Billy Wilder: The Art of Collaboration

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder's big break came when Paramount chose to team him with the accomplished screenwriter Charles Brackett. Although they were completely unlike in almost every respect, the relationship worked well, resulting in a number of great pictures, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, and others. Wilder had collaborated with other writers on projects in the past. Wilder created few scripts without a collaborator over his whole writing career. 

His work on Ninotchka (“Garbo laughs!”) also United director Ernst Lubitsch with writer Billy Wilder. Wilder idolised Lubitsch, and the sign on his office read: “How would Lubitsch have done it?” Soon, Billy Wilder decided he wanted to be a director, too. Because he felt filmmakers were botching his and Brackett's screenplays, he began to lose patience with them. When a journalist once asked him if he believed it was vital for a filmmaker to be able to write, his unimpressed view immediately apparent. “No, but knowing how to read is quite helpful.” 

Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland feature in Wilder's directorial debut, The Major and the Minor. It was such a hit that Wilder was able to keep directing, exceeding the studio's expectations. After filming Five Graves to Cairo (1943), he made Castle Keep (1944) with Erich von Stroheim and Franchot Tone, based on Rommel's North Africa campaign. 

Double Indemnity (1944) is unanimously regarded as one of the finest film noirs movies and was nominated for seven Academy Awards even though it was not all that succesful at the box office. Wilder worked with acclaimed crime author Raymond Chandler on the script for Double Indemnity, which was based on a novel by James M. Cain. Despite the fact that they disliked each other, their partnership resulted in a great script, as well as some of the most pithy lines to be found in any movie. A testament to Wilder's directorial skill is that he managed to get noteworthy performances out of his actors, such as Edward G. Robinson, for the film's harrowing story of desire and murder. 

Brackett and Wilder reunited for The Lost Weekend (1945), based on a novel that Wilder had read while on a train journey, and the result was a riveting, uncompromising drama about a writer struggling with his alcoholism. Ray Milland won an Oscar for his role as the alcoholic Don Birnam. Their greatest collaboration followed when they were paired once more to work on Billy Wilder’s masterly Sunset Boulevard. 

In 1996 James Linville conducted an interview for The Paris Review with screenwriter-director Billy Wilder on his extensive career. Published as Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1 it remains one of the most celebrated accounts of the screenwriter's craft. In the following extract Billy Wilder discusses working with the writers Charles Brackett on Sunset Boulevard, I.A.L. Diamond on Some Like it Hot and Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity.

WILDER
For a long time I wanted to do a comedy about Hollywood. God forgive me, I wanted to have Mae West and Marlon Brando. Look what became of that idea! Instead it became a tragedy of a silent-picture actress, still rich, but fallen down into the abyss after talkies. ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ I had that line early on. Someplace else I had the idea for a writer who is down on his luck. It didn’t quite fall into place until we got Gloria Swanson.

We had gone to Pola Negri first. We called her on the phone, and there was too much Polish accent. You see why some of these people didn’t make the transition to sound. We went to Pickfair and visited Mary Pickford. Brackett began to tell her the story, because he was the more serious one. I stopped him: No, don’t do it. I waved him off. She was going to be insulted if we told her she was to play a woman who begins a love affair with a man half her age. I said to her, We’re very sorry, but it’s no use. The story gets very vulgar.

Gloria Swanson had been a big star, in command of an entire studio. She worked with DeMille. Once she was dressed, her hair done to perfection, they placed her on a sedan and two strong men would carry her onto the set so no curl would be displaced. But later she did a couple of sound pictures that were terrible. When I gave her the script, she said, I must do this, and she turned out to be an absolute angel.

I used stars wherever I could in Sunset Boulevard. I used Cecil B. DeMille to play the big important studio director. I used Erich von Stroheim to play the director who directed the first pictures with Swanson, which he in fact did. I thought, Now, if there is a bridge game at the house of a silent star, and if I am to show that our hero, the writer, has been degraded to being the butler who cleans ashtrays, who would be there? I got Harry B. Warner, who played Jesus in DeMille’s biblical pictures, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton, who was an excellent bridge player, a tournament player. The picture industry was only fifty or sixty years old, so some of the original people were still around. Because old Hollywood was dead, these people weren’t exactly busy. They had the time, got some money, a little recognition. They were delighted to do it...

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

You’re never quite sure how your work will be received or the course your career will take. We knew we’d gotten a strong reaction at the first big preview of Sunset Boulevard. After the screening, Barbara Stanwyck went up and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s robe, or dress, or whatever she was wearing that night. Gloria had given such an incredible performance. Then in the big Paramount screening room, Louis B. Mayer said loudly, We need to kick Wilder out of America if he’s going to bite the hand that feeds him. He was with his contingent from MGM, the king then, but in front of all his department heads, I told him just what he could do. I walked out just as the reception was starting.

