What do you think?
Rate this book
Conversations With Filmmakers Series
Billy Wilder: Interviews
Always daring Hollywood censors' limits on content, Billy Wilder directed greats such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, and Gary Cooper. Billy Wilder: Interviews follows the filmmaking career of one of Hollywood's most honored and successful writer-directors and spans over fifty years. Wilder, born in 1906, fled from Nazi Germany and established himself in America. Starting with a celebrated 1944 Life magazine profile, the book traces his progress from his Oscar-winning heyday of the 1940s to the 1990s, in which he is still witty, caustic, and defiant. Often playful and sometimes outrageous, but just as often very serious, Wilder details his rise as a Berlin cub reporter to a fledgling screenwriter in Hollywood's "Golden Age." He tells the stories behind his brilliant direction of such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960), among others. A dazzling raconteur, Wilder gives the scoop on the royalty of cinema, from the maddening magic of Monroe to the uncanny empathy of frequent alter ego Lemmon. Though his natural tendency is to spin marvelous anecdotes on the subject of show business, Wilder also delivers penetrating and instructive observations on his craft. On screen, his special blend of cynicism and romanticism was always expressed in a style that avoided showiness. Billy Wilder: Interviews includes in-depth profiles, spirited Q&A's, and on-the-set glimpses of the director at work. Taken together, the interviews form an unofficial memoir of a sophisticated artist once described by a colleague as the most unusual and amusing man in Hollywood. Robert Horton is the film critic for The Herald in Everett, Washington. His work has been published in Film Comment, New York Newsday, American Film, and the Seattle Weekly.
- GenresFilm
252 pages, Paperback
First published April 24, 2002
About the author
Billy Wilder
60 books47 followersBilly Wilder (born Samuel Wilder) was a Polish-born, Jewish-American journalist, screenwriter, Academy Award-winning film director and producer, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Many of Wilder's films achieved both critical and public acclaim.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 7, 2008
Billy Wilder's work is among my favorites of cinema -- Some Like It Hot is possibly up on my Top Five list (which I've never actually made) -- and I'm charmed by this collection of interviews with him, ranging from his very early work as a writer/director to post-career. It's interesting not only for showing how he developed as an artist, and how his responses to his own work changed (his comments on, say, Marilyn Monroe or Ace in the Hole are revealing), but how writing about movies changed from the forties to the eighties.
The interviews/articles range in quality --a 1944 Life article and a 1960 Playboy interview are among the best, while the 1970 Action interview is painful to read -- and it's amusing to see what anecdotes get repeated, from story to story, and how they morph. It's also interesting watching how Wilder shapes his public face, how he becomes more practiced in saying what he wants to say, how he learns to communicate more fluently.
The last several interviews are really kind of sad -- not only does Wilder continue to insist that his next picture's gonna be the big hit he hasn't had in a while (it never was), but he also becomes more vocally bitter about the development of American cinema, away from his kind of witty, coherent storyline and toward more spectacle-style cinema. And while I don't disagree with him, that story is a really good thing to have, it became just the conservatism that old men engage in. Railing against the encroaching dark.
Reading a book like this is a really good lesson in how shallow the interview usually is. All of the repetition becomes onerous, and then almost ominous -- what's not being said? Wilder must have been more than the sum of "I would worship the ground you walked on, if you lived in a better neighborhood" and giving the audience two and two and letting them make four and "directors don't bury their dead", but he's been cagey enough that we can't see it.
I found myself thinking, a lot, about the limits of relationships while I was reading this. How well can we ever know someone else? If we were asked to define our friends, how well could we do so, and how revelatory would that definition be?
(This is a hell of a book for those of us who write RPS -- provoking some ideas that I'm pretending I never had, as well as making me think about the nature of publicity and media.)
The insights into Wilder aren't inconsiderable, either; the glimpses of him actually working as a director, and the discussions of his writing routine, are fascinating; he makes some very interesting points about the communal nature of filmmaking, and has some intriguing techniques for coping with that.
This might be more valuable for the thoughts it provokes than for the actual content. But it's charming, full of bon mots and sweet anecdotes, and is a good book to flip through, since it's in easily-digestible chunks.
The interviews/articles range in quality --a 1944 Life article and a 1960 Playboy interview are among the best, while the 1970 Action interview is painful to read -- and it's amusing to see what anecdotes get repeated, from story to story, and how they morph. It's also interesting watching how Wilder shapes his public face, how he becomes more practiced in saying what he wants to say, how he learns to communicate more fluently.
The last several interviews are really kind of sad -- not only does Wilder continue to insist that his next picture's gonna be the big hit he hasn't had in a while (it never was), but he also becomes more vocally bitter about the development of American cinema, away from his kind of witty, coherent storyline and toward more spectacle-style cinema. And while I don't disagree with him, that story is a really good thing to have, it became just the conservatism that old men engage in. Railing against the encroaching dark.
Reading a book like this is a really good lesson in how shallow the interview usually is. All of the repetition becomes onerous, and then almost ominous -- what's not being said? Wilder must have been more than the sum of "I would worship the ground you walked on, if you lived in a better neighborhood" and giving the audience two and two and letting them make four and "directors don't bury their dead", but he's been cagey enough that we can't see it.
I found myself thinking, a lot, about the limits of relationships while I was reading this. How well can we ever know someone else? If we were asked to define our friends, how well could we do so, and how revelatory would that definition be?
(This is a hell of a book for those of us who write RPS -- provoking some ideas that I'm pretending I never had, as well as making me think about the nature of publicity and media.)
The insights into Wilder aren't inconsiderable, either; the glimpses of him actually working as a director, and the discussions of his writing routine, are fascinating; he makes some very interesting points about the communal nature of filmmaking, and has some intriguing techniques for coping with that.
This might be more valuable for the thoughts it provokes than for the actual content. But it's charming, full of bon mots and sweet anecdotes, and is a good book to flip through, since it's in easily-digestible chunks.
January 21, 2021
Good stuff! My only reason for taking off one star was the fact it was only 1/2 to 2/3 interviews. There were a lot of people writing about him...instead of talking with him.
July 10, 2022
One of the better entries in the University of Mississippi's "Interviews" series (editor Robert Horton even apologizes for its notorious redundancies, though in this volume, there are few). Interestingly, the focus is mostly on the post-heyday Wilder, as he reluctantly transitions from Golden Boy to Golden Ager. Fortunately, the Wicked Wit of the West loses none of his showy sourness, so if he pontificates more about the state of the industry from 1975-1996 than dissects his own films, that's fine. The Wilder captured here may not be Wilder the notable, but he remains Wilder the quotable.
April 1, 2008
Edited by Seattle's Robert Horton: A series of chronological interviews of Wilder conducted in various circumstances by different writers. It's fascinating and fun and sometimes heart-wrenching as Wilder struggles with film industry and audience changes after almost 3 decades of churning out fabulous pictures that made top box office returns.
Read
October 28, 2008Didn't read all of this because the interviews cover some of the same ground.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews