Thumbing through Cameron Crowe's book length interview with Billy Wilder, and I thought I'd share some choice cuts:
BW: Double Indemnity was so grim, by the way, that Brackett [Wilder's writing partner] kind of ducked out. He says, "No, it's too grim for me." So that's how I got Chandler. Mr. Raymond Chandler, from whom I learned in the very beginning, you know, what real dialogue is. Because that's all he could write. That, and descriptions. "Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth" ... or the other one I loved: "Nothing is as empty as an empty swimming pool. But he could not construct.
He was about sixty when we worked together. He was a dilettante. He did not like the structure of a screenplay, wasn't used to it. He was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence. "There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool." That is a great line, a great one. After a while I was able to write like Chandler... I would take down what he wrote, and structure it, and we would work on it. He hated James Cain. I loved the story, but he did not care for Cain. I tried to get Cain, but he was busy making a movie. Chandler also did not care for Agatha Christie. But each had what the other lacked. Christie, she knew structure. Sometimes the plot was very high-schoolish. She had structure, but she lacked poetry....
CC: Over the years, it appears you've upgraded your estimations of Leisen and Chandler.
BW: Sure, the anger gets washed, gets watery. You know, you forget about it. That's a very good thing. That's the only thing. Sure. I cannot forgive Mr. Hitler, but I certainly can forgive Mr. Leisen or Mr. Chandler. That's a different story. [Pause.] But then... there was a lot of Hitler in Chandler.
CC: [laughs] In what way?
BW: In the way he talked behind my back. And the way he quit writing with me and then came back the same day. Because I had told him to close that window, a Venetian blind in the office, and I didn't say, "please."
CC: You had the stick too, right? The riding crop. And you said, "Shut the window."
BW: Yeah, I had the stick. I had the stick, and I had three martinis before lunch, and I called girls -- six girls. One of them took fifteen minutes for me to get off the phone... and he was just outraged. He just could not take it, because he was impotent, I guess. And he had a wife who was much older than he was, and he was in AA, Alcoholics Anonymous -- an unnecessary thing, because he got to be a drunkard again when we finished.
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CC: Let's talk about a couple of your famous "lost sequences." In Double Indemnity, why didn't you use the gas-chamber ending you'd scripted and shot with Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson?
BW: I did not need it. I knew it as I was filming the next-to-the-last scene. The story was between the two guys. I knew it, even though I had already filmed the gas-chamber scene. Here was the scene I didn't use. It was a close-up of Robinson and a close-up of MacMurray. The looks. There was a connection with his heart. The doctor was standing there listening to the heartbeat when the heartbeat stopped. I had it all, a wonderful look between the two, and then MacMurray was filled with gas. Robinson comes out, and the other witnesses are there. And he took a cigar, opened the cigar case, and struck the match. It was moving -- but the other scene, the previous scene, was moving in itself. You didn't know if it was the police siren in the background or the hospital sending the doctor. What the hell do we need to see him die for? Right? So we took out that scene in the gas chamber -- cost us about five thousand dollars, because we had to build that thing. It was an exact duplicate, and there are always two chairs there -- two chairs, in case of a double murder and they executed them together. So one chair was empty. It was a very good scene...
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CC: How did you arrive at the visual style of the movie?
BW: We had to be realistic. You had to believe the situation and the characters, or all was lost. I insisted on black-and-white, of course, and in making operettas I'd learned that sometimes one technical shot destroyed a picture. You could say that Double Indemnity was based on the principal of M, the very good picture starring Peter Lorre. I had a feeling, something in my head, M was on my mind. I tried for a very realistic picture -- a few little tricks, but not very tricky. M was the look of the picture. It was a picture that looked like a newsreel. You never realized it was staged. But like a newsreel, you look to grab a moment of truth, and exploit it.
CC: But the lighting was sometimes very dramatic. Were you influenced by the German expressionist films?
BW: No. There was some dramatic lighting, yes, but it was newsreel lighting. That was the ideal. I'm not saying that every shot was a masterpiece, but sometimes even in a newsreel you get a masterpiece shot. That was the approach. No phony setups. I had a few shots in mind between MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson, and they happened at the beginning and the end, when the two were together in that room. That was it. Everything was meant to support the realism of the story. I had worked with cameraman before and I trusted him. We used a little mezzo light in the apartment when Stanwyck comes to see MacMurray in the apartment -- this is when he makes up his mind to commit murder. That's it. ...
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The book is called "Conversations with Wilder." I would imagine it's available at the library, but if it's not and you'd like a closer look, just let me know.
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