Conversations with Wilder is Cameron Crowe's attempt to do for Billy Wilder what Francois Truffaut did for Alfred Hitchcock in his 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut . The young French film maker and the veteran British director had sat down and gone over Hitchcock's film career in a series of interviews for a book that would become a mine of Hitchcock quotes, and probably the best known of the many books on Hitch. At the time that Conversations with Wilder was published, Billy Wilder was one of the last remaining great film directors of the Hollywood studio era. A former journalist, Wilder's film career had begun in Europe, before he moved to the US in the early 1930s to work as a screenwriter. As with some later writer-directors, it was frustration with the treatment of some of his scripts that prompted him to turn to directing himself, paving the way for other writers to do the same. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, Wilder made a string of films that have gone on to almos