“There is nothing clever about confusion.”
“The war was an escape to reality… The only thing that mattered were human relationships; not money, not position, not even family… Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important. It is a sort of wonderful state of mind. It’s too bad it takes a war to create such a condition among men.”
“It’s eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There’s nothing else to it.”
“If anybody doubts my loyalty to my country, I’ll punch him in the nose, and I don’t care how old he is.”
“It’s a miserable life in Hollywood. You’re up at five or six o’clock in the morning to be ready to start shooting at nine.”
“Great pictures can’t be entirely fictitious.”
“Stills belong in the lobby, not on the screen.”
“I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.”
“If we must have the Production Code, then I think the only way to use it effectively is to judge a film as a whole and determine whether its effect is good or bad.”
“Pictures that will live on for years, like ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and ‘Gone With the Wind,’ had great historical events in the background.”
“The trouble with Hollywood is that too many of the top people responsible for pictures are too comfortable and don’t give a damn about what goes up on the screen so long as it gets by at the box office. How can you expect people with that kind of attitude to make the kind of great pictures that the world will want to see?”
“If Beethoven could write his ‘Eroica Symphony’ stone deaf, then William Wyler can do a musical.”
“There’s only one prima donna in my pictures, and that’s me!”
“A director must push his actors to the utmost limit to get everything possible out of each scene – without being corny or sentimental or going overboard.”
“The slightest thing can ruin a scene, but you must be willing to take chances.”
“The good ones push their luck to the limit – like Laurence Oliver. As actor and director, he will go just as far as he can.”
“Confusion seems to have become the vogue of European directors.”
“Everything a director does must help the story and the performances. Otherwise, it is useless.”
“Look at ‘Marienbad’ honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.”
“When beautiful movie stars allow themselves to look terrible, people think they’re really acting.”
“I’m delighted that ‘The Sound of Music’ is doing so well. Of course, it’s an infallible piece of material. Even when second- and third-rate road companies were doing the play, they did enormous business.”
“It looked like ‘The Sound of Music’ would even surpass ‘Ben Hur,’ and I thought it would be unfair for me to have done both. I thought I’d leave something for somebody else. That’s a quip.”
“I’m here to make good pictures. If I don’t see it, I won’t touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!”
“I’m accused constantly of having ‘no signature.’ That’s the big artistic demerit. You can’t tell a Wyler film from another man’s film just by looking at it.”
“To me it’s more fun and more challenging, too, to do different types of pictures.”
Leave a Reply