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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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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
German
Brilliant
Made
Believe
World
People
Austrian
Beethoven
Hitler

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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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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 am big. It's the pictures that got small.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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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.
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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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God save me from myself.
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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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If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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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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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.
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Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.
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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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I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.
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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
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