Billy Wilder (The Apartment) The Apartment (1960)
Billy Wilder (1906–2002) directed and co-wrote The Apartment, his fifth Best Director nomination and his second win. Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha, Austria-Hungary (now Poland), he fled Nazi Germany in 1933, reached Hollywood by way of Paris, and built a career writing and then directing some of the most durable American films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The Apartment sits between Some Like It Hot (1959) and One, Two, Three (1961) — the run of his late-career peak.
The biographical fact under everything else
Wilder's mother, stepfather, and grandmother died in the Nazi camps. He left Berlin for Paris in 1933 immediately after the Reichstag fire. He arrived in Hollywood in 1934 speaking little English and worked in genre apprenticeship — co-writing Ninotchka (1939) with Charles Brackett under Ernst Lubitsch's direction — before he began directing his own scripts in 1942.
"My mother died in Auschwitz. My grandmother died in Auschwitz. My stepfather died in Auschwitz. So you have to forgive me if I don't make sentimental films." — Billy Wilder, Conversations with Wilder (1999) by Cameron Crowe (book, not available online)
The biographical fact matters for The Apartment in a specific way: Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen), the Jewish neighbor who delivers the film's thesis statement — "Be a mensch. A human being." — is voicing a Yiddish word for moral integrity in a film made by a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. The choice of Yiddish as the language of moral instruction is not casual. See Mensch (the word's role in the film).
The films before The Apartment
By 1960 Wilder had already made:
- Double Indemnity (1944) — film noir, with Fred MacMurray as the doomed insurance salesman who plots murder for a married client
- The Lost Weekend (1945) — Best Picture and Best Director Oscars
- Sunset Boulevard (1950) — the Hollywood-on-Hollywood masterpiece
- Ace in the Hole (1951) — his most savage film, a flop on release, now canon
- Stalag 17 (1953) — POW comedy-drama
- Sabrina (1954) — Audrey Hepburn romance
- Some Like It Hot (1959) — Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag, Marilyn Monroe singing
The five films most associated with him — Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment — constitute one of the densest peaks of any American director's career. Three of them (Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) are on the AFI's Top 100; all five are on the National Film Registry.
The Wilder-Diamond partnership
Wilder's first writing partner was Charles Brackett (1936–1950, twelve films, two Oscars). After Sunset Boulevard the partnership ended bitterly. Wilder's second great collaboration began in 1957 with I.A.L. Diamond on Love in the Afternoon and lasted until Wilder's last film, Buddy Buddy (1981). Together they wrote Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Irma la Douce (1963), The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974), and Fedora (1978).
Diamond was the structural mind; Wilder was the German-trained satirist. They wrote together in the same room, line by line, with Wilder pacing and Diamond at the typewriter.
"Iz Diamond was the perfect partner for me. He had a wonderful instinct for structure, and he was a great economist of words. Two words from him were better than ten from anyone else." — Billy Wilder, The New York Times (1988)
Wilder's working method on The Apartment
Wilder wrote in shorthand on yellow legal pads and kept a small notebook of unrealized ideas. The Apartment had been in that notebook since 1945. See Production History (The Apartment) for the full origin story. Once production began, Wilder wrote with Diamond ahead of the camera but not far ahead — Shirley MacLaine famously signed onto the picture without seeing a finished script.
On set Wilder was famously precise. He shot less coverage than most directors, planning compositions in advance and refusing the studio convention of "protection" coverage that would let editors recut a sequence different ways.
"Billy didn't shoot a lot of coverage. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he shot exactly that. There was no second-guessing in the editing room because there was nothing to second-guess with." — Daniel Mandell (editor of The Apartment), American Cinema Editors (interview reprint)
The strict shooting plan is part of why The Apartment feels so tightly constructed. There are very few unmotivated cuts; every camera move and every piece of coverage is doing structural work.
What The Apartment did for his career
The 1960 wins — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay — were the high point. Wilder kept working for another twenty-one years, with diminishing commercial returns. Irma la Douce (1963) was a hit, The Fortune Cookie (1966) was an Oscar winner for Walter Matthau, but the late films (Avanti!, Fedora, Buddy Buddy) were either ignored or panned. He retired after 1981 and lived another two decades in Beverly Hills, granting occasional interviews — most importantly the long sequence with Cameron Crowe that became Conversations with Wilder (1999).
"Sometimes I look at my old films and think, how did we get away with that? The Apartment — a film about a young man who lends his bedroom to married executives. It was the right time. The censors were tired." — Billy Wilder, Cinephilia & Beyond (interview reprint)
What Wilder said the film was about
In interviews over forty years Wilder gave several versions of what The Apartment was about. The most consistent answer was small and unfashionable: it was about the corruption that creeps into a working life when a person decides to be useful at the expense of being human, and about the possibility — never guaranteed — of getting back.
"I wanted to make a movie about how easy it is to lose yourself in a corporation, in a system, and how hard it is to find yourself again." — Billy Wilder, American Film Institute (1986)
His insistence on the unsentimental ending — Fran says "Shut up and deal," not "I love you too" — was a refusal to soften the diagnosis. See "Shut up and deal" (the closing line).