French films

Billy Wilder - biography

1906-2002
Biography
Billy Wilder photo
Billy Wilder is best-known for the following films:


Billy Wilder Quotes
“Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.”

“I’ve never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe.  Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen.  And that includes Garbo.”

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

“Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting?  If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing.  If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.”

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

“I hear Otto Preminger’s on holiday.  In Auschwitz.”

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

“Shoot a few scenes out of focus.  I want to win the foreign film award.”

“What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.”

“France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.”

“If there’s anything I hate more than being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.”

“Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.”

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

“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.”

“Don’t be too clever for an audience.  Make it obvious.  Make the subtleties obvious also.”

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

“I have ten commandments.  The first nine are, thou shalt not bore.  The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.”

“I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.”

“I’d worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.”

“I’ve met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you’re twenty minutes.”

“It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.”

“My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?”

“One’s too many, and a hundred’s not enough.”

“They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying.  But it won’t work.  She was an original.”

“We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.”





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