Exclusive: Pollack Strikes Out

With all the wisdom and common sense that comes with over a quarter of a century in the business, celebrated director Sydney Pollack offered a piercing overview of the current production mania seizing Hollywood as the impending actor's strike looms larger. "I think all this hysteria that is going on is very self destructive," Pollack told Empire Online last night. "Everybody is rushing too quickly into films and throwing tons of money into films to get them made. I believe in not behaving as there is going to be a strike and, if there is a strike adjusting to that." Speaking before the inuagural BAFTA David Lean Lecture where he was interviewed on stage by fellow filmmaker and business partner Anthony Minghella. Pollack described his upcoming flick, an adaptation of Richard Price's novel Freedomland, as an "interesting, tough piece" that would be ready to shoot in late summer, picket lines permitting. As joint owners of Mirage Enterprises, Pollack will also have a hand in producing Minghella's next directorial outing Cold Mountain, a relocation of The Odyssey to the American Civil War, based on the novel by Charles Frazier. "The novel broke my heart when I read it." Minghella admitted. "A friend of mine read it and, when he finished it, threw it across the room. I thought any book that could evince that kind of reaction was worth thinking about." Like Minghella's Oscar-winning The English Patient, Cold Mountain - "I'm in the lower slopes at the moment," he quipped about drafting the screenplay - promises a similar mixture of intimate storytelling on a grand canvas. "The only thing that is daunting is what it will involve to physically make the film. It has every season. It's up and down mountains. It's got battle scenes. It's got animals. It's got all the things that when you're in your office writing sound great and easy to do. But, when you get out there and there's no snow and bears and skinning pigs, then it's terrifying. I can't say I'm particularly relishing collecting the material but I am really looking forward to seeing it."