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
Good
Cameras
Eighty
Parts
Execution
Picture
Spot
Percent
Afford
Actors
Spots
Able
Twenty
Right
Camera
Writing
Twenties

More quotes by 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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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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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 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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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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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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Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
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The best director is the one you don't see.
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The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
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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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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'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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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
Billy Wilder