Billy Wilder Quotes

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. Maybe they would have been less glamorous than films, but I would continue to tell stories.

[Martin Scorsese ] basically works just like any other director. You work the scene, you try to find what's best in it and make it work. That's what it was like.

But then, even with sex, I'm more in the school of less is more in movies.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

I love those films where I feel the director's confidence - where he doesn't need to overdo it with the shots and the cuts.

They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.

I try and let the film do the talking.

The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'

Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don't give you all the information.

Filmmaking is not about what we see - it's a very misconceived notion; it's about what we don't see.

If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

I always wanted to direct. I always saw myself as a director.

I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

I never think of myself as a celebrity - or even an actor, actually. I think of myself as a writer-director.

If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would listen to the director.

It was very important to me to choose a director like Gary [Ross], whose instincts come from character, who's a storyteller, and who puts characters first.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

I don't ever feel that it's necessary to say certain things. I think we can be very suggestive. I think we can allude to certain things.