Billy Wilder

There is no such thing as somebody sitting down and saying, “Now, all right, I’m going to make a new picture.” Not at all. You have ideas stashed away, dozens of them — good, bad, or indifferent. Then you pull them out of your memory, out of your drawer, you combine them…. People think when it comes to a screenplay you start with absolutely nothing. But the trouble is that you have a million ideas and you have to condense them into a thousand ideas, and you have to condense those into three hundred ideas to get it under one hat, as it were. In other words, you start with too much, not with nothing, and it can go in every kind of direction. Every possible avenue is open. They you have to dramatize it — it is as simple as that — by omitting, by simplifying, by finding a clean theme that leads someplace.

BILLY WILDER