Dale Pollock is a former film producer who now teaches Cinema Studies at the University of North Carolina School of The Arts. He is an Academy Award nominee and has produced thirteen feature films. He also worked with great actors and actresses, including Kathy Bates, Tommy Lee Jones, Reese Witherspoon and Paul Newman. But there is much more to know about Dale Pollock.

WFDD radio camper Patrick Camara recently met up with Dale.

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When I first saw Dale he was sitting on a bench that was right in front of the Wait Chapel at Wake Forest, surrounded by green bushes on a nice summer day. He had a huge smile on his face and greeted me with great enthusiasm. I asked him why he decided to bring RiverRun to Winston-Salem.

I knew that festival world and I thought it would be very valuable for the film students in my school to understand what a movie festival was from the inside out. Not just from trying to get your movie into a festival, but how does it really run, how do you choose the movies.  But what we didn't anticipate was how popular RiverRun would become. And so last year we had 18,000 people come to RiverRun. And, you know, in our first year we had three or four hundred. So, it's been a big growth.

I then asked him what he felt was the biggest difference between films nowadays and films back then.

I made movies in a certain budget range of prob 12 million to 30 million dollars. Those movies don't exist anymore.  Either movies are really inexpensive, under 10 million. And then you have a lot of movies that are 75 million or 100 million and above. But in  between...not that many movies left. And I think that's actually one of the problems in the movie business right now.

Finally, I asked if he had any advice for aspiring or future filmmakers.

Learn your own belief system. Be passionate about your work. If you don't fully believe in what you are doing, no one else will. So that is your strongest attribute.

Dale also told me that even though he doesn't make films anymore, he is very proud of his films and is now very happy teaching and helping students become successful in the filmmaking industry.

For WFDD Radio Camp, I am Patrick Camara.

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