Quote

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

Billy Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Character
Leading
Develop
Clean
Line
Lines
Action

More quotes by Billy Wilder

Image
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
Billy Wilder
Image
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
Billy Wilder
Image
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
Image
Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
God save me from myself.
Billy Wilder
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Billy Wilder
Image
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
Billy Wilder
Image
I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
Billy Wilder
Image
The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Billy Wilder
Image
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
Billy Wilder
Image
You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
Billy Wilder
Image
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
Image
Make subtlety obvious.
Billy Wilder
Image
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
Billy Wilder
Image
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