For solo and collaborative efforts as director and scenarist, Billy Wilder has been nominated 24 times for Academy Awards, amassing nine Oscars during 28 years in the movie capital. Recently Playboy interviewed him in his suite of offices on the Goldwyn lot in downtown Hollywood, where he and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond - having just completed Irma La Douce - were brainstorming over the script for his next picture. They would be working and reworking it right up to the final day of shooting, for Wilder has conceded that although he always knows where he's going with his plots, he's never quite sure how he's going to get there. Between intermittent sips of a vodka martini, he answered our questions with a rapid-fire delivery reminiscent of the brisk dialog from one of his own films. He strode restlessly up and down as he spoke, slapping his thigh occasionally with an ornately carved walking stick, his colloquial English enunciated in the guttural accents which still bespeak his beginnings as a struggling screenwriter in Berlin between the wars. Much of Wilder's work - from such eminently unfunny films as The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard to such comedic tours de force as Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two, Three - has been touched by a cynicism which reflects the mood of that worldly city during the Twenties. We began with an exploration of these early years and influences.

Playboy: Are you conscious of any kinship in your films or your philosophy, as several critics have suggested, with the savage satire of Bertolt Brecht, or with the intellectual cynicism he articulated for his generation?

Billy Wilder: I knew him in Germany, and I knew him when he lived for a time here in Hollywood, and I regard him with Mr. Shaw - George Bernard, not Irwin -- as one of the monumental dramatists of this first half-century, but I was never aware that he influenced me. Brecht was dealing with enormous subjects of the hungry, exploited masses which neither my brain nor my attention-span can cope with. His was a much vaster canvas than mine. After all, was Mickey Spillane influenced by Tolstoy? That's Leo Nikolaevich, not Irwin. If there was any influence on me in those days, it must have come more from American books and plays I read. One of the most popular writers was Upton Sinclair. I read him, and Sinclair Lewis, Bret Harte, Mark Twain. I was also influenced by Erich von Stroheim and by Ernst Lubitsch, with whom I first worked on Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. But I don't believe I have been influenced by the cynicism of the times or even shown any of it on the screen. When they say that I have, they could be referring to, say, Double Indemnity, but this was done from a short story by James M. Cain, an American. It is not sugar-coated, my work, but I certainly don't sit down and say, "Now I am going to make a vicious, unsentimental picture."

Playboy: As a native-born Viennese, you were already living in one of Europe's principal artistic and cultural capitals. What made you leave it to go to Berlin?

Wilder: Simple. After one year at the University in Vienna, I became a space-rates reporter. Paul Whiteman played a concert in town, liked my review, and took me along to Berlin with him. There I danced as a gigolo for a while in the Eden Hotel, and at the Adlon I served as a teatime partner for lonely old ladies.

Playboy: How did you make the transition from dance floor to sound stage?

Wilder: Well, before long I got another reporting job, I was already trying to break into film writing, but having as much luck as the New York Mets. During this time I was living in a rooming house where there was a daughter who was engaged but also playing around a little on the side. One night her fiancè came pounding at the front door. I was in bed - my own bed - asleep, and before I knew what was going on, she had pushed this scared old man with his shoes in his hand into my room while she went to answer the front door and admit Helmut or Irwin or whatever his name was. I recognized the old man immediately as the head of the company called Maxim Films. He looked at me sheepishly and said, "Have you got a shoehorn?" I said, "I have a shoehorn, but I also have this script I would like you to read." "Yes, yes, send it along to the office," he said. "No. Now," I said, so he sat down and read it, and he gave me 500 marks for it on the spot, and I gave him my shoehorn. After a while Helmut went away and he was able to sneak out, and that was how my film career began. Soon I was up to my ears in movies. I must have written 50 silent pictures: Sometimes I did two a month. One, People on Sunday, directed by Robert Siodmak, is still shown in places where they call movies "the cinema."

Playboy: This was about the time when Hitler began his rise to power. Did political events have any effect on your career?

Wilder: They ended it. I was having my dinner in the Kempinski Hotel the day after the Reichstag fire. I knew I had to get out. The Nazis were getting too warm. I rolled up the paintings I was collecting, packed a small bag and got on the train to Paris. A year later I came to the United States. I've been here ever since and eventually found my way to Hollywood.

Playboy: Your long-time collaborator, Charles Brackett, once said your work was characterized by "an exuberant vulgarity." What is your own appraisal?