Interview/Auteurs

I have seen a number of Billy Wilder's films and some of them rank among my favorites. It's interesting to read about this man that made so many excellent films in such a short period of time. His stretch of films that he directed and has a writing credit in from 1944-1963 rivals any filmmaker's catalog. It's funny because, like John Ford as mentioned in class, Wilder seems to downplay his contribution to film as an artform and his methods and artistic intentions as well. We can sort of see past that as apparently he gave Peter Sellers and Walter Matthau heart attacks and had many of his own anxieties about filmmaking. He was clearly a man who cared not only about his job but also his art and craft. His economy of filmmaking is pretty impressive too. It seems he had no trouble getting sufficient footage to make his films in a limited number of takes. It also seems like there was not a lot of planning ahead, just simply doing things at the time because they felt right, made sense, and needed to be done. Billy Wilder was able to make films that are very important to cinema history by just trying to make things simple for himself and others. Apparently it may have been stressful along the way but Wilder just seemed to make stuff happen as he saw fit without overthinking it. If I were a filmmaker, I think I would want to do it that way, with fewer heart attacks.

I always thought the auteur theory was like the concept of film genre in that there's no strict set of rules or a complete guideline for classifying or determining auteurs but it's more of an idea you can play with for your own understanding of a filmmaker's work. Like the Western genre, you can identify it in a number of ways and there comes a point where a movie is either a Western or it is not. What that point is, however, is unclear. Yet, for the viewer or the critic, the answer will usually feel obvious. We know what a John Ford movie is. We know what a Western is. We know that a John Ford movie is a John Ford movie because he created it, designed, executed it, and put his stamp on it. When John Ford is making a Western, it feels like a John Ford Western. No one else makes John Ford Westerns because only Ford can do so.