Quote

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

Billy Wilder

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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Audience
Dark
Imbecile
Wrong
Imbeciles
Individual
Member
Together
Critical
May
Members
Work
Genius
Never
Thousand

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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You 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.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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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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Marilyn 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.
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I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
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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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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
Billy Wilder
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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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.
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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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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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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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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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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.
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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.
Billy Wilder
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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
Billy Wilder