Billy Wilder Quotes

He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.

If you don't like what you're doing, it's unlikely anyone else will either, so be sure you are happy with your own work first.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

A tip from Lubitsch: 'Let the audience add up two plus two and they'll love you forever.

That's the trouble with you readers. You know all the plots.

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

Everyone in the audience is an idiot, but taken together, they're a genius.

That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise

You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.

You're only as good as the best thing you've ever done.

The big trick is to find the subject that relates to a human experience. Explain the rules, involve people, and they will do most of the work for you.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

There’s a famous quote regarding Polanski. Perhaps Jack Nicholson said it, perhaps someone else, but it goes, “Polanski is the five-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.” So, yes, the world seems to despise him. I, however, love his work. It’s so much funnier and well-constructed than the pompous stuff of Kubrick. Polanski balances between camp and horror in much the same way Billy Wilder did.

Billy might have known it for several months by now, and I might only just have begun to grasp it, but we had both come to the same realization: the realization that what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more

As a class, Americans are extremely impatient. While they are the first to catch onto a joke, they are also the quickest to get bored. In Europe, a film producer can take his time establishing a mood. He can have dozens of dissolves of clouds. Americans audiences will not sit still for them, no matter how beautiful or exciting they may be. If they show the second cloud shot they expect to see an airplane in it. Then, if there's a third, they expect to see the plane explode in mid-air. The story must progress with every angle.

Goodbye, Baby. Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) Double Indemnity

Studios! You can't make picture with 'em, you can't make pictures without 'em.

Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

Cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you, states of mind that run through daily life as surely as a fault line. Chandler’s “mysterious something” was a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise that identified itself with Los Angeles at a particular time, what we call noir. On the one hand noir is a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom. This fruitful comingling gave birth to movies like Double Indemnity, directed by Vienna-born Billy Wilder and scripted by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novella. The themes — murderous sex and the cool, intricate amorality of money — rose directly from the psychic mulch of Southern California. But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it’s a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the sense like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day. Noir — in this sense a perspective on history and often a substitute for it — was born when the Roaring Twenties blew themselves out and hard times rushed in; it crystallized real-life events and the writhing collapse of the national economy before finding its interpreters in writers like Raymond Chandler.

They beached me, like a harpooned baby whale, and started to check the damage, just for the record ... By this time the whole joint was jumping -- cops, reporters, neighbors, passersby -- as much hoopdedoo as we get in Los Angeles when they open a Super Market. Even the newsreel guys came roaring in. Here was an item everybody could have some fun with, the heartless so-and-so's. What would they do to her? Even if she got away with it in court- crime of passion - temporary insanity - those headlines would kill her: Forgotten Star a Slayer--Aging Actress--Yesterday's Glamour Queen...

Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins “Reminder” by Mumford & Sons “Barton Hollow” by The Civil Wars “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele “Can’t Break Her Fall” by Matt Kearney  “Stillborn” by Black Label Society “Come On Get Higher” by Matt Nathanson “I Won’t Give Up” by Jason Mraz “This Girl” by City & Colour “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday “I would be Sad” by The Avett Brothers “Hello, I’m Delaware” by City & Colour “99 Problems” by Hugo (originally written and performed by Jay-Z) “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons “Let It Be Me” by Ray LaMontagne “Rocketship” by Guster “Don’t Drink The Water” by Dave Matthews Band “Blackbird” by The Beatles

In the last years of the Republic there were films such as Robert Siodmark's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)) and Gerhard Lamprecht's Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931), which embraced the airy streets, light-dappled forests, and lakes surrounding Berlin. Billie Wilder, a brash young journalist and dance-hall enthusiast, worked on the scripts for both these films. While Kracauer and Eisner saw malevolence in the frequent trope of doubling (one being possessed by another and thus becoming two conflicting psychological presences), Wilder witnessed another form of doubling during the Weimer era: transvestitism, a staple of cabaret. Men dressing as women (as do Reinhold Schünzel in der Himmel auf Erden [Heaven on earth]) and Curti Bois in Der Fürst von Pappenheim [The Masked Mannequin][both 1927]) or women as men (as does Dolly Haas in Liebeskommando [Love's Command, 1931]), in order to either escape detection or get closer to the object of their affection, is an inherently comic situation, especially when much to his or her surprise the cross-dresser begins to enjoy the disguise. Billie left Germany before he directed a film of his own; as Billy he brought to Hollywood a vigorous appreciation of such absurdities of human behavior, along with the dry cynicism that distinguished Berlin humor and an enthusiasm for the syncopations of American jazz, a musical phenomenon welcomed in the German capital. Wilder, informed by his years in Berlin (to which he returned to make A Foreign Affair in 1948 and One, Two, Three in 1961), wrote and directed many dark and sophisticated American films, including The Apartment (1969) and Some Like it Hot (1959), a comedy, set during Prohibition, about the gender confusion on a tonal par with Schünzel's Viktor und Viktoria, released in December 1933, eleven months into the Third Reich and the last musical to reflect the insouciance of the late Republic.

As Titanic began production, there was an immediate chemistry between Barbara and myself—a lot of looks across the room. At this point Barbara Stanwyck was a legendary actress, universally respected for her level of craft and integrity. She also had the most valuable thing a performer can have: good taste. Besides a long list of successful bread-and-butter pictures, Barbara had made genuine classics for great directors: The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Meet John Doe for Frank Capra, Stella Dallas for King Vidor, The Lady Eve for Preston Sturges, Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks, and Double Indemnity for Billy Wilder. Barbara carried her success lightly; her attitude was one of utter professionalism and no noticeable temperament. As far as she was concerned, she was simply one of a hundred or so people gathered to make a movie—no more, no less.

Mucho antes de que Billy Wilder fuera Billy Wilder, ya se comportaba como si fuera Billy Wilder

To the Son of God prayer was more important than the assembling of great throngs . . . He often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed [Luke 5:15–16].

April 25: Billy Wilder sends a telegram to Marilyn expressing his delight that she will appear in Some Like It Hot. She is to receive her usual $100,000 fee, plus 10 percent of the profits. She is photographed signing a contract with the film’s producer, Walter Mirisch.

Individually, the audience is stupid. Collectively, the audience is a genius.

Jerry: But you don't understand, Osgood! I’m a man! Osgood Fielding III: Well, nobody's perfect!

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.

Yes, complaining is sin. Perhaps you have never seen it this way, but it is. Romans 14:23 teaches us that whatever is not of faith is sin, and I doubt that any of us complain by faith. Billy Graham said, “Grumbling and gratitude are, for the child of God, in conflict. Be grateful and you won’t grumble. Grumble and you won’t be grateful.”19 Complaining was one reason it took the Israelites forty years to make what was actually an eleven-day journey through the wilderness. Their immaturity was a sign they were not ready for the Promised Land, because in order to possess the land, they had to first dispossess those who currently occupied it (Deuteronomy 9:1, 11:23). In