By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Never bore anyone!: Schlöndorff remembers Wilder
Volker Schlöndorff has a lengthy and entertaining memoir of Billy Wilder in the LA Times. “It was Wilder’s First Commandment: Never bore anyone! Neither in front of the camera nor behind it, neither in the screening nor drawing room, not on the phone nor in a restaurant… Rather than acting out a scene himself to indicate what he was looking for, he used ironic exaggeration. It is my hope to someday achieve his seemingly carefree levity. For as different as our personalities and films may be, he has always been my role model… Comedies, he said, are like Swiss clockwork: Just as one gear wheel locks into another, each rejoinder drives the next; the straight line must be delivered clearly before the punch line, then a short pause for laughter, followed by another punch line to redouble the laughter and to keep it going. Nothing is worse than sporadic laughter — only roaring, continuous laughter brings down the house… [W]e were friends for 25 years, until his death in 2002. We often discussed films, and he was always full of stories, tricks, rules, answers. He had rules for every situation in life, in a script and on the set: how something should be done, and what should not be done under any circumstances. What shoes you should buy and where. What you should eat. What cut you should never make, and what camera angle you should never use (worm’s-eye view or from a chandelier). What an actor cannot express without looking stupid (a sudden realization). What is indecent to show (a close-up of a person who has just learned of a friend’s or relative’s death)… [H]e took me to Lubitsch’s grave to show me that his secretary really had been buried at the master’s feet — “in case he needs to dictate something to her.” Of three hours of Schlöndorff’s assembled footage of Wilder’s lessons in life and film, the Berliner retorted: “”What this shows us is that you should never give an interview on a swivel chair. Also, you shouldn’t talk so much with your hands if you have a mouth. And above all never use a back-scratcher during an interview! It just does not look dignified.” [It’s a long piece, worth reading in full.]