"People would come after I made a movie and say" "It's not the same." "It was a completely different way of thinking, which was hard to copy." "As we said then, he's not a director who's afraid that people might not understand, or afraid that " "Two and two is four, and three and one is four, and one and one and one and one is also four." "But Lubitsch said, "Two and two, end of discussion." "Let the audience add it up."" "Sometimes we worked in the office." "Sometimes we went to New York." "I always worked with him." "There wasn't a day that went by with him where he wouldn't " "We were together once or twice a week during that time." "And he'd always make chocolate out of chicken shit, so to speak." "You've often said you made your first film out of self-defense..." " Of course." " Against the screenwriters " "Against the directors!" "Against the directors!" "One thing they hated me for was when I was asked whether directors also had to be able to write." "And I said it was more important that they should be able to read." "The day before, I went to see Lubitsch." "I said, "I'm going to start work in the morning on the first scenes of my first film."" ""I'm scared shitless," I told him." "He said, "I've made 70 movies, and I'm still scared shitless."" "They say it's difficult to tell a story on stage." "But us filmmakers, we can take our camera everywhere." "Yes, no limits to locations..." "That's what they believed." "If you can place your camera everywhere, it's much more difficult, because you don't know where to set up." "We're free to make a decision, but it can be disastrous." "In the theater, you have only limited choices " "Should I do it like Eisenstein?" "Should I do it like Busby Berkeley?" " Look in from above." " Look in from above, the point of view of the electrician." "But because we can do everything, it's a lot more difficult." "My method is to work fast and try to have as few shots as possible." "Good and interesting shots, but not the kind of shots where moviegoers get outraged at some lousy shot." "When that happens, you've already lost the game." "Especially if they knew that there was a camera crew there." "The impact of the film, the power of the film are the inserts that shook the house..." " Give me some examples" " Okay." "In The Lost Weekend, the man who's afraid that without alcohol he won't make it through the night." "He's hidden a bottle, and now he's looking for it everywhere." "He can't find it and finally he plunks himself on the couch." "He looks up and..." "He didn't know the first thing about writing scripts." "He only wrote about camera movements." "''The camera slips in through the keyhole, and then sniffs the panties of the lady."" "He wanted to be cinematic, but you didn't need that." "You could take care of that yourself." "So, what should go into a script?" "Nothing, just the scene." "Day or night, so that the cameraman can prepare his setup." "He didn't know the rules" "How did you work together?" "At first, he complained about you, because you had been impolite." "No, that was halfway through the script." "Not in the beginning." "He came back, because I was getting too many calls from too many girls, and that was disruptive." "I explained the scene to him, including Act 1, Act 2 and so on." "He didn't have a sense for the big screen." "A dramatist would know." "If you've got a Mamet, they know how " "How to set up a scene." "And how dialogue is added in." "Just like in " "Just like in chess, you make a move and have to keep things going." "A big scene that the film could do without is a bad scene." "So, you made those chess moves." " What did he do?" " We cooperated on the dialogue... and defined the atmosphere." "The cameraman was John Seitz." "I asked him for an afternoon mood in that phony Spanish house in Los Feliz, and I wanted people to see the dust." "And he came up with some silvery stuff..." "That was a man with guts." "Seitz was also the cameraman on Lost Weekend, the cameraman on Five Graves to Cairo..." "It's black." "In the murder scene, all you see is the woman behind the steering wheel doing this." "And that was the murder." "Yes, that pulling back, by half an inch." "One day I went to my car, across from Paramount studios, but the car wouldn't start." "I ran back and shouted, "Hold the setup!"" "There are two kinds of movies." "One for the audience with a simple story, nicely decorated and ornate." "You can afford that, because the story is so simple." "Or a complicated story that is simply put on film." "If you put too many ornaments in there, people won't be able to follow it." "The interesting thing... was that you couldn't film through the water." "The surface distorts the image." "We tried and tried." "Impossible." "But finally we found a solution." "We put... a mirror at the bottom of the pool." "Then we filmed straight into the mirror and it worked." "Then you saw the cops and the reporters looking in." "You see Holden's body." "It's like checking into a hotel, they sign your name on a tag, with your name orJohn Doe " "John Doe for an unknown person " "And they took such a tag and tied it to his big toe." "That was one of my biggest laughs." "A preview was done in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, terrible." " Why terrible?" " Well, the same audience." "I was sitting on some stairs, and this woman with a big hat comes along." "She went to the ladies' room, but then turned around and said..." "And that was the first five minutes of the film that we'd been working on for a year." "As I said, everyone in the audience is an idiot, but taken together, they're a genius." "So, everything had been set up to scout for locations in Paris." "Then he started talking about the terrible sandwiches and the cold coffee." "He said..." "Then he thought for five seconds and said..." "A city in