The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
BILLY WILDERThe only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
BILLY WILDERI’m delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we’ve got something to look down on.
BILLY WILDERThe 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.
BILLY WILDERI had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.
BILLY WILDERI have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.
BILLY WILDERThe forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.
BILLY WILDERThe best director is the one you don’t see.
BILLY WILDERI hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
BILLY WILDERI, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
BILLY WILDERFrance is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
BILLY WILDERShoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
BILLY WILDERThey’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
BILLY WILDERMake subtlety obvious.
BILLY WILDERAfter so many drive-in waitresses becoming movie stars, there has been this real drought, when along come class; somebody who actually went to school, can spell, maybe even plays the piano.
BILLY WILDERI am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
BILLY WILDERYou 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