Billy Wilder

The screenplay as the only sacred law

Billy Wilder arrived in the United States in 1934 barely speaking English and with a killer instinct for dialogue. In his first months in Hollywood he shared a cramped room with Peter Lorre and survived on instant soups. He was not a tormented artist in search of eternal beauty. He was a reporter from Vienna who knew that reality is usually a lot dirtier than the big studios were willing to admit.

In 1939 he wrote the script for Ninotchka for Ernst Lubitsch, and there he understood that elegance was a precision weapon. But Wilder wanted total control because he hated seeing other directors ruin his lines. So he decided to step behind the camera to protect his words.

Wilder was a cynic who scorned pretty shots.

In 1944 he shot Double Indemnity and set the rules of greed on the big screen. He didn't use expressionist lighting for aesthetic whim but to hide the fact that the budget was tight and that the actors needed shadows in which to conceal their intentions. Raymond Chandler co-wrote the script, and they ended up loathing each other during the process. The result was a film that forced the censors to look the other way while a woman convinced an insurance salesman to murder her husband.

And the gamble paid off.

Because postwar audiences didn't want fairy tales. They wanted to see ordinary people doing terrible things for money or sex. Wilder gave them exactly that, with a narrative structure that never let the viewer catch their breath.

Bite, bold wit and commercial success

After the success of Double Indemnity in 1945, the director became an untouchable figure in the industry. He won three Oscars in a single night, and that gave him the freedom to shoot Sunset Boulevard in 1950. It was a frontal attack on the very dream factory that fed him. Louis B. Mayer yelled at him during a private screening, calling him ungrateful for fouling Hollywood's own nest.

Wilder simply told him where to go.

In 1960 he released The Apartment and proved that a romantic comedy could be made about corporate prostitution and suicide. Jack Lemmon became his go-to actor because he perfectly understood that rhythm of short sentences and rapid-fire lines. The shoot was an exercise in military discipline under the appearance of creative chaos. He saved 1 million dollars on sets using forced-perspective tricks, with short actors in the background of the office.

But the system began to change in the late sixties. The new bearded directors of the Spielberg and Coppola generation started taking over the space of the old screenwriting craftsmen. Wilder tried to adapt, but his dry, direct style clashed with the new visual psychedelia. In 1970 he shot The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and suffered the biggest studio cut of his career.

Nearly an hour of the original footage was cut.

Despite the commercial setbacks, he never stopped showing up at his office every morning to write. In 1978 he shot Fedora in Europe with German capital, because in the United States nobody wanted to finance a director over seventy. It was a project born of resentment toward a cinema he no longer recognized as his own.

In 1981 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer spent 10 million dollars producing Fedora, and the film barely earned half of that at the North American box office. It was his last work behind the camera. He spent the rest of his days collecting modern art and welcoming young filmmakers eager to learn the secret of his narrative rhythm. He died in 2002 from pneumonia at his Beverly Hills residence.