En “Conversaciones con Billy Wilder” el legendario director, ya nonagenario, accedió por primera vez a hablar extensamente sobre su vida y obra. Entrevistado por Cameron Crowe, en sus páginas habla de su experiencia en el mismo corazón de Hollywood, así como sobre guiones, fotografía y escenografía, sus colegas y sus películas, y el cine de hoy. En este largo coloquio de director a director -similar al sostenido por Truffaut y el maestro del suspense en “El cine según Hitchcock”- conocemos cómo fue la colaboración de Wilder con estrellas de la talla de Audrey Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich o Charles Laughton, entre muchos otros, y nos asomamos a las curiosas y divertidas historias ocurridas entre bastidores durante el rodaje de “Perdición”, “Berlín Occidente”, “El crepúsculo de los dioses”, “El gran carnaval”, “Traidor en el infierno”, “Sabrina”, “La tentación vive arriba”, “Ariane”, “Testigo de cargo”, “Con faldas y a lo loco” o “El apartamento”.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood’s 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, the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today’s 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 Wilder’s 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 Wilder’s 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, everybody’s 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 Wilder’s films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.
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