Book cover of Conversations with Wilder

Book description

In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.

Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection --…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Conversations with Wilder as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard… Billy Wilder is my favourite filmmaker. I like the elegance of his storytelling and his bittersweet wit. In Wilder’s final years, Cameron Crowe conducted a series of interviews with the writer-director. From fleeing Nazi Germany to his admiration for Ernest Lubitsch, from the trials of working with Marilyn Monroe or Raymond Chandler to the joys of collaborating with Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Lemmon, and Charles Laughton, from his successes to his failures and on to the secret of what makes a good writing partner, Wilder needs little…

From Kieron's list on The best books on moviemaking.

Billy Wilder was a genius filmmaker, but even if you aren’t a fan of The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, or any of his other movies, there is still so much for any artist to learn from his fabulous creative brain. This is a unique book, in which director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire) sits down to talk to Wilder – not so much about his life, as his creative process. It digs deep into the soul of a filmmaker who changed the way we all approach storytelling. I return to…

If you love Conversations with Wilder...

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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