Although the movie was a great success, it was about Hollywood, exaggerated and dramatized, and it really hit a nerve. So on the way down the steps I had to pass all those people from MGM, the class studio . . . all those people who thought this picture would soil the taste of Hollywood.

After Sunset Boulevard, Brackett and I parted friends. Twelve years together, but the split had been coming. It’s like a box of matches: you pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there’s always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore. The match wasn’t striking. One of us said, Look, whatever I have to give and whatever you have to offer, it’s just not enough. We can end on the good note of Sunset Boulevard. A picture that was revolutionary for its day.

INTERVIEWER
How do collaborators work together?

WILDER
Brackett and I used to share two offices together with a secretary in between. When we were writing he always laid down on the couch in my office while I would walk around with a stick in my hand.

INTERVIEWER
Why the stick?

WILDER
I don’t know. I just needed something to keep my hands busy and a pencil wasn’t long enough. He always had the yellow legal tablet, and he wrote in longhand, then we’d hand it to the secretary. Brackett and I would discuss everything, the picture as a whole, the curtain situations—first act, second act and then the end of the picture—and the curtain lines. Then we would break it down and go to a specific scene and discuss the mood and so forth, then we’d figure out what bit of the story we’d tell in those ten pages of the scene.

Some Like It Hot (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
Was it the same working with I. A. L. Diamond?

WILDER
Pretty much the same as with Brackett. Discuss the story, break it down into scenes, and then I would dictate and he would type. Or he would sit there thinking, and I would write on a yellow tablet and show it to him.

How’s this? I’d say.

No. No good, he’d say. Never in an insistent way, however.

Or he might suggest something to me, and I’d shake my head. He’d just take it, tear it up, and put it in the wastebasket, and we’d never come back to it.

We had a great deal of trust in each other. But sometimes with writing you just can’t tell, especially if you’re writing under pressure. Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like It Hot the week before we shot it. We’d come to the situation where Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.

‘Why?’ Brown says.

‘Because I smoke!’

‘That’s all right as far as I’m concerned.’

Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, ‘I’m a boy! Because I’m a boy!’

Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in ‘Nobody’s perfect’ for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
I understand your collaboration with Raymond Chandler was more difficult?

WILDER
Yes. Chandler had never been inside a studio. He was writing for one of the hard-boiled serial magazines, The Black Mask—the original pulp fiction—and he’d been stringing tennis rackets to make ends meet. Just before then, James M. Cain had written The Postman Always Rings Twice, and then a similar story, Double Indemnity, which was serialized in three or four installments in the late Liberty magazine.

Paramount bought Double Indemnity, and I was eager to work with Cain, but he was tied up working on a picture at Fox called Western Union. A producer-friend brought me some Chandler stories from The Black Mask. You could see the man had a wonderful eye. I remember two lines from those stories especially: ‘Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.’ The other is when Marlowe goes to Pasadena in the middle of the summer and drops in on a very old man who is sitting in a greenhouse covered in three blankets. He says, ‘Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.’ A great eye . . . but then you don’t know if that will work in pictures because the details in writing have to be photographable.

I said to Joe Sistrom, Let’s give him a try. Chandler came into the studio, and we gave him the Cain story Double Indemnity to read. He came back the next day: I read that story. It’s absolute shit! He hated Cain because of Cain’s big success with The Postman Always Rings Twice.

He said, Well, I’ll do it anyway. Give me a screenplay so I can familiarize myself with the format. This is Friday. Do you want it a week from Monday?

Holy shit, we said. We usually took five to six months on a script.

Don’t worry, he said. He had no idea that I was not only the director but was supposed to write it with him.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

He came back in ten days with eighty pages of absolute bullshit. He had some good phrases of dialogue, but they must have given him a script written by someone who wanted to be a director. He’d put in directions for fade-ins, dissolves, all kinds of camera moves to show he’d grasped the technique.

I sat him down and explained we’d have to work together. We always met at nine o’clock, and would quit at about four-thirty. I had to explain a lot to him as we went along, but he was very helpful to me. What we were doing together had real electricity. He was a very, very good writer—but not of scripts.
One morning, I’m sitting there in the office, ten o’clock and no Chandler. Eleven o’clock. At eleven-thirty, I called Joe Sistrom, the producer of Double Indemnity, and asked, What happened to Chandler?

I was going to call you. I just got a letter from him in which he resigns.

Apparently he had resigned because, while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through, I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said please. He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that he found it very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls.

