He won an Oscar for his villain Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A feat he repeated with his far more likable King Schultz in Django Unchained. Since then, Christoph Waltz has played Bond villain Blofeld and has worked with directors such as Terry Gilliam, Wes Anderson and Tim Burton. Next, he slips into the role of a real-life movie legend. Namely, Tarantino’s best villain plays the famous film director Billy Wilder. However, it is not a conventional biopic.
Tarantino muse Christoph Waltz plays Billy Wilder: That’s well known
Christoph Waltz is set to star in the film adaptation of the novel Mr. Wilder & Me, Collider reports. The film is based on an original by Jonathan Coe, which was released in Germany under the title Mr. Wilder and I appeared (at Amazon *).
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Christoph Waltz in Spectre
Instead of a straightforward biopic, the story of a young woman in the 70s as a Interpreter on the set of the film Fedora (1978) contributes. She knows little about the elderly gentleman with an Austrian accent who is directing, so a kind of friendship develops between the unlikely duo, while Wilder revels in memories of the time before exile in the USA on his journey through Europe.
Directed by Stephen Frears, who specializes in true stories including The Queen, Philomena and The Program. The screenplay is by Oscar-winning Christopher Hampton for his adaptations of The Father and Dangerous Liaisons. A dark story of this kind awaits us in Mr. Wilder and I but probably not, at least based on the light-footed buddy story in the novel.
Christoph Waltz plays an absolute film legend with Billy Wilder
Born Samuel Wilder in Austria-Hungary, the Jew of Polish descent began his career as a journalist in Vienna. As a screenwriter, he worked on several classic German films (including People on Sunday and Emil und die Detektive) before fleeing into exile after the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler, first to France and then to the United States.
Billy Wilder in an interview with Hellmuth Karasek:
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In the States, Billy Wilder celebrated enormous success as a screenwriter and director. He directed Hollywood cinema classics such as Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment. During his career, Wilder has received 21 Oscar nominations and six awards (not counting his honorary Oscar).
Mr. Wilder and I takes place at a time when Hollywood studios are running out of money. The European-produced Fedora, itself a meta-movie about a producer trying to coax a famous actress into retirement, was to be his penultimate directorial effort. The film legend died in 2002 at the age of 95.
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