Conversations with Wilder

In Conversations with Wilder Hollywoods legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work. Here in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters stills grabs and never-before-seen pictures from Wilders own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe one of todays best-known writer-directors about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood and about screenwriting and camera work set design and stars his peers and their movies the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilders inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck Gary Cooper Marilyn Monroe Jack Lemmon Tony Curtis William Holden Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka. Here are Wilders sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair Double Indemnity Sunset Boulevard Love in the Afternoon Some Like It Hot The Apartment and Ace in the Hole among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script everybodys lines never a fault never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna working as a journalist in Berlin rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit tough-minded romanticism and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilders films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.