"Throughout his forty-year career, director Sydney Pollack dazzled Hollywood with his commercially adept, wide-ranging, and artistically acclaimed talents. Pollack was an actors director who began his work on the silver screen by appearing in low-billed television shows and films. Because of those humble beginnings, Pollack made close alliances with major names and became known for his star-studded connections. From his 1965 debut as a feature motion picture director for The Slender Thread, which starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, to his final thriller The Interpreter with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman in 2005, Pollack grew in popularity. He won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1985 for Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and was nominated as Best Director for They Shoot Horses, Dont They? (1969) and Tootsie (1982). Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews is a collection of twenty-four interviews with Sydney Pollack that span from 1967 until 2007, only one year before the directors untimely death. Many of the interviews are from foreign or rare sources, detailing Pollacks time in from France in the 1970s to Rome in 2007. The interviews offer behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Pollack himself, ranging from his examination of female vocal pattern speech waves for Tootsie to his accidental post as a dialect coach for John Frankenheimers The Young Savages (1961).

As a collection, the interviews comprise a how-to book on directing with close-ups of Pollacks famous stars. The collection is also a sweeping chronicle of post-1960s Hollywood that covers the dealmaking, the creative wrangling, and the evolution of directorial decisions. Until Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews, no substantial book has examined the famed directors life and career. This collection sheds light on the nuts and bolts of filmmaking using the voice of Pollack himself, offering an evocative alternative to the traditional informative style of biography and film analysis. The collection at once informs and entertains, reviving the spark of a man who influenced Hollywood for decades"-- Provided by publisher.