Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 4]

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: How involved do you get, Mr. Diamond, in casting and other matters after the script is done?

Diamond: Oh, I throw out ideas, and sometimes they’re listened to and sometimes they’re not.

Wilder: He is in my office at all times, except when I cast the starlets who don’t wind up with the part. Now tell me, is this a seminar of various specialists? In other words, you’re not all going to be cardiac. Some are going to be nose, throat, and ear. If I had a son or daughter who wanted to go into the business, I would say, ‘’The way things are going, go into special effects or become a stunt man.’’ Special effects — with the need for bigger and bigger fish — would be a safe field, I think. No, maybe a lawyer is better.

Q: Mr. Diamond, have you ever collaborated in any way on the direction?

Wilder: Oh, he collaborates with me all the time. He just doesn’t get the credit for it.

Diamond: No. I’ll give you an example of two persons who used to direct together: Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. But they had a rule: Only one of them was allowed to talk to the actors. They might consult on the sidelines, but always it was one man in charge. No, we don’t co-direct. I may sit on the sidelines, and I may make a suggestion occasionally, but I stay out.

Q: Do you have any ambition to direct a film yourself?

Diamond: Not really.

Wilder: If they give you a zoom lens? No, he is a very elegant man, and he just does not want to get that close to actors. I have to go into the cage, and he’s outside.

Diamond: Speaking of zoom lenses, Billy’s cutter at Paramount was an associate producer on most of his pictures, and he was once lent out to a young director who was making his first picture. He was a stage director, and he sat on the set every day, and one day he prepared the following scene: Two persons are sitting on a couch talking, and the woman is smoking a cigarette. The idea was to zoom in on the cigarette in her mouth, pan down with it as she put it in an ashtray, and then as she picks her hand up come back and continue the dialogue. The cutter watched this all morning, and finally he went to the director and said, ‘’What is the point of this? Is the cigarette poisoned? Is she a spy and there’s a secret message in the filter?” The director could not answer. The point was that he had come from the stage, and he wanted to prove to everybody that he could use a camera. Ultimately, that scene was never in the picture, and the director never talked to the cutter again because he had been caught being completely self-indulgent.

Wilder: Not only didn’t it prove anything, but the power of the camera is such that if you have a moment like that audiences get curious, restless. They think that there must be a reason for it; otherwise he wouldn’t show it. They’re very, very sharp now. They watch everything.

Diamond: In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese also has a very busy camera. There’s one scene where two people are sitting in a booth in a restaurant talking to each other, and the camera goes 180 degrees to the right, then it comes back 135 degrees to the left, then it goes 90 degrees to the right. None of this is for any reason at all, except that he didn’t trust the words in the scene. I guess he felt that unless he was engaged in some sort of busywork he wasn’t directing. He didn’t have the courage to let the camera stay in one place and let the scene play.

Wilder: It’s especially the curse of stage directors. They take a play and say, ‘’Now we’re going to open it up.’’ They have a very good scene in a living room that has played six hundred times on Broadway. But for the picture they take the people out and put them on the roof garden, then they take them downstairs, then into the drugstore, and it’s still the same scene.

One of the best scenes I’ve ever seen in a picture was between Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. They are sitting in a cab, not even a transparency in back to save money. Venetian blinds in a New York cab. The two brothers talking, especially Brando. The scene was beautiful and very well written, and it lasted seven minutes. No cut, no close- ups, no nothing. One of the great scenes, because you were involved. But I’m not going to like the scene any better if they suddenly got up and walked out somewhere.

Diamond: The tip-off is usually in the middle of a scene when somebody says, ‘’Let’s get some air.”

Here is Diamond and Wilder winning the 1961 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Apartment:

Part 1 of the conversation with Wilder and Diamond here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Tomorrow: More from the dynamic writing duo.