Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
BILLY WILDERMarilyn 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.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.
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I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.
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The best director is the one you don’t see.
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I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
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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.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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We’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.
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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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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
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Money makes even bastards legitimate.
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Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book?
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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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God save me from myself.
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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 just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
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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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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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If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
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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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The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
BILLY WILDER