Neither fish nor fowl, Steven Soderbergh's Getting Away With It reads like a hybrid of the usual Faber film stock. Clearly it started its odd life as part of the Someone On Someone series, with Soderbergh intent on laying bare the career bones of his idol, Richard Lester. That's in here, meticulously transcribed sessions talking the Brit director from early days in TV, through two reputation cementing Beatle pictures (Hard Days' Night, Help!), and up to The Return of The Musketeers, the 1989 movie that claimed the life of Roy Kinnear. Lester hasn't made a film since.

And all of that, despite the relative also-ran nature of his oeuvre (The Knack, Petulia, Juggernaut), is surprisingly engrossing. If it perhaps lacks the depth one might expect of those usual Faber volumes, the subject and his interlocutor make for a sparky double act.

But it's the remainder that gives me pause to commend this to your attention. For Soderbergh, seemingly unsure of his mission (if the witty, "onanistic, self-referential game-playing" footnotes are to be believed), cuts the interview with his own diary. He tries to script a new film for Henry Selick (Toots; it was never made), doctor both Mimic and the ill-feted Nightwatch remake, and market two recently completed pictures: the lunatic, scattershot Schizopolis; and filmed Spalding Gray monologue, Gray's Anatomy.

What remains is a portrait of a highly driven, highly self-critical procrastinator. He talks to Lester, he meets with buyers, visits festivals and sits in hotel rooms "flipping frequently through the adult pay channels so as not to incur a charge, cheap pervert that I am." How much you like it will depend on how much you like Soderbergh's sometime smug but often beguilingly self-abusive nature. A bit like his films really. "I imagine Me as Not Me reading all this shit and thinking, 'This is boring shit,'" he says at one point. "The sound of my own (writing) voice makes me ill."