Conversations With Wilder

The 93-year-old Billy Wilder, Hollywood's legendary writer-director, talks about screen writing and camera work, set design and the stars, his peers and their movies, the old studio system, and filmmaking today. 200 photos.

The renowned director talks to Cameron Crowe about 30 years at the very heart of Hollywood. Wilder's distinct voice provides a fascinating insider's view of the film industry past and present.

In-depth profiles, spirited Q & A's, and on-the-set glimpses of the director at work

Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films—including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment—Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society. In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition. Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

On Sunset Boulevard, originally published in 1998, describes the life of acclaimed filmmaker Billy Wilder (1906-2002), director of such classics as Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend, The Seven Year Itch, and Sabrina. This definitive biography takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from Billy Wilder's birth outside of Krakow in 1906 to Vienna, where he grew up, to Berlin, where he moved as a young man while establishing himself as a journalist and screenwriter, and triumphantly to Hollywood, where he became as successful a director as there ever was. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment"Wilder's cinematic legacy is unparalleled. Not only did he direct these classics and twenty-one other films, he co-wrote all of his own screenplays. Volatile, cynical, hilarious, and driven, Wilder arrived in Hollywood an all-but-penniless refugee who spoke no English. Ten years later he was calling his own shots, and he stayed on top of the game for the next three decades. Wilder battled with Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Bing Crosby, and Peter Sellers; kept close friendships with William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, and Walter Matthau; amassed a personal fortune by way of blockbuster films and shrewd investments in art (including Picassos, Klees, and Mir's); and won Oscars--yet Wilder, ever conscious of his thick accent, always felt the sting of being an outsider. On Sunset Boulevard traces the course of a turbulent but fabulous life, both behind the scenes and on the scene, from Viennese cafes and Berlin dance halls in the twenties to the Hollywood soundstages of the forties and the on-location shoots of the fifties and sixties. Crammed with Wilder's own caustic wit, On Sunset Boulevard reels out the story of one of cinema's most brilliant and prolific talents.

The author of "I, Fellini" offers a candid look at the life and career of the great film director, Billy Wilder--much of it told in his own voice. 20 photos.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The first book to bring together interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema’s most talented pioneers.