Kansas." "So we left, with the script and all." "We sat down in a drug store and just laughed." "At 6:00, he calls again and says..." "When I was in Paris shooting Love in the Afternoon," "I got this letter and it said " "It was from the highest boss under Balaban, very important." "I just couldn't believe my eyes when I read the letter, and he wrote that it would mean a lot of money." "But money wasn't an issue." "He wrote this to a man who lost his mother and stepfather at Auschwitz, and now he comes along and wants to portray the Polish as the villains." "I sent a copy of the letter to Balaban and demanded an apology." "He had a contract for another three films with Paramount, and ifhe didn't apologize, I wouldn't make the movie." "My letter was very angry." "But nothing happened." "Nobody apologized, I packed my things and left." "The general and all the others were sitting with us, and I said that we had to show this film to as many Germans as possible, because I had a feeling they'd spread lies and say," ""They're all fascists." "The movie was made in Hollywood by thejews." "They put makeup on these people to make it look like they're suffering."" "I tell you, they were all bones." "For real." "I said we'd preview it, in Würzburg, I think." "So we did a preview Hollywood style." "And people were watching some operetta film, and we told them, "Please, sit down and watch this."" "When the film was over... there were only 75 of 500 left." "No one had filled out any of the cards, and every single pencil had been stolen." "That was a problem." "I said, "Let me think this over." Then I had an idea:" "The ration card, which allowed them to get bread would have to be stamped after the showing, otherwise they wouldn't get any bread." "During World War I, I was a little boy in Vienna, but on the wrong side." "This time, I was on the right team." "The Americans had never waged war on their own soil." "There had never been planes throwing bombs at them." "There were some submarines in the Atlantic, which they captured, and one submarine from Japan, but otherwise " "We had fully prepared ourselves for that." "We had read a lot, and people told us about the blackouts and ambulances." "They also had a training drill." "It was like the Keystone Cops." "It was an exercise to prepare for a bombing event." "We had to save people." "The ambulance came and we had to get people." " That was at the studio?" " No, in the streets of Bel Air." "So, we had put people on stretchers, and we'd shove them into the ambulance." "Since we weren't very strong, we chose a woman." "And indeed we picked the shortest woman." "That was Hitchcock's wife." "We put her on the stretcher and into the ambulance." "And the ambulance sped off." "But we forgot to close the door, and she fell out." "Then there was a blackout guardian..." "A blackout guardian." "And Walter Reisch and Lubitsch were there too." "They patrolled the streets to see that all the lights were off." "And then they'd shout..." "With a German accent!" "And did you say that if the documentary material doesn't work and can't be applied one-to-one, you'd hold up a mirror to the Germans in a different way?" "You're an entertainer, but also a moralist." "You can't deny that." "In A Foreign Affair, you show it to the Germans in a different way." "If I'd had concentration camps and corpses, it wouldn't have " "I think you liked this counterpoint, yeah?" "When you started writing, you already had Marlene Dietrich in mind." "Berlin 1945 and Dietrich were the perfect fit." "Yes, Dietrich and Hollander's songs." "She'd returned from the front." "She had spent more time at the front than me." "Even more than Eisenhower." "She had made many films with Sternberg and others, and she was an expert in lighting." "She knew how she had to position her face to look good." "She learned that from "Strindberg" - Strindberg?" " That's an interesting slip." " Yeah, quite the slip." "Yes, a bit." "Anyway, he taught her that." "It's a bit odd when an actress says..." "It's too bright or too dark." "That's the main " "And that's a little " "You have to be careful." " A co-combatant." " Yes." "I try to call her up whenever I am in Paris." "But I think, she disguises her voice, a Czech cook or a French maid." "And she says..." "And she exaggerates it so much that you know, of course, right?" "Yes." "Come on." "I said, ''Marlene, I'll come upstairs." "I just want to be close to you..." "I'll call you Monday morning. "" "Then, she calls Sunday night and says she has to cancel... and see an eye specialist." "So, I suggest Tuesday, and she says," ""But you said you'd leave on Tuesday."" "I tell her I can rearrange my schedule, but she replies," ""No, no, your plan was to leave Tuesday, so leave on Tuesday."" "I had problems with the script for Sabrina..." "I wrote at night," " and during the day, I shot " " What you'd written before." "One day, when I was supposed to do four or five pages " "It was on a Friday, so I had Saturday and Sunday to get even." "But on this Friday, I only managed a page and a half." "Nobody knew about this." "Except for Audrey Hepburn." "Why did she " "I told her." "I said I couldn't go too fast, because that's all I had." "It's strange." "She said..." "So I shot the scene from this angle, and then from another." "I stretched it out." "To help me, she'd sometimes deliver a wrong line." "So, what Monroe did on her own, she did to help you out." "We wrapped things up at 5:00, and she said to me and my assistant director..." "She really helped me." "That was sexual." "It's nice to put on ice-cold undies." "In short, we had a few temperature-related jokes." "Today's films show two naked bodies and you wonder is it a bosom or a knee?" "You can't tell them apart, they form a pretzel." "And you can't imitate that." "Once I told her, when she showed up