Hat es Spass gemacht, Mr. Wilder?

When asked about the three most important rules of filmmaking, Billy Wilder famously replied: "You must not bore, you must not bore, you must not bore." And he adheres to this even at 93 years old in conversation with director Cameron Crowe. No one is safe from Wilder's biting humor, whether it's Marlene Dietrich, "Mother Teresa with prettier legs," Erich von Stroheim, who is rumored to have a fondness for lingerie, or Marilyn Monroe, "an endless puzzle with no solution." Cameron Crowe is a demanding conversational partner, repeatedly drawing enlightening confessions from Wilder about his preference for black and white or his sense of production design, for example. Wilder reminisces about his youth in Vienna, his time as a journalist in Berlin, and his emigration to the USA, where he initially shared a tiny hotel room and canned soups with a certain Peter Lorre – after all, at the Chateau Marmont.