CONVERSATIONS WITH WILDER

Hoping to do for Billy Wilder what Francois Truffaut did for the Master of Suspense in his 1967 Hitchcock, writer-director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) found himself interviewing a far less loquacious auteur. Still, his gentle persistence with the testy 93-year-old Austrian director of such classics as The Apartment, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard paid off. Though there have been several Wilder biographies in recent years, this is probably the best book about his work to date, since Crowe is able to extract so much new behind-the-scenes detail from the notoriously reticent filmmaker. True, his subject's evasiveness occasionally prompts Crowe to awkwardly switch gears or toss out silly questions. But when Wilder reminisces -- on Ernst Lubitsch (for whom he scripted Ninotchka), Marilyn Monroe (''a continuous puzzle, without any solution''), Marlene Dietrich (''Mother Teresa with better legs''), or his thwarted wish to direct Schindler's List as a memorial to his family, murdered at Auschwitz -- he reveals the humanity beneath his much-vaunted cynicism. B+