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.
BILLY WILDERHollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
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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 something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
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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 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.
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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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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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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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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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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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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Money makes even bastards legitimate.
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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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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house.
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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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The best director is the one you don’t see.
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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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Jerry: Oh, you don’t understand, Osgood! Ehhhh… I’m a man. Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.
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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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The 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 WILDER