Gift Guide: Essential Reading for Cinephiles and Aspiring Filmmakers

The autobiographies of Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray are two of the most passionate, heartbreaking and instructive books about filmmaking ever written. Ray is best known for directing James Dean's iconic performance in Rebel Without a Cause. Fuller made some of the greatest genre movies of the '50s and '60s including The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor. Both novels are compulsively readable, with enough filmmaking advice to replace an entire year of film school and enough insight into both filmmakers' lives and struggles to captivate even the most casual cinephile.

I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies combines diary entries from the great director towards the end of his life, observations from his wife Susan and transcripts of entire lectures on acting and directing from when Ray taught at Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. During this class, Ray and his students collaborated on the rarely-screened film We Can't Go Home Again. His classes are fascinating, especially the degree to which he focuses on acting with his students. During one assignment, he throws a party where they must all come in character based on assignments he gives and stay in character throughout the party.

Fuller's A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking doesn't get to filmmaking until halfway through the book. Fortunately, Fuller's early life was every bit as fascinating as his films if not more so: Between working the crime beat as a reporter in New York in his teens, traveling around the U.S. during the Great Depression and enlisting in the first infantry in World War II, Fuller came to Hollywood armed with plenty of stories. And thanks to his tabloid journalism roots, every single one of them explodes off the page in his autobiography. The filmmaking advice he repeats most often is to "Grab 'em by the balls!" Film students may be able to learn about structure and technical issues in school, but no one talks about the passion involved in the craft like Fuller.

·I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies - $26.95 @ Amazon

·A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking - $18.95 @ Amazon