Wilder & Diamond on Screenwriting
Billy Wilder: We meet at, say, 9:30 in the morning and open shop, like bank tellers, and we sit there in one room. We read Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and then we just stare at each other. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes it goes on until 12:30, and then I'll ask him, “How about a drink?'' And he nods, and then we have a drink and go to lunch. Or sometimes we come full of ideas. This is not the muse coming through the windows and kissing our brows. It's very hard work, and having done both, I tell you that directing is a pleasure and writing is a drag. Directing can become difficult, but it is a pleasure because you have something to work with. You can put the camera here or there; you can interpret things this way or that way; the readings can be such or such. But writing is just an empty page. You start with nothing, absolutely nothing, and I think writers are vastly underrated and underpaid. It is totally impossible to make a great picture out of a lousy script. It is impossible, though, for a mediocre director to screw up a great script altogether.
I.A.L. Diamond: A writer named Hal Kanter once wrote a monologue for Groucho Marx which had the following line: ''Who needs writers? Give me a competent director and two intelligent actors, and at the end of eight weeks I will show you three of the most nervous people you ever saw.'’
* From the American Film Institute's Interview with Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond [ 1976]
** Clip taken from Michel Ciment's documentary Portrait of a "60% Perfect Man" [1980], featured on the Criterion Edition of Ace In The Hole
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