Storytelling tip from Billy Wilder

25 August 2007 | Culture, Internet, Media, TV & Movies | Comments

A while ago, I wrote about how NOT spelling things out for your audience, making them to some of the work to connect narrative dots, can more powerfully bond them to your ideas than if you lay it all out for them. It was a fairly long post in which I talked about memes, Keats on Shakespeare’s “negative capability” and the like.

Then, today, rummaging through my notes, I found this quotation from the late director Billy Wilder that says it more succinctly: “Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.” Wilder attributed it to another director, Ernst Lubitsch.

This came in a list that NRP excerpted from Cameron Crowe’s “Conversations with Wilder” a little over a year ago. The list is worth sharing in its entirety:

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then— that’s it. Don’t hang around.