In 1992, the Directors Guild of America began presenting yearly seminars with the directors nominated for its outstanding achievement in feature film award. Jeremy Kagan, the film and Emmy award-winning director who has moderated these events since their inception, has cherry-picked some of the most fascinating and insightful remarks from these illustrious filmmakers and shaped them into a highly informative and wildly entertaining read. This second edition of Directors Close Up contains anecdotes from 45 directors–including Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Ang Lee–that you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. Speaking to an audience of their peers seems to have allowed even some normally guarded artists to speak their minds. Seasoned pros, neophytes and just plain movie fans will all find something to inspire them in this wide-ranging love letter to filmmaking. Wisely divided into chapters which break down the process into its various stages–from “The Script” to “Postproduction: Music and Sound”–rather than by individual director, one can dip into this book anywhere and quickly get absorbed. The chapter on casting is especially revealing. Here you can read about the varied techniques directors use to get audition-phobic actors to read for them. For instance, if you’re James Cameron casting Titanic and the actor is Leonardo DiCaprio, you just lay it on the line and tell him, “You are gonna read or you are gonna go home.” Or, if you’re lucky, like Barry Levinson, who couldn’t bring himself to ask Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley to read for the part of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy, the actor will save your neck and ask politely if he can come back again and read. The section on editing is equally compelling. Having trouble letting go of scenes you love? Follow Alexander Payne’s advice: “You know, you trim a steak, you got to cut into the meat.” Storyboards, script notes and on-set shots are an added bonus to the text. Everything combines to create humanized portraits of some larger-than-life artists.

Since 1969, the American Film Institute, through its Center for Advanced Film Studies, has educated and nurtured some of the industry’s most gifted directors. (In the first class alone were Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and David Lynch.) As part of their instruction, these fledgling filmmakers have been treated to seminars with legendary directors, producers, cinematographers and writers. George Stevens, Jr., founder of the AFI and its director until 1980, has compiled a riveting assortment of excerpts from these events. Stevens’ wonderful, chatty introductions to the 32 luminaries featured here give us a succinct, insider’s take on each person, enriching the no-holds-barred Q&A’s which follow. The choice of subjects ranges from the comic (Harold Lloyd) to the sublime (Ingmar Bergman). Howard Hawks, John Huston, Geroge Cukor, William Wyler, David Lean–and other greats are represented. Frank Capra talks about nearly abandoning It Happened One Night because no actors wanted to play the lead parts. Billy Wilder confesses to feeling “suicidal” after viewing the first cut of every one of his films. Hitchcock reveals he never even looks through the camera because every creative decision is worked out before shooting begins. Interviews with a few non-directors are also included, adding another dimension to the book. Cinematographer James Wong Howe explains how he created a shot simulating the POV of a beat-up Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront–he made his camera operator walk around in a circle until he was dizzy and then turned on the camera. Writer Ray Bradbury counsels filmmakers to read poetry every night of their lives, because “poetry and motion pictures are twins,” both dealing in vivid, concise imagery. One part reminiscences, one part tricks of the trade, this book is a complete film school, a must-read for those serious about directing–and those who just want to continue their film education.

Even the most critic-averse director will find something to savor in this comprehensive anthology of intelligent, thoughtful writing on film. Phillip Lopate, the essayist, novelist, poet and film critic, has compiled a highly personal collection of essays based on the simple criterion of whether he “liked or didn’t like the way a piece of criticism was written.” Fortunately, Lopate is an editor with exceedingly good taste. Some of the best non-fiction writers of the twentieth century are represented here. Ralph Ellison writes about Hollywood’s depiction of race in such films as Birth of a Nation and Pinky. Susan Sontag gives her typically heady take on science fiction films of the 50s and 60s. H.L. Mencken bemoans the rapid-paced editing techniques that he insists are turning movies into a “maddening chaos of discrete fragments.” (One can’t help but wonder what he would make of today’s MTV-style of filmmaking.) The poet Carl Sandburg, sounding surprisingly like a teenage horror fan, rhapsodizes about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as “the craziest, wildest, shivery movie” with the “creepiest murders.” Altogether over 65 writers are included, from seminal critics like James Agee and Pauline Kael to filmmaker-critics like Paul Schrader (writing with encyclopedic knowledge about film noir) to current voices like Kenneth Turan (represented by his infamous Titanic pan, which provoked James Cameron to ask for his dismissal). Reading the essays in chronological order, as Lopate has presented them, one gets a strong sense of how much films and the world they reflect have changed and, at the same time, how much the core ideas that great films address remain timeless. Though critics can at times seem like a filmmaker’s worst enemy, it is also true, as evidenced by this collection, that they can be the medium’s biggest champions and most articulate chroniclers.