late" " In New York?" " No, here at the studio." "But she'd been under contract for six years!" " She was serious about this?" " Yes, she was." "I suggested we might send a driver to pick her up in the future." "When you know that someone is unreliable and doesn't get her lines right, you can prepare for that." "But she was" "She would always come up with different things." "Sometimes she knew the lines for eight pages of script." "At other times, she had a mental block." "Sometimes she was too early." "In Some Like It Hot, we had a scene on a beach, and she had complicated dialogue with Tony Curtis, who pretends he's a member of the Shell family, oil and stuff, you know?" "A page and a half to two pages of dialogue." "We shot the scene outside." "There was a Navy" "There was a Navy station there, and jets were flying back and forth every 10 minutes." "I figured we'd take four days in between the flights." "Waiting for the flights to stop before filming." "But the second time we shot it, everything was okay." "The entire dialogue of two pages, no letter, no comma left out." "Everything was perfect." "It took us 18 minutes, and not three days." "But there were other scenes where she had only one sentence... and we ended up shooting it 80 times." "She turned it around." "After shooting it 30 times... with a thumbtack." "Next take." "Look here." "It's written here." "She says, "I don't want to read it." "I might forget my other lines."" "I said, "You only have one sentence."" "We put her lines in each drawer, 83 times." "And after 60 takes, I said to her..." "What's the problem?" "60 times." "Not brave enough?" "No, it's not my style." "If I deal too much with one actor," "I might ignore others." "And like my work with the ladies..." "Everything was known, and we knew each other..." "A film where the whole story is fully resolved doesn't exist." "It's impossible." "But you need to give the audience a sense of direction," ""He will try to stay away from alcohol, and that thing with the congresswoman and the officer" "They'll try to find happiness." "When I hire or work with actors who've worked with me before," "I tell them, "It's not the 10 Commandments."" "But please tell me before we start shooting." "Don't show up at the set and say," ""I can't do this scene."" "Tell me two days before, so we can set it up for you." "Time is money, after all, when you're on the set." "It's too late." "I started many films without knowing the third act." "We knew what we wanted it to be, but it was a miscalculation, because when you start a script, you have to hire the crew, book the soundstage, design the sets." "And then it was time to start, but the script wasn't finished yet." "We didn't stop everything." "We just started shooting and it was better for us, because we got a better feel for the characters." "But you always systematically shot the scenes in their proper order." "Yes, sometimes, though, it was tricky too." "When we had to shoot the end first, but we still had... 30 pages that hadn't been written." "Jack Lemmon is the kind of man, you could ask me about him in every film and my answer would always be the same." "He is a complete and professional purist." "There is no other actor who takes his job more seriously." "Shirley MacLaine asked my wife, Audrey," "''Do you think it'll be a good film?"" "She said, "He's trying hard, but you just never know."" ""Yeah, yeah."" "She was " " She was suspicious?" " Yes." "But let me ask you this." "You were at the height of your success then, right?" "Right after Some Like It Hot..." "The height of my success is always the next film." " The Apartment?" " No, always the next one." "If the last one was good?" "All I can say is, I'll do better." "But you had an excellent reputation after Some Like It Hot." "Excellent?" "I don't know." "Good, perhaps." "But she was still suspicious." "Yes, she knew me." "It's easy to say a film is good or bad, but it's difficult to know when you're reading the script." "Gloria Swanson was told that we wanted to do an audition first." "To tell an actress ofher standing that she had to audition first, that was a bit much." " Did she agree?" " She agreed to it immediately." "You know, the style of acting, women of the same age today, they would act it differently." "It was silent film acting " "And more expressive, because they had to act out the words." "And that was great about her." "She had a period way of acting." "Her style was 1920s." "You can't learn that." "You must grow up with it." "It wasn't modern." "But it was a bit risky, because when you take it to the high point, you can fall off the other side." "Yes, you're always bordering on the ridiculous." "Like a beautiful woman bordering on being ugly." "Did Gloria Swanson show any signs of"falling off"?" "No, she knew her stuff." "I had to control a little, but " "You see, it's easier to tell someone to tone it down than to tell them to do more." "Yes, toning it down is easier than doing more." "There's substance, and it could blow up, so you have to control it." "Nobody knows why that man was so charismatic." "He was hard to work with, because during love scenes, he'd spit a bit when he spoke." "You had to adjust the camera accordingly." "Not facing the light." "It looked as if it were raining from his mouth." "You see that in the theater." "The two of us got off on the wrong foot at first." "But then I discovered the real Bogart." "Is it true that he would mock your accent during shooting?" "Everybody does that." "You have to knee him in the nuts with both knees." "You create a story as realistic as possible, so that people find it believable." "You tell them something they can take home with them." "The kind of film, as we hope, that people see and then go to a drug store to talk about it for half an hour." "If you pull that off, it's great."