Billy Wilder Quotes

(in 1976) They say Wilder is out of touch with his times. Frankly, I regard it as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?

(after directing Marilyn Monroe for the second time in Some Like It Hot (1959)) I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I`m too old and too rich to go through this again.

Today we spend 80% of the time making deals and 20% making pictures.

Hollywood didn`t kill Marilyn Monroe; it`s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

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

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

In certain pictures I do hope they will leave the cinema a little enriched, but I don`t make them pay a buck and a half and then ram a lecture down their throats.

(about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history) I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

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

Making movies is little like walking into a dark room. Some people stumble across furniture, others break their legs but some of us see better in the dark than others. The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade.

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

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

(asked if it was important for a director to know how to write) No, but it helps if he knows how to read.

You watch, the new wave will discover the slow dissolve in ten years or so.

(on Marilyn Monroe) An endless puzzle without any solution.

The best director is the one you don`t see.

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

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

I was not a guy writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think.

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."

I just made pictures I would`ve liked to see.

Anyone who doesn`t believe in miracles isn`t a realist.

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

(On Ace in the Hole (1951)) I was attacked by every paper because of that movie. They loathed it. It was cynical, they said. Cynical, my ass. I tell you, you read about a plane crash somewhere nearby and you want to check out the scene, you can`t get to it because ten thousand people are already there: they`re picking up little scraps, ghoulish souvenir hunters. After I read those horrifying reviews about "Ace in the Hole", I remember I was going down Wilshire Boulevard and there was an automobile accident. Somebody was run over. I stopped my car. I wanted to help that guy who was run over. Then another guy jumps out of his car and photographs the thing. "You`d better call an ambulance," I said. "Call a doctor, my ass. I`ve got to get to the L.A. Times. I`ve got a picture. I`ve got to move. I just took a picture here. I`ve got to deliver it." But you say that in a movie, and the critics think you`re exaggerating."

The subtlest comedy you can get right now is MASH (1970). They don`t want to see a picture unless Peter Fonda is running over a dozen people or unless Clint Eastwood has got a machine gun bigger then 140 penises. It gets bigger all the time, you know; it started out as a pistol and now it`s a machine gun. Something which is warm and funny and gentle and urbane and civilized hasn`t got a chance today. There is a lack of patience which is sweeping the nation - or the world, for that matter.

(opon seeing Sigmund Freud`s therapy couch) It was a very tiny little thing. All his theories were based on the analysis of very short people!

The Wilder message is don`t bore - don`t bore people.

The close-up is such a valuable thing -- like a trump at a bridge.

People copy, people steal. Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with special effects. I couldn`t do that. I quit smoking because I couldn`t reload my Zippo.

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

Some pictures play wonderfully to a room of eight people. I don`t go for that. I go for the masses. I go for the end effect.

If there`s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it`s being taken too seriously.

(on Marlene Dietrich) Mother Teresa with better legs.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that (Adolf Hitler) was a German and (Ludwig van Beethoven) an Austrian.

(to a cameraman on one of his pictures) Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

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

(on Marilyn Monroe) Breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese.

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

My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.

France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can`t tear the toilet paper.

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

Agents are like tires on a car; in order to get anywhere at all, 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.

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