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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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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Midwife
Policeman
Policemen
Filmmaker
Director
Directors
Bastard
Must
Psychoanalyst
Sycophants

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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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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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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.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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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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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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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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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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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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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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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 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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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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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
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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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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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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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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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