Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilderwas an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist and journalist, whose career spanned more than fifty years and sixty films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. With The Apartment, Wilder became the first person to win Academy Awards as producer, director and screenwriter for the same film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth22 June 1906
CountryUnited States of America
If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.
An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.
You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.
If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
The best director is the one you don't see.
She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.
God save me from myself.