it’s the confidence and courage to carry out the ideas once
you’ve found them and once you’ve trusted them. Then you
can’t be afraid to fail. Otherwise it’s just imitative. Otherwise
you go to leadership school, and try to pitch your voice the
same way that the boss did there, and have your office deco-
rated the same way his is, and that’s not real leadership. Real
leadership probably has more to do with recognizing your own
uniqueness than it does with identifying your similarities.”
Pollack told me a story that illustrates marvelously the
“blessed impulse” of leadership. “Years ago, I did a film with
Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford called T h e Wa y We We r e.
Streisand played a character who wanted desperately to be a
writer, who worked very, very hard at it, but nothing came eas-
ily to her. Redford played a character where everything came
easy. He was a kind of a prince. He had no particular aspira-
tions to be a writer, but he happened to be good and talented.
She had worked and struggled and worked and struggled in her
writing class to do a very serious paper, a little short story. And
the professor chose that day to read Redford’s story. It just dev-
astated her. She ran out of the classroom, and the scene called
for her to run to a trash basket, rip up her story, throw it in the
trash basket, and just sob.
“I had set up the shot so that the camera was at the trash bas-
ket pointing toward a tree behind which she was standing, so
that when I would call, ‘Action,’ she would emerge running from
behind this tree, run toward the camera, straight at us, throw the
story in the trash basket, and I would move into her face when
she leaned against the trash basket and cried. The first assistant
director on the picture, Howard Koch, Jr., had been the first
A.D. on her previous picture, Up the Sandbox. Howard came to
me while we were working on the scene and said, ‘You know,
Operating on Instinct