don’t know anything about architecture, I really don’t. I know only how I feel when I see certain buildings of his, but I’m no expert on architecture. So for me to go in and try to give you a totally objective evaluation of Frank as an architect would be absolutely presumptuous, I couldn’t do it. But what I feel I can do with him as a friend is show him to you, show you who he is, show you what he thinks, show how he works, show you where these ideas come from, show you how he’s developed as a man and as an architect, show you what his insecurities are, and show you what his demons are. And that’s really what I set out to do."

On first meeting Frank Gehry:

"Well, I met him socially in the early '80s, and I think what drew us together a bit was that we were both big complainers. We were always complaining about how unfair life was to us, because we were working in fields where everything depended on what the public thought of you. You know, you’d get an idea and you do it and the public hates it or loves it or whatever, and we were being immature little boys bitching and complaining. That’s how I met him, really, and I liked him a lot. I thought he was interesting and innovative and courageous. I wasn’t crazy about the buildings. I saw them and I said, ‘I don’t think I quite get what he’s doing.’ I used to go to dinner at his house sometimes with my wife and driving back home I would say, ‘God, I couldn’t live in that house ever,’ and she’d say the same thing. But slowly I got to a point where I started to say, ‘I think I’m beginning to understand what he’s doing here a little bit.’ He’s trying to peel back the surface of something and show you a little bit of what’s underneath. He’s trying to find some sort of aesthetic in the raw materials that usually get covered over, because in some way the covering-over is a little bit of a lie. It’s hiding a lot of stuff, what its purpose is.

"So what Frank was doing, to me, was sort of the opposite of slick, if you will, the opposite of polished. At first I wanted to hire a construction crew to finish everything he did, because it always looked totally unfinished to me and I said that once when I gave him an award somewhere. I said, ‘You know, I think I’m getting really sophisticated because I don’t any longer try to look up the number of a construction company every time I see a building of Frank’s.’ But then when I saw Bill Bow, it was like a flower blooming, it was like all of this stuff that he was doing, all of this experimenting and pushing the edge, and struggling to give birth to something seemed to flower in Bilbao and I was literally knocked off of my feet by that building. And I think it was instrumental in my wish to do this. I was so curious as to where it came from. You think of it; where does it reside in this guy that I knew so well? I look at this guy and it was a very odd feeling because he took me through that building before it opened. That day, it was going to open that night and there was going to be a big party and people came from all over the world, architects and high society people and artists. That afternoon in Bilbao, it was 1997, I went with him and Frank - you’ve seen Frank, he’s like your next door neighbor - and then I look at this building and it’s just unbelievable the way it happened. So that made me crazy to understand it better, to understand who Frank was even more than I knew, and where did these ideas live and all of that."

Sydney Pollack on whether he felt artsy doing a film about architecture and buildings:

"I didn’t think of that, to be honest with you. I’ll tell you what I kept saying to people, ‘Who’s going to want to see this?’ This is not a film for mass audiences, this is - you know, I never did think it was going to be a film. I thought it would be archival and maybe of interest to schools, maybe architecture schools or something, and maybe a television show or something like that. I had no idea that anybody would buy it as a film because I thought, 'Who sits around on Sunday afternoon and says let’s go see that film on that architect, that documentary?’ So I wasn’t thinking of it quite in those ways, I was thinking of it more in terms of satisfying my own curiosity. It wasn’t horribly expensive, we didn’t have huge sums of money to pay back, and nobody was going to lose a lot of money. It wasn’t like making a 50-60 million dollar Hollywood movie where you’re petrified that if nobody comes to see it, you’re going to be hung in the middle of Times Square or something. It was what it was and it felt comfortable to work on that level and not feel the commercial pressure to deliver a film that everybody’s going to like or everybody’s gonna be interested in. So I just didn’t know who I was making the film for and I didn’t care."

Remembering Sydney Pollack: The Sketches of Frank Gehry Page 2