Naturally. I would take a phone call, three or four minutes, to say, Let’s meet at that restaurant there, or, Let’s go for a drink here. He was about twenty years older than I was, and his wife was older than him, elderly. And I was on the phone with girls! Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me—that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what. Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.

- ‘Billy Wilder: The Art of Screenwriting No. 1’. Interviewed by James Linville. The Paris Review, 1996. Full interview here.

Clint Eastwood: Straight Shooter

Unforgiven (Directed by Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood has directed over 35 feature films, frequently starring in them and composing original music for nearly a dozen, amassing in the process several Oscar nominations, two Oscar wins and two DGA Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Revered as the last ‘classical’ director working in Hollywood – a tribute to the restraint of his storytelling and the effectiveness of his working method – Eastwood has never been afraid of taking risks, balancing accessible mainstream success with darker edgier projects. 

Eastwood as a figure of the brooding anti-establishment was first solidified by his portrayal as a protagonist in A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). He was in the early 1970s looking for more challenging roles which he found in films like The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), which allowed him to go beyond the roles he had become associated with.

Eastwood began directing with Play Misty For Me in which a radio presenter is stalked by an obsessive fan. His presence as an actor in most of these early ventures tended to overshadow his film's successes, most notably in the remarkable The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yet he was recognised as a capable filmmaker with a consistent and distinct style by the mid-1970s. He also began to show an increasing inclination for less marketable ventures like Bird (1988) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). His standing as one of America's most distinguished filmmakers was reinforced by his award of the Oscar for Unforgiven (1992), which was widely praised and is now recognised as his masterpiece.

The following extract is from an interview with Scott Foundas in which Eastwood discusses his approach to directing, his attitude to commercialism and the significance of the script:

Q: You have a reputation for working fast on the set, and [Don] Siegel had a similar reputation. Was that something you picked up from him?

A: Speed is just up to the individual. Some people think things over more; others work more instinctively. I’ve worked with some other fast directors – Bill Wellman wasn’t slow. He knew what he wanted, shot it and moved on. I came up through television, and in television you had to move fast. The important thing, of course, is what comes out on the screen. I like to move fast only because I think it works well for the actors and the crew to feel like we’re progressing forward. But I think the reputation that I have for speed is not necessarily a good one – you don’t want to do Plan 9 from Outer Space, where the gravestones fall over and you say, ‘I can’t do another take. We’re too busy. Move on.’ You’re still making a film that you want to be right. But I find, as an actor, that I worked better when the directors were working fast. That’s why I guess Don and I got along so well. You sustain the character for shorter periods. You’re not having to ask yourself, ‘Now where was I three days ago? What the hell is this scene all about? What are we doing here?’

Q: Is the filmmaking process significantly different for you when you’re acting in and directing a picture as opposed to just directing?

A: It is. You definitely split your concentration. Most actors who’ve turned to directing – William S. Hart, Stan Laurel, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier – have had to be in the picture in order to get the directing job, and that’s what happened with me. Once in a while an actor comes along and gets a project going that he’s not also starring in – Redford with Ordinary People, for example – and that’s certainly the more ideal thing, to do one job and concentrate on that one job. I always expected to withdraw from acting at some point and just stay behind the camera, and in recent years, I’ve done that. Even when I think back on Unforgiven – I had a major role in it, but there’s also a lot of the picture that I’m not in. Being out of Mystic River was great. But then Million Dollar Baby comes along and there’s a great role in there for an older guy. Well, I’m an older guy. So, there you go. Never say never.

Q: Did directing your own pictures then make it harder to go back and act for other directors?

A: I don’t think so. I actually think every actor should direct at some point to learn the hurdles and the obstacles the director faces and the concentration it takes – a concentration equal to that of the actor, just in a different way. I felt that directing made me much more sympathetic to what directors have to do. I think I was easier to work with as an actor after I’d directed a few times. When the director wanted another take for reasons other than performance, I didn’t bog down and say, ‘Come on, what do you need that for?’

Q: When you start a film do you always have a sense of what you want, what it’s going to look like?

A: I always wanted to try something different. A lot goes into a film. But first you have to have a great story, a foundation; then you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to frame that story, how’s it going to look, how’s it going to sound. It’s hard to express it, because I don’t sit around and intellectualize it. A lot of times when I go to work, I have a picture in my mind of how things should be, but I don’t know why I have that picture. I just know that I want to get there and I’ve got to explain to people how we’re going to get there, or have people explain that to me.

Q: Unforgiven is frequently cited as the film that caused American critics and audiences to finally accept you as a serious artist, whereas that recognition had come considerably earlier from some foreign circles, notably France.

