Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 5]

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:

Wilder: I ran into Scorsese New Year’s Eve, and he had just done Taxi Driver. We talked about a half hour, and he was talking about simplifying. It’s like with a young colt: You have to put the blinkers on him. He’s going to calm down, and he’s going to be fine. He’s a very fine talent. There is a whole group of yo ung directors who are just absolutely marvelous.

Q: For instance?

Wilder: I’m omitting now the established ones like Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols. But I think Harold Ashby is very, very fine. I think Bertolucci is marvelous. There are twenty I could mention quickly.

Diamond: Certainly, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg are as technically accomplished as any director in the business.

Wilder: Coppola is marvelous. I think that Coppola’s Godfather, Part II is certainly among the five best American pictures ever made. In execution, in perception, I thought it was an absolute masterpiece. On my list of the unforgettable ones, it’s way up there.

Q: What are some others?

Wilder: Oh, there are many. There’s Grand Illusion, Best Years of Our Lives, Bridge on the River Kwai, Maltese Falcon, The Informer. And some of the old German pictures, some of the Murnau pictures. But for a man like Coppola, who had made only four or five pictures, it was an outstanding achievement. It was just a very mature work of a very mature man.

Q: Speaking of a busy camera, Mr. Diamond, what did you think of Citizen Kane the first time you saw it?

Diamond: I was very impressed, but that was not a busy camera. That was a very quiet camera. Take Stagecoach. I don’t think John Ford moved his camera once in the whole picture. There was one pan shot, but what a hell of an effective shot it was. He’s shooting down on the stagecoach on the floor of the valley, and suddenly he pans over and there’s an Indian watching from a bluff. That’s the only time the camera moved. Lots of action, lots of excitement, no camera movement. He made his actors come to the camera.

Wilder: But, you see, in making pictures — I’m not talking now about directing pictures — it’s not how you are photographing. It is the juxtaposition of the various shots that you make. It is the scissors that make the picture, the cut. Alfred Hitchcock is certainly a tremendous influence on picture making, but, once in a while, he indulged. He said he was going to make a picture called Rope and that it would have seven or nine setups in the whole picture. It was absolute, total nonsense. He would wind up on the back of somebody’s dark suit, and the next reel would start. They had to rehearse and rehearse. Every ten days they would get one whole reel, and they would collapse in exhaustion. But why not cut? This is writing the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. What is he trying to prove? Battleship Potemkin, that is movies. It’s what follows what. This is where we have it all over the theater.

Billy Wilder reads from the script for Some Like It Hot:

Part 1 of the conversation with Wilder and Diamond here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Next week: More from the dynamic writing duo.