Writer-director Billy Wilder, whose admirers include the likes of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, was responsible for some of the greatest movies to come out of Hollywood: “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Apartment” and “Some Like It Hot” to name but a few.
He worked as a reporter in Berlin before breaking into the German film industry as a screenwriter in 1929. Witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Wilder emigrated to Paris and later the United States, where he worked as a screenwriter, director and producer.
Before his death in 2002 at the age of 95, Wilder had received 21 Academy Award nominations, winning six times. He was honored during his lifetime by the American Film Institute, Kennedy Center Honors, National Endowment for the Arts and the Directors, Producers and Writers guilds.
Film historian Joseph McBride, author of more than 20 books, examines the Hollywood great’s career in the critical study “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University Press). In addition to years of research, McBride, a screenwriter and former reporter and columnist for Daily Variety, interviewed Wilder several times between 1974 and 1995.
McBride spoke about Wilder in a recent interview with The Republican.
Q: You have written books on many top filmmakers — John Ford, Orson Welles, and Frank Capra. What drew you to Wilder?
Once when I was visiting the Directors Guild of America, I found myself referring to Billy Wilder as my “idol.” To my friend Selise Eiseman, the guild’s national Special Projects officer, I added, “Even though I’m too old to have an idol.” She beamed and said, “That’s OK, he’s my idol too.” Now I’m even older, and I realize that, as Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” warns us, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” but there are few filmmakers I admire as much as Wilder. When I was a repressed Catholic kid, Wilder was my sex education teacher with “Some Like It Hot” and “Irma la Douce,” which opened up exhilarating new vistas. Before I turned to writing books fulltime — which I prefer to screenwriting — I aspired to being an acerbic, witty satirist of social hypocrisy like Wilder. I’ve been writing about him for 51 years now and always had in the back of mind that I would do a book about him.
Q: What finally impelled you to write it?
Partly it’s because I thought his late films, which I championed — such as “Kiss Me, Stupid,” “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” and “Avanti!” — continue to be undervalued. And I was angry that Wilder was, in effect, an internal exile in Hollywood for the last 21 years of his life, eager to work but shunned as old-fashioned. And most of all it’s because I think he is still misunderstood in some circles as “cynical” and “misogynistic,” when in fact he’s a boldly realistic and compassionate filmmaker. He sees human flaws clearly and reports on them with a mordant wit that forms a protective shield for his hilarity, warmth, and “sort of disappointed romanticism at heart,” as his longtime writing partner I. A. L. Diamond called it.
Q: Wilder began his career as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer in Vienna and Berlin. How do you think that shaped him as a screenwriter and director?
François Truffaut once remarked that you can tell a lot about a director by knowing what profession he pursued before he began making films. Wilder’s films are exposés of social ills and crimes, mixed with keenly perceptive human-interest stories of the kind he was writing as a peripatetic young reporter. The most striking example of his journalism is a brilliant four-part series he wrote in Berlin of his experiences as a semi-gigolo dancing with ladies for tips at a Berlin hotel, “Waiter, Bring Me a Dancer!” This 1927 series, which reads like a movie, is a mixture of reportage and imagination. He sometimes claimed he worked as an Eintänzer (a tea dancer or gigolo) only to write about the experience as a reporter but he admitted to me that he was having a hard time making ends meet, so he took the job and then wrote about it. There are many gigolos and prostitutes in his films, which often revolve around the conflict in his characters between the need for money and sex and the desire for love.
Q: Wilder was quite versatile, directing films as diverse as “Double Indemnity,” “Stalag 17,” “Some Like It Hot” and “Sabrina.” What common trait made a Billy Wilder film a Billy Wilder film?
That versatility is also a byproduct of his newspaper background. Like us, he enjoyed newspaper work because you never know what will happen on a given day or whom you will get to interview. Wilder told me that as much as he admired a director such as Alfred Hitchcock, he would have been bored if he always made the same kind of film each time out. So he wanted to make comedies when he was depressed and dramas when he was happy. He tried his hand at many kinds of stories as a journalist and always found ways to make them resonate with his own view of the world, as he does with his superlative work in numerous film genres, from film noir to romantic comedies and sometimes mixtures thereof.
Q: I was surprised to read on the connection between Wilder’s “The Apartment” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter.” Can you elaborate on how Wilder was inspired by the film?
After “Some Like It Hot,” Wilder was so enamored of Jack Lemmon that he pulled out an old idea to write for him. Along with Diamond, Wilder fashioned “The Apartment” — which he told me he considered his best film because it was his most successful blend of comedy and drama, the mixture he had been working for all his life — from a couple of disparate sources. One was the Hollywood scandal in which producer Walter Wanger shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang for having an affair with his wife, actress Joan Bennett. Lang was using the apartment of an underling for his assignations with his client. But the germ of the film idea was a pure expression of Wilder’s acerbic, obliquely compassionate view of the world — his wondering about a minor character in “Brief Encounter,” the man briefly seen lending his apartment to the Trevor Howard character for an unconsummated adulterous affair. Wilder began wondering how such a man would deal with the detritus of other people’s sex lives while painfully wishing for genuine love of his own.
Q: What impact has Wilder had on cinema and younger filmmakers?
To twist a point he made about his work, Wilder is an example of how you can make people watch films that tell them they are SOBs and have them still find those films entertaining and illuminating. Many major directors and writers today are great admirers of Wilder. Spike Lee sought him out and became his friend while expressing the wish to make a modern version of Wilder’s 1951 newspaper drama, “Ace in the Hole.” Wilder once said it was his best film but that it failed at the box office because it was too corrosive. Lee appreciated the way Wilder dealt with “the choices people make and the consequences of those choices.”
Orson Welles, in a television interview on the last night of his life, referred simply to “wonderful Billy Wilder.” Steven Spielberg has called Wilder “the greatest writer-director who ever existed” (I agree), and Wilder’s friend Fernando Trueba, the Spanish director of “Belle Epoque,” told me you could argue for several people as the greatest of all directors, “But if you say, Who is the best screenwriter ever? And then I say there’s no doubt, it’s Billy Wilder, and then the world. I can prove that in a jury, in front of the judge. It’s not an opinion. It’s not a judgment of taste. It’s a scientific truth.”
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