Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 3]

A 10-part series with the writers of The Apartment and Some Like It Hot.

More excerpts from a sit-down interview with writer-director Billy Wilder and longtime screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond:

Q: To get back to your collaboration, how detailed is your treatment before you start writing the dialogue?

Wilder: The treatment? There is no treatment. We just start right off. There is no outline, no first treatment, which has to be done very often, I imagine, if you need financing. We just start right off with scene one, and since we are on the film set all the time, there is no ‘’Slow fade-in, camera tiptoes’’ — none of that. Just ‘’day” or ‘’night,’’ not even ‘’morning’’ or ‘’evening.” Just ‘’day” or ‘’night’’ so that the cameraman knows how to light it, because he can’t light “evening” anyway. There’s a minimum of those fancy descriptions.

Diamond: It’s different if you’re trying to sell a script. Naturally, you’re going to want to try to make it as readable as possible. You will throw in a lot of camera directions. When directors tell interviewers, ‘’The minute I get on the set I throw away the script,’’ what they mean is that they pay no attention to the camera directions, because they’re not going to pan when you say so.

Wilder: I find with young writers, and some of them with very, very good ideas, that they get lost, unnecessarily so, in technical descriptions of which they know very little. Nobody will say, ‘’This is a great screenwriter because he always has the camera angles.’’

Just have good characters and good scenes and something that plays. The camera technique, that is secondary. Writers from the theater and directors from the theater who come from New York are very camera-conscious, and the writers will give you minute description, and directors will get on the dolly and they will swish around and up and down. They are afraid that the scene will be too stagy. There’s no such thing.

Diamond: I think most young directors today, if you offered them the choice between a good script and a zoom lens, would take the zoom lens.

Wilder: Take away the zoom lens. Just don’t let them have it.

Diamond: Look at an older director like Stanley Kubrick, who is no longer twenty-six years old. Barry Lyndon must have twenty scenes in which the camera started close and then zoomed back. If you do it twice in a picture it may be effective, but there it became monotonous. He is a marvelous still photographer, but you have to keep some dynamics of film in mind. There were scenes as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen in my life, but any time you’re sitting in the theater and saying, ‘’Gee, isn’t that a great shot,” then you’re not involved in the story. I think it was Penelope Gilliatt who said a few years ago, ‘’Movies have now reached the same stage as sex: It’s all technique and no feeling.”

Wilder: She was speaking for herself, I’m sure.

This is a gem: Izzy Diamond himself speaks! At an AFI event in 1986 honoring his longtime partner and friend Billy Wilder:

Part 1 of the conversation with Wilder and Diamond here.

Part 2 here.

Tomorrow: More from the dynamic writing duo.