After I finished film school, I got work as a cameraman in Berlin. I was fortunate to be the assistant to Eugene Schüfftan, one of the best German cameramen during the golden age of German cinema in the 1920s. One of the films that Schüfftan photographed was Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a semidocumentary made in 1929 about four young people spending a weekend in the country. The film was written by Billy Wilder and directed by Robert Siodmak.
I only carried the camera around and measured the focus, but I was pleased to be working with talented people like Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak. The picture was made on a shoestring, and we had to stop every two or three days to raise more money. It was a smash hit, and Billy, Robert, and I all eventually migrated to Hollywood and became directors there.
My career in Hollywood in some ways ran parallel to Billy’s. For example, each of us made a picture in the ruins of Berlin after World War II, in 1948. I directed The Search, about displaced European children, and Billy directed A Foreign Affair, about the Allied occupation of Berlin. Both pictures were successful at the box office.
The cold war years, a period of uncertainty in the aftermath of World War II, spawned Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for Communists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In 1950 Cecil B. De Mille, who was very right wing, persuaded the board of the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) to require a loyalty oath of the membership. Joseph Mankiewicz, the president of the SDG, opposed De Mille’s resolution. Billy Wilder and I, among others, signed a petition supporting Mankiewicz.
The De Mille faction sent out messengers on motorcycles late at night with a letter to each of us who supported Mankiewicz’s stand. There weren’t any direct threats in the letter, but there were heavy hints that our careers were on the line if we didn’t endorse De Mille’s resolution.
At the general meeting of the SDG membership, the crunch came when De Mille read our petition to reject his demand for a loyalty oath. De Mille said it was signed by “Mr. Vilder and Mr. Zinnemannnnn,” indicating that we were foreigners and that our petition was un-American. With that, the membership booed De Mille. John Ford got up and said, “Cecil, you’re a good picture maker, but I don’t like what you stand for.” Then Ford moved that De Mille’s motion for a compulsory loyalty oath be rejected, and it was.
Billy and I seemed to have kept pace with each other throughout our careers. We both won Academy Awards for directing features—two apiece. Billy won for The Lost Weekend and for The Apartment; I won for From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.
Although Billy and I began our careers in Germany, we have always thought of ourselves as Hollywood directors—not just because we worked in the American film industry for so many years but because we both believed in making films that would entertain a mass audience. Neither of us wanted to make pictures that were aimed at an elite—intellectual or otherwise. We always believed that motion pictures were a popular art, meant to entertain the public at large. And that is the kind of movie that we made.