The Way We Were

Robert Redford was unhappy with cuts made to the film following a preview. He said, "I think we'd both have preferred a more political Dalton Trumbo -type script, but finally Sydney came down on the side of the love story. He said, 'This is first and foremost a love affair,' and we conceded that. We trusted his instincts, and he was right."

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford had very different approaches to acting. Streisand liked to analyze the part at length and rehearse a great deal, while Redford was more of an intuitive actor, preferring to be more spontaneous. According to Sydney Pollack, "Barbra would call me up every night at nine, ten o'clock and talk about the next day's work for an hour, two hours on the phone. Then she'd get in there and start to talk and Bob would want to do it. And Bob felt the more the talk went, the staler he got. She would feel like he was rushing her. The more rehearsing we did, she would begin to go uphill and he would peak and go downhill. So I was like a jockey trying to figure out when to roll the camera and get them to coincide."

When Barbra Streisand heard the titular song for the first time, she loved it. However, she made two important suggestions that ended up transforming the song into something even better. She suggested a slight shift in the melody to send it soaring at a crucial point in the song, and she also suggested changing the first line of the song from "Daydreams light the corners of my mind" to "Memories light the corners of my mind."

Marvin Hamlisch originally did not include the title theme music in the final scene when Katie hugs Hubbell. After the first preview showing fell flat, he changed his mind. The studio didn't want to pay the $15,000 cost of redoing the scene, so Hamlisch returned that sum out of his film paycheck to make the change.

Despite their differences, Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford had a deep respect for each other and worked well together. They were both opposite in many ways, just like their characters, and they used those differences to the benefit of the film.