When he was in his 70s, he decided to produce a film about how an elderly screen siren, Fedora, is enticed out of retirement, he was rebuffed by the same studios that had previously adored her.
The narrative of the tumultuous filming of Fedora in 1978 was chronicled in a novel by Jonathan Coe in 2020, which the Observer called “a novel to treasure.”
Mr Wilder & Me is now being adapted into a film by a multi-award-winning screenplay, director, and producer. Wilder’s travel to central Europe, where members of his family perished in the Holocaust, will also be explored. Oscar winner Christoph Waltz will play Wilder, who, like the famous Hollywood filmmaker, was born in Central Europe before starring in recent Bond flicks.
Marthe Keller portrayed Fedora in the original film, and William Holden, who had previously been in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, was the leading man. Calista, a fictional translator/assistant recruited by Wilder to assist with the film’s European shoot, is used by Coe, whose earlier works include the Costa Book Prize winner Middle England and What a Carve Up!
Wilder, who was born in 1906 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was one of many great cinema directors and executives who migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s. His mother, grandparents, and stepfather remained in the country and perished in extermination camps.
Like the Coe book, the new film will depict how Wilder’s trip to Central Europe in the late 1970s for Fedora led him on a voyage into the depths of his own family history. It was also ironic that Wilder, who had been turned down by Hollywood for Fedora, had to rely on German money to complete his film.
By the late 1970s, Wilder had fallen out of favor with both viewers and Hollywood. “I’d always thought it’d be a moving subject for a book,” Coe adds.
Fedora was not a critical or box office hit, which was disappointing. Even if viewed through the prism of his dying cinematic career, the Mr Wilder & Me film will at the very least remind people what an immensely gifted guy Wilder was.