A: I’ve never thought about what other people think. I’ve always just thought – and I still think this way – that you make a film, you present it to the public and then it’s out there and it’s up to them to judge it. I just kept grinding them out, like a machinist, and I guess some people might go back and, in hindsight, say, ‘Well, this wasn’t so bad.’ The Outlaw Josey Wales, for example – I would say that, judging from the man on the street, that’s the most popular Western I’ve ever done. But Unforgiven did break through in a way.

Q: You’ve been directing films for thirty-five years, does it feel like you’re doing anything different now than when you started out?

A: A lot of people say, ‘Well, how come you’re doing better now than when you were 45 or 50?’ The answer is I don’t know. Maybe I’m not. Maybe 45 or 50 just wasn’t looked at in the same way. Or maybe I know more and I’m thinking more, doing better things, being more selective. Probably because I’m older now, I don’t feel compelled to do a lot of work. I’ll do a lot of work if it’s there, like in the last two years I’ve done two pictures back-to-back – Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers. But these things just all came about. If they hadn’t come about, I’d probably be a much better golfer. Whereas back in the 1970s and ’80s, I was doing more stuff. Some things you read and you say, ‘I love this script!’ Others you read and you go, ‘I like the script and I’ll do it.’ Now, I’m inclined to wait until I love the script.

Q: So many filmmakers complain about the time it takes to raise money and set projects up. But you’ve been fortunate in having a major studio–first Universal and then Warner Bros. – that was more or less willing to support whatever you wanted to do over the years.

A: Sure. A project like Bird (1988) was going nowhere when I grabbed it. It had been hanging around for a long time. It was owned by another studio and I talked Warner Bros. into trading something for it. Now, Warners might not have done that for someone else. So I’ve gotten a few films made that probably wouldn’t have been made otherwise. That goes for the last two, especially. They ended up successful despite the apprehension of the studio – so sometimes that studio thing works for you and sometimes against you. Warner Bros. wasn’t excited about doing Mystic River – they thought it was too dark. And they weren’t excited about doing Million Dollar Baby, because it was a woman’s boxing movie. But I didn’t see it like that; I saw it as a great love story. So it’s all about the way you look at it. But we got it made; that’s the main thing.

Q: Is the difficulty you had making those two films representative of any larger changes you’ve observed in the industry over the last four decades?

A: We live right now in an era where the fad is to remake a television show or a movie that’s already been remade five other times. It’s tough for a lot of studios to say, ‘Let’s start from scratch.’ In the 1940s, they had writers on tap all the time who would pitch ideas to the studio personnel. But can you imagine pitching Sunset Boulevard or some of these classic films now? A picture like that would have to be done as an independent, just as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby had to be done semi-independently. The good thing is that it’s come full circle in a way, with the studios forming independent divisions to finance smaller films, to take on projects that wouldn’t get made otherwise. George Clooney’s film, Good Night, and Good Luck, is another example of a film that probably wouldn’t be high on a studio’s list of things to do. I’ve always tried to influence the studio to not be afraid to do things that might not make a lot of money, but which they’ll be proud of thirty or forty years from now. That’s what I told [former Warner Bros. chairman and CEO] Bob Daly when I was doing Bird. I said, ‘I don’t know if this thing will make any money – it’s about jazz, it’s not very commercial, it’s a tragic story. But I can guarantee you that I’ll try to make a film you’ll be proud to have your logo on.’ That’s about all I can offer. That’s about all I can offer on any of these films.

Q: The writer of Unforgiven, David Webb Peoples, has said that you filmed what was basically the first draft of his script, which is certainly a departure from the Hollywood norm of ‘developing’ and rewriting things ad infinitum and calling in four or five writers. You seem to have enormous respect for the written word.

A: Some scripts come in and they’re just great to start with; I’ll use Unforgiven as the example. It was a good script. I got it in the early 1980s and waited until ’92 to make it. I called up the writer, David Peoples, and said, ‘I’m going to make your movie, but I want to change a few things. Can I run these ideas by you as I get them?’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’ But the more I fiddled with it, the more I realized I was screwing it up. It goes back to something Don Siegel used to say: So many times you get a great project and people want to kill it with improvements. And that’s exactly what I was doing with Unforgiven. So finally, I called David back and said, ‘Forget what I said about making those changes. I’m not doing anything except changing the title.’ It was originally called The William Munny Killings. Of course, once you get into a project, there are always some things that live up to or exceed your expectations, and certain other things that will be disappointing. So you have to be able to re-write on your feet as you’re working. But once in a while projects come along where everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle – as it went together in your mind, it comes together on film.

- Interview extract from ‘Scott Foundas: The Straight Shooter’. DGA Quarterly, Spring 2006.