Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
BILLY WILDERI have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
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France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
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I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them. I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School.
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
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One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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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.
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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.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
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Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood’s Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town.
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You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.
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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you’re really in the presence of something. In that league there’s only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It’s a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you’ve found it.
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Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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Money makes even bastards legitimate.
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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I just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
BILLY WILDER