Written Interview: Billy Wilder

It’s from Playboy magazine in 1963. An excerpt:

Playboy: Analytically inclined reviewers are fond of “discovering” secondary levels of social and satirical comment in your films, even in the comedies. Do you consciously inject such messages?

Wilder: I am not really a message man. Pictures like Love in the Afternoon and Sabrina are not in any way a comment on the world. Maybe The Apartment had a few things to say about our society, but it was not meant to be a deep-searching exploration of how we are. On certain levels, once in a while, maybe we smuggle in a little contraband message, but we try never to jump in their faces with our naked pretensions showing, because they’ll recoil. In certain pictures I do hope they’ll leave the theater a little enriched, but I never make them pay a buck-and-a-half and then ram a lecture down their throats. In Munich not long ago I saw Chaplin’s Limelight for the first time; it was never shown on the West Coast, and I was anxious to see it. A girl in our party said she had seen it eight times, and later I told her I knew how she felt, because I saw it once and it seemed like eight times. I found it completely shallow and commonplace. If only he had stuck to comedy. In the silents he never philosophized. In sound he never stopped philosophizing; when he finally found a voice to say what was on his mind, it was like a child writing lyrics to Beethoven’s Ninth. I found it shocking to think that he was attacked for his political convictions and forced to leave the U.S. when everything he was saying was on a grammar school level. Mind you, I still think he was an authentic genius, and I would do a picture with him today for free — if he would only shut up.

You may have to work your way past some… uh… photographs, but any interview with Billy Wilder, arguably one of the finest writer-directors of all time, is worth it. For more, go here.

HT to @LaFamiliaFilm for the link.

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