What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the double standards in how critics assess art from different cultures.
Billy Wilder's quote exposes the hypocrisy in the way critics label and judge artworks based on cultural biases. What is deemed inappropriate or 'dirty' in one context may be celebrated or viewed as passionate and expressive in another, particularly when it comes to foreign films versus domestic ones. This reflects larger societal attitudes toward sexuality, art, and the subjective nature of criticism.
In practice
In a film studies class while discussing cultural differences in film reception.
Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.
He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.
It's much more important to write than to be written about.
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
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