Quote

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

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
Doors
Actor
Situation
Actors
Nothing
Enters
Entering
Door
Window

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
Billy Wilder
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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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.
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.
Billy Wilder
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
Billy Wilder
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I'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 Wilder
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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
Billy Wilder
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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
Billy Wilder
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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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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, 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.
Billy Wilder
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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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Make subtlety obvious.
Billy Wilder
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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
Billy Wilder
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
Billy Wilder
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God save me from myself.
Billy Wilder