the ersatz vegetarian

There’s a very big relationship to it, and anybody who can make a comparison to it, it’s one of the most flattering things that you could ever say. There’s a movie that nobody wanted to make, that people thought was kind of crass and crude. I did not see it until I was in film school. I had seen some Billy Wilder movies as being a part of the culture, but I didn’t know whose they were or whatever. But what I love about that movie is that there is this image that sort of got metabolized of the ‘50s in particular and the high ‘60s and that period basically between Woodstock and, let’s say, Eisenhower.”

“It’s a pretty great movie, and one of the great things about the movie, too, is that there’s so much entertainment in it. There’s an hour and 20 minutes in that movie when all that’s happening is catching the audience up with what’s already happened. You literally come into a situation and you are learning for an hour and 20 minutes that this guy has an apartment, that his boss is using him, that everyone is having sex in this apartment, that he does it all the time. There’s no forward movement in the story, except for the audience finding out what this guy’s life is like. Just narratively it’s fascinating, and then there’s all the planting and payoff.”

“Billy Wilder wrote it with I. L. Diamond – this is like one of the great writing teams of all time, and just the cinema in it, the stuff that’s done…I’d like to claim a relationship to ‘Mad Men’ for that, too. Spoiler alert: Things like the champagne cork going off and you think it’s a suicide. The tennis racket. The compact with the crack in it. The restaurant with the drinks in it. How things are shaping up ‘cookie-wise.’ That’s a contemporary movie. People were seeing people that they knew. It was done in a very sort of classic kind of way. It’s masterful storytelling.