Buddy Buddy - Production

Production

L'Emmerdeur, released as A Pain in the A-- in art houses in the United States, had enjoyed moderate box office success, and MGM executives invited Billy Wilder to rewrite and direct an American adaptation. Wilder later recalled, "I hadn't been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do – write, direct. This wasn't a picture I would have chosen." Even before Wilder and his screenwriting partner I.A. L. Diamond began working on the script, the director offered the lead roles to Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, whom he previously had paired in The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page, and both men readily accepted. "I couldn't say no to Billy," Matthau said, "and I didn't want to say no to being in a Billy Wilder picture. But this wasn't a Billy Wilder picture."

Principal photography began on February 4, 1981, and from the start Wilder had problems with both the screenplay and casting. "Wilder the writer let Wilder the director down," he stated. "We had to write too fast. The script was done in three months. We always took much longer, but the wheels were rolling, and we had to go forward." Two weeks into filming, the director realized, "It didn't work to have two comics together. I needed someone serious like Clint Eastwood as the hit man instead of a comedian like Matthau."

Lemmon already had made six films with Wilder, and he sensed a change in the director's approach to filmmaking. "Billy seemed more tense. He seemed to be pushing harder, forcing it . . . It was something I couldn't put my finger on exactly. He had always been open to suggestions I had for my part . . . but this time, I didn't feel as welcome with my ideas, so I didn't say anything. Who am I to tell Billy Wilder what he should do?"

The film was a critical and commercial failure, and in later years Klaus Kinski denied being in it. "The best thing for me about Buddy Buddy was that not very many people saw it," Wilder said. "It hurts to strike out on your last picture." Anxious to bounce back from the unhappy experience, he and Diamond immediately went to work on what they hoped would be their next project. "Iz and I had so many ideas, we'd work on one for four weeks, and then we'd start another. We'd been burned; we chose wrong with Buddy Buddy, and we didn't want to make another mistake. We'd had some failures, so our confidence wasn't as good." Although the writing team continued to collaborate until Diamond's death in April 1988, none of their work reached the screen.