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I think that's what we were both hoping for. Between the Q and A and the journal, I just thought it was perhaps relevant to somebody to portray the process of what it's like to be a person who happens to do this for a living as opposed to a portrait of a filmmaker. It was hard. I was working while I was doing it and it was a massive editing job. I had 35 hours of interviews with him, and the journal I had was probably five times the length of what you read.

And then you have all these self-deprecating footnotes, which touch on comic battles with your editors at Faber and Faber. You have a jokey "Note From Your Publisher" and two mock author's notes, including an outline for an introduction that will contain an "Awesome display of ego disguised as humility; joke about same." Even the title and the cover design make your book feel as irreverent as a Lester movie.

The footnote idea came late because I felt something was missing; one more deconstructed element was needed. So in the last two weeks just before I turned it in, I came up with the idea of a fictional person at Faber who hates me. The copy editors at Faber got a huge kick out of the "inside" view of how the company works.

I mean, I love all the director books they do, "So-and-so on so-and-so"; I've got all of them. But I thought, We've got to tart this up a bit. We've got to put on some bells and whistles, so if somebody picks it up off the shelf they'll feel they have to buy it.

A lot of younger directors, as different as Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting") and Stacy Cochran ("My New Gun") and Michael Patrick Jann ("Drop Dead Gorgeous"), have taken inspiration from Lester's movies.

And I know in some cases they are taking the right things from his work -- not just the visual dexterity of, Oh, if I shoot a lot of images and do a lot of cutting, it will be just like a Richard Lester movie. There's a lot more thought behind it than that. We would all do well to look behind the surface at some of the ideas he's trying to put across, because he's an intelligent guy and he expressed a point of view -- especially, in his peak years, about society at large.

I think he has a genuine interest and appreciation for people who do not have power. And I think that's getting lost a lot these days. I was talking to a buddy of mine who went into a meeting with some executives and they were describing a lead character in a project they wanted to do. "He's one of these guys, he really has the town wired; he knows everyone and he's doing all these things." We were just sitting there going, "Who is that? We don't know anybody like that. And who, of the people who would go see this movie, knows anyone like that?" The idea that you can make a movie about an ordinary person is almost gone.

Usually, when you talk about a director of ideas, you think of someone cerebral or self-conscious. But Lester at his best is downright blithe about getting his ideas to the screen.

That's the other thing that I took from him, which has helped me enormously in the last few films, including the one I'm finishing now ("Erin Brockovich"). How should I describe it? Tossing things off, instead of being labored about what you do. I'm serious about what I do, but I think there's a real benefit to not being precious and working quickly and going strictly on instinct. It's something I lost and I absolutely got back from him.

Because "Out of Sight" and "The Limey" have such stylistic confidence, it's odd to think of them as in any way "tossed-off." What you call relying on instinct must also mean relying on whatever craftsmanlike reflexes you've built up.

I had the luxury of making a first film that was successful enough to afford me a lot of mistakes. The good news was I took advantage of them. By the time "Out of Sight" rolled around I felt pretty light on my feet and secure in my ability to work in a way that was expedient but detailed. That was my seventh film -- if I was paying attention at all I should have been able to do that!

But as we both know, a lot of people aren't paying attention. Directing has become the best entry-level job in show business. You have to keep your eye on the long term -- which is why I understand what Charlie Kaufman is doing. I try to be careful about things I do and not promote myself separately apart from a film I'm talking about. I've never taken a possessory credit, because anything that furthers the idea of you as a brand name is risky -- because people get tired of certain brands.

Lester is frank about decisions he made that have sometimes been called forced and inorganic. For example, he admits that he conceived the elaborate structure of "Petulia" because he was afraid that if he didn't it might have come off as "a romantic novelette."

In point of fact, does it matter that Lester and the writers who worked on "Petulia" sort of deconstructed it because otherwise it would be a terrible melodrama? No. The bottom line is, that's a great film, no matter how you cut it. Everything is working against it being a terrible melodrama, from the way it's cast to the way the performances are pitched on the set to the way it's composed and cut. That's why it works -- it's because he's cutting against the grain of what's inherent in that material. Sometimes that's a mistake, but in that case it certainly isn't.

Talking with Richard Lester reminded me of how rigorous you have to be; conceptually, you have to sit down and make sure you're wringing everything out of the material that you should be wringing out of it. What frustrated me about "The Underneath" was that I felt I wasn't rigorous with it. On the one hand, maybe there should be an international cultural police force -- so when someone like me says, "I want to splice an armored-car heist movie together with Antonioni's 'Red Desert,'" they come and stop you. But on the other hand, if you make a revisionist nonlinear noir movie, there are more places to go with it than I did in "The Underneath." I was not at a time in my career when I understood that; and I was just feeling sort of dry.

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