Billy Wilder

American Director

About Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder (; German: [ˈvɪldɐ]; born Samuel Wilder; June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was an Austrian-American film director, producer and screenwriter. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director eight times, winning twice, and for a screenplay Academy Award 13 times, winning three times.

Wilder became a screenwriter while living in Berlin. After the rise of the Nazi Party, he moved to Paris due to rampant antisemitism. He moved to Hollywood in 1933, and had a major hit when he, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-nominated film Ninotchka (1939). Wilder established his directorial reputation and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director with the film noir adaptation of the novel Double Indemnity (1944), for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Raymond Chandler. Wilder won the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the film adaptation of the novel, The Lost Weekend (1945), which also won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In the 1950s, Wilder directed and co-wrote a string of critically acclaimed films, including the Hollywood drama Sunset Boulevard (1950), for which he won his second screenplay Academy Award, Ace in the Hole (1951), Stalag 17 (1953) and Sabrina (1954). Wilder directed and co-wrote three films in 1957, including The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution. Wilder directed Marilyn Monroe in two films, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). In 1960, Wilder co-wrote, directed and produced the critically acclaimed film The Apartment. It won Wilder Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Beginning with Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, he made seven films with Jack Lemmon, four of which co-starred Walter Matthau; the threesome’s first collaboration was The Fortune Cookie (1966). Other notable films Wilder directed include One, Two, Three (1961), Irma la Douce (1963), Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and Avanti! (1972). Wilder directed fourteen actors in Oscar-nominated performances.

Wilder has received various honors over his distinguished career between the late 1980s and 1990s. He received the British Academy Film Award Fellowship Award, the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, and the Producers Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment are included in the AFI’s greatest American films of all time. As of 2019, seven of his films are preserved in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.

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Quotes by Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.

Billy Wilder

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.

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

Billy Wilder

He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.

Billy Wilder

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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.

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder

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

Billy Wilder