Professor David Peimer
Some Like It Hot: The Genius of Billy Wilder
Summary
A master of comedy, Austrian-born film director, screenwriter, and producer Billy Wilder (1906–2002) was known for his sharp dialogue and ability to find humor in even the bleakest of situations. Some of his most famous films include Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960).
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s a great question. Yeah, I do. I think the absurdity shows up this irony. You know, when you see irony and double meanings, you can’t trust is the meaning this or is the meaning that and therefore it feels absurd. So there’s constant double, triple meaning in any situation. You see it from the mafia’s point of view, you see it from the Lemmon, from the Curtis, from the Monroe character, all of their points of view. And that’s part of the jigsaw that Billy Wilder creates. And in that way we get a sense of the absurdity of anything. Because one person will look at a tree and see green leaves, another one a brown branch, another one may be a root, another one the wind rustling in the leaves. And he creates all these perceptions of the same reality, put it all together and it’s a feeling of the absurd, not only funny.
I think that’s a fantastic point, a really good point. I think it is because if one takes his own personal life story, unrequited love and the sense of incredible loss and you know, different ways of dealing with it. And I think one of the ways he does it is through unrequited love in the classic love triangle. He does it in “Sabrina.” He does it here and in you know the other movies. I think it’s transferred perhaps not necessarily from his own life but immediately in terms of love, but the loss of his own family in the Holocaust. It’s hard to deal with loss and grief.
That’s a great point. He does say that he would often write with actors in mind. And he wrote with Marilyn Monroe in mind and he wrote with Jack Lemmon in mind and later with Walter Matthau, et cetera. He tried to write as often as he could with certain actors in mind because of what he said in the beginning. You know, no actor can do everything, no writer can do everything, no director can do everything. So obviously you know, when you’re writing you have certain actors and persona in mind of what you feel you can play to their strengths. And I think that’s an intelligent director and writer working and that goes way back in the old days, Orson used to write for certain actors. So I think it may be seen as old school today, but it’s effective and often successful I think because again, you’re playing to the strengths and so you can help the areas of limitation.