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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

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
Dirty
Foreign
Pictures
Critics
Films
Call
Lusty
Film
Naughty
Lust

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
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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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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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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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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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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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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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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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.
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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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Make subtlety obvious.
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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
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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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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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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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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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
Billy Wilder