Billy Wilder

His talent and courage always went hand in hand. And with those weapons he did not hesitate to gut the society of his time. Indeed, for him it was not just a question of portraying, of showing, but almost of disinfecting society from the hypocritical customs that, like foreign bodies, threatened the lives of men. No wonder William Holden said of him that “his brain was full of razor blades”, perhaps the best definition of the caustic talent of this prodigious creator. And it is that for Wilder discretion was synonymous with pusillanimity, something as hypocritical as crossing one’s arms before the accommodative American puritanism. And Wilder was not a hypocrite, if perhaps a little cynical, yes, but a cynic who was always ten meters ahead of you.

Samuel Wilder, his real name, was born on June 22, 1906 in Sucha, a small town in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Poland) and his first intention was to become a lawyer. In time he realized that writing was his thing, so he signed up for a Viennese newspaper and went to cover news in Berlin in the 1920s. But by the end of the decade he had already collaborated as a screenwriter on a dozen films. In 1933, with the arrival of Hitler, he decided to leave Germany. A year later, already in Paris, tired of having his scripts distorted, he directs his first film, Dangerous Curves.: “One must remember, as a screenwriter, that nobody is going to read what he writes. That’s why I became a director, because nobody read my scripts”. But his Jewish genes and the advance of Nazism convince him of the need to leave Europe. Part of his family is not as lucky (his mother died in Auschwitz). Back in Hollywood, he shares a flat with his friend Peter Lorre from him and writes some unforgettable scripts, including those for Ninotchka and Bola de fuego .

And in 1942 he gets behind the camera. The night before his first American shoot, he confessed to Lubitsch, whom he always considered his teacher: “Tomorrow I’ll shoot my first movie and I’ll shit my pants.” Lubitsch replies: “I shoot my sixties movie and I shit my pants every day.” His career as a director would last until 1981 and in those forty years he would write and direct all his films, including a handful of masterpieces: Perdition (1944), Days without a Trace (1945), The Twilight of the Gods (1950), The great carnival (1951), With skirts and crazy (1959), The apartment (1961), Irma la dulce (1963),On a silver platter (1966)… His greatest critical successes were Días sin trace , a harsh recreation of the world of alcoholism, for which he won the Oscar for Best Director, and The Apartment , which won 3 Oscars, including best film and direction. When in the tragic charm of this film the communists wanted to see a harsh criticism of the Western way of life, Wilder settled the matter in his own way: “The only place where the story could not take place is in Moscow. Jack Lemmon could not leave the keys to the apartment simply because he would have to share it with three other families”. So he had a tongue, more acidic than an Alien’s blood.

Since 1981, Billy lived away from the cinema because the companies did not trust an octogenarian. And so until March 27, 2002, he passed away at his home in Beverly Hills at the age of 95. With him has gone a great creator, a fierce critic and a teacher who always managed to make his maxim come true: “I have ten commandments. the first nine say: you must not be boring”. Perhaps the key was the phrase that he always had on the table in his office: “How would Lubitsch do it?”