The best director is the one you don’t see.
BILLY WILDERHindsight is always twenty-twenty.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
-
-
Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.
BILLY WILDER -
France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
BILLY WILDER -
Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
BILLY WILDER -
I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it’s getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous.
BILLY WILDER -
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
BILLY WILDER -
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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 -
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
BILLY WILDER -
I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.
BILLY WILDER -
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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 -
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.
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