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
The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.
I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
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.
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.
It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on. (Of Television)
I hate that word. It's return--a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that's the bunk. It's little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.
The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
I'm delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we've got something to look down on.
I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre...
I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.