Quote

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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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Writing
Twenties
Good
Cameras
Eighty
Parts
Execution
Picture
Spot
Percent
Afford
Actors
Spots
Able
Twenty
Right
Camera

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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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.
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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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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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 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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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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God save me from myself.
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If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
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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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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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Well, nobody's perfect.
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I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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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.
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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.
Billy Wilder
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The best director is the one you don't see.
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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If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
Billy Wilder