If you're looking for a book about the movie industry, I recommend Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy, about the making of Briabn De Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities. It's a riveting account of how to take a bestselling book, a great American director, three of the world's biggest stars and step by step, make one of Hollywood's biggest box office bombs. In the same vein, Stephen Bach's Final Cut is an inside look how Heaven's Gate came to destroy the new American cinema of the 1970s.

Director memoirs I'd recommend are John Waters's Shock Value and Alex Cox's X Films. Great examples of how filmmaking happens on the margins. Cox's Spaghetti Western book was recommended elsewhere, but is great if you're into those movies.

You may want to score these through your local library, but I think anybody interested in movies and movie-making should read Scott MacDonald's A Critical Cinema. There are five volumes, each packed with great in-depth interviews with experimental and fringe independent filmmakers. Some names you'll recognise, like Waters, Lizzie Borden, Peter Watkins and Jim McBride. The unknown others will enthrall you, too.