Product Description

The renowned director talks to Cameron Crowe about 30 years at the very heart of Hollywood. Wilder's distinct voice provides a fascinating insider's view of the film industry past and present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #799414 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 393 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Conversations with Wilder, an invaluable, photo-intensive volume, is a kind of remake of Truffaut's must-read interview book Hitchcock, with Cameron Crowe in the inquisitive Truffaut role and wily 93-year-old Billy Wilder as the crafty master director. Drawing on his experience interviewing the monsters of rock and his deep, shot-by-shot knowledge of Wilder's work, Crowe gently and cunningly coaxes answers from Wilder--arguably today's most influential living director--on what made his hits tick and his flops suck, along with glimpses of what might have been. Did you know Mae West and Mary Pickford spurned Sunset Boulevard and Wilder spurned Marilyn Monroe for Irma la Douce? That The Apartment was inspired by Brief Encounter and the look of Double Indemnity was based on M? The gossipy insights are great too. Bogart spat when he talked, so Wilder couldn't back-light him in Sabrina, and Audrey Hepburn's wardrobe woman had to towel her off after each take--discreetly! Wilder loathed Raymond Chandler (partly because Chandler disdained James M. Cain when adapting Double Indemnity) but gives him his due as a screenwriter: Chandler could do dialogue and descriptions but he couldn't construct a scene; "He was a mess but he could write a beautiful sentence", says Wilder. Agatha Christie was the opposite: "She had structure but she lacked poetry."

Some critics scoff at Crowe (who cried while directing emotional scenes in Jerry Maguire) for taking on the cynic Wilder. But they're brothers under the skin. Both leaped from popular music journalism to directing. Both incorporate actual events in their films. Wilder keenly regrets not filming this scene in The Spirit of St. Louis, which he claims really happened: the night before his historic flight, Lindbergh's handlers talked a pretty waitress into having sex with him. They claimed he was a virgin, and likely to die on his voyage. In the hero's parade upon his return, she waves at him through the ticker-tape but he doesn't see her. "Would have been a good scene", mourns Wilder. Without this book, we'd never have known about it. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com

Customer Reviews

Deeply affecting
Some have protested that Cameron Crowe's book is far too messy to be taken seriously. Be that as it may, I just re-read it and love it intensely. Mr Wilder, dead by now, and his wistful tone of voice shine through at every turn. He was probably as incurably a romanticizer as the next guy, probably not averse to a white lie or two, but the books is brimming with new insights, oozing with old-world charm, and the relationship that continues to grow between the young biographer and his 93-year old subject is deeply affecting. Wilder will be severely missed, and Crowe's brilliant book is his legacy. Warmly recommended.

Fascinating, enveloping, utterly brilliant
Buy this book! - you don't have to like Wilder or Crowe you'll be amazed about what he has to say about Marylin Monroe and Audrey Hepburn and also the fascinating relationship that develops between interviewer and interviewee, plus lots of photographs that can be studied for hours.

A tremendous book for a tremendous guy
ALMOST FAMOUS and JERRY MAGUIRE writer/director Cameron Crowe goes back to his journalist roots here, with a loving memoir to his boyhood hero Billy Wilder. Over the course of the book's 376 pages, Wilder, the man behind such classics of cinema as THE APARTMENT and DOUBLE INDEMNITY gives his thoughts on working in Hollywood over nearly fifty years, always entertaining and only shying from the truth when it's too personally painful to reveal. This book is both a fascinating insight into one of 20th Century cinema's most enduring icons, penetrating look into the functions of cinema itself, as both entertainment machine and weapon of attack on the establishment.