Billy Wilder's work is among my favorites of cinema -- Some Like It Hot is possibly up on my Top Five list (which I've never actually made) -- and I'm charmed by this collection of interviews with him, ranging from his very early work as a writer/director to post-career. It's interesting not only for showing how he developed as an artist, and how his responses to his own work changed (his comments on, say, Marilyn Monroe or Ace in the Hole are revealing), but how writing about movies changed from the forties to the eighties.

The interviews/articles range in quality --a 1944 Life article and a 1960 Playboy interview are among the best, while the 1970 Action interview is painful to read -- and it's amusing to see what anecdotes get repeated, from story to story, and how they morph. It's also interesting watching how Wilder shapes his public face, how he becomes more practiced in saying what he wants to say, how he learns to communicate more fluently.

The last several interviews are really kind of sad -- not only does Wilder continue to insist that his next picture's gonna be the big hit he hasn't had in a while (it never was), but he also becomes more vocally bitter about the development of American cinema, away from his kind of witty, coherent storyline and toward more spectacle-style cinema. And while I don't disagree with him, that story is a really good thing to have, it became just the conservatism that old men engage in. Railing against the encroaching dark.

Reading a book like this is a really good lesson in how shallow the interview usually is. All of the repetition becomes onerous, and then almost ominous -- what's not being said? Wilder must have been more than the sum of "I would worship the ground you walked on, if you lived in a better neighborhood" and giving the audience two and two and letting them make four and "directors don't bury their dead", but he's been cagey enough that we can't see it.

I found myself thinking, a lot, about the limits of relationships while I was reading this. How well can we ever know someone else? If we were asked to define our friends, how well could we do so, and how revelatory would that definition be?

(This is a hell of a book for those of us who write RPS -- provoking some ideas that I'm pretending I never had, as well as making me think about the nature of publicity and media.)

The insights into Wilder aren't inconsiderable, either; the glimpses of him actually working as a director, and the discussions of his writing routine, are fascinating; he makes some very interesting points about the communal nature of filmmaking, and has some intriguing techniques for coping with that.

This might be more valuable for the thoughts it provokes than for the actual content. But it's charming, full of bon mots and sweet anecdotes, and is a good book to flip through, since it's in easily-digestible chunks. ( )