I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with TCM’s “Great Directors” theme this month. A new vanguard every day for 30 days. My DVR is getting a workout.
Anyway, if I could spend a few hours with any director, alive or dead, it would have to be the affable, wily Billy Wilder. I love his philosophy on filmmaking, his attitude through the years, his no nonsense artistry, etc. If I had made it to Los Angeles prior to his death in 2002, I’m sure I’d have stalked his Brighton Way office in Beverly Hills like a moth to the flame, Bela Lugosi to my impressionable Ed Wood.
I bring this up because I caught up with Volker Schlondorff’s “Billy Wilder Speaks” this morning, which ran on TCM Saturday amid a retrospective of the director’s greatest hits — “Double Indemnity,” “Stalag 17,” “The Apartment,” etc. It’s a fascinating look at Wilder’s career through his own eyes, the old codger spinning anecdote after anecdote.