Episode 7
Over dinner, Billy Wilder recounts the time when he made a film about German death camps. He tells it in the form of a screen play.
In 1945, Billy Wilder made a film called "Death Mills" about the Holocaust. In it he showed βan entire field, a whole landscape of corpsesβ. He went on to make "Sunset Boulevard", "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment". "Mr Wilder & Me" is ostensibly a fiction about a young woman discovering her love of film, music and young men but it is also about the way that a generation of film-makers responded to the great cataclysm of the second world war and the seriousness with which they viewed entertainment, particularly comedy, as an escape from nightmarish reality.
The protagonist, Calista is a film score composer and she tells the story of how she came to work for the legendary film director, Billy Wilder whilst he was preparing to work on one of his last films, "Fedora".
Written by Jonathan Coe
Abridged by Florence Bedell
The readers were
Jasmine Hyde (narrator and all female parts)
Paul Kemp (old and young Wilder)
Jos Vantyler - all other voices.
Produced by Clive Brill
A Brill Production for ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4.
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- Tue 7 Jun 2022 22:45ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4