The Writer Who Directed, The Director Who Wrote: Every Frame a Painting Explores the Genius of Billy Wilder

When the acclaimed cin­e­ma video-essay chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing made its come­back this past sum­mer, its cre­ators Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos took a close look at the “sus­tained two-shot,” which cap­tures a stretch of dia­logue between two char­ac­ters with­out the inter­fer­ence of a cut. Though it’s become some­thing of a rar­i­ty under today’s shoot-every­thing-and-fig­ure-it-out-in-edit­ing ethos, it was used often in clas­sic Hol­ly­wood pic­tures. Take, for exam­ple, the work of Pol­ish-born writer-direc­tor Bil­ly Wilder, who began his film career in pre­war Ger­many, then went to Hol­ly­wood and “embarked on a series of osten­si­bly dar­ing, dis­en­chant­ed movies, against the grain of Amer­i­can cheer­ful­ness.”

So writes David Thom­son in The New Bio­graph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Film. “Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty was a thriller based on the prin­ci­ple that crime springs from human greed and deprav­i­ty; The Lost Week­end was the cinema’s most graph­ic account of alco­holism; A For­eign Affair has shots of a ruined Berlin accom­pa­nied by the tune ‘Isn’t It Roman­tic?’; Sun­set Boule­vard mocks the mad­den­ing glam­our with­in Hol­ly­wood; Ace in the Hole expos­es the unscrupu­lous­ness of the sen­sa­tion­al press; Sta­lag 17 is a pris­on­er-of-war film that under­cuts cama­raderie.” And the fine­ly honed com­e­dy of The Apart­ment or Some Like It Hot has only grown more enter­tain­ing — because rar­er — over the decades.

But was straight­for­ward com­e­dy real­ly Wilder’s forte? His pic­tures are fun­ny, but often in a high­ly par­tic­u­lar way. His “char­ac­ters do not mean what they say, and they do not say what they mean,” Zhou explains: this is ver­bal irony. But it comes along with two addi­tion­al fla­vors of irony: dra­mat­ic, which aris­es “when the audi­ence knows more infor­ma­tion than the char­ac­ters,” cre­at­ing sus­pense over whether those char­ac­ters find out the truth “and what hap­pens as a result”; and sit­u­a­tion­al, which aris­es “when a char­ac­ter makes choic­es that lead to an unex­pect­ed and yet inevitable con­clu­sion.” In his scripts, Wilder could “weave all these types of ironies togeth­er while main­tain­ing a strong emo­tion­al core.”

Even so, no great film­mak­er is mere­ly a sto­ry­teller. Despite being famous pri­mar­i­ly as a dia­logue writer, Wilder “insist­ed that his films should work as images first.” Among oth­er tech­niques, “he put the cam­era where the sub­text was, which allowed the audi­ence to fol­low the emo­tions of the scene and not just the lit­er­al mean­ing.” He also “used as few cam­era setups as pos­si­ble,” shoot­ing pages of his script with­out a cut. (Instruc­tive­ly, the video com­pares a scene from Wilder’s orig­i­nal Sab­ri­na with its hope­less­ly awk­ward equiv­a­lent in Syd­ney Pol­lack­’s 1995 remake.) Nor is it inci­den­tal to his fil­mog­ra­phy’s endurance that he embod­ied that old-fash­ioned com­bi­na­tion of respect and con­tempt for the view­er. “Let the audi­ence add up two plus two,” he once advised younger film­mak­ers, and “they’ll love you for­ev­er.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Every Frame a Paint­ing Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sus­tained Two-Shot Van­ished from Movies

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.