Art & Creativity Quote by Sydney Pollack

Pollack’s line is a quiet flex disguised as humility: cinema isn’t just another art, it’s the one that hires all the others. He’s pointing to film’s built-in pluralism - the way a movie is simultaneously writing, theater, photography, music, design, choreography, even architecture and industrial engineering. That “in a way” matters. It softens what could sound imperial, acknowledging that film doesn’t replace those arts; it metabolizes them, translating their languages into a single time-based experience.

The intent is also practical, almost blue-collar. Pollack came up in an era when a director wasn’t a solitary auteur floating above the crew, but a coordinator of specialists. His best-known work (“Tootsie,” “Out of Africa,” “Three Days of the Condor”) is less about flashy signature than about calibration: performance that feels lived-in, images that carry mood without announcing themselves, music and pacing that do emotional work under the dialogue. The quote smuggles in a philosophy of collaboration. Film is where egos go to be managed.

Subtextually, it’s a defense of the medium against the old snobbery that treated movies as either commerce or entertainment. Pollack argues for cinema as a synthesis art - not purer, but more socially and technically complex. In the late 20th century, with Hollywood industrializing and “auteur theory” glamorizing directors, he’s staking out a third position: the director as curator-conductor, responsible not for domination but for coherence.