EYE ON THE WORLD: Conversations With International Filmmakers.<i> By Judy Stone</i> . <i> Silman-James Press: 826 pp., $35</i>

Judy Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle’s highly respected film reviewer-interviewer (now retired from daily reviewing), has led as lively a life as many of the filmmakers we encounter in her “Eye on the World: Conversations With International Filmmakers,” and that’s what makes her book so rewarding. By the time Stone turned her attention to films and their makers in the 1960s, she had a solid reputation as an investigative reporter unafraid of controversy; it’s not for nothing that she is the 17-years-younger sister of the late I.F. Stone.

With an easy, unpretentious style and sure sense of humor, Stone grabs your attention with her first sentence, describes a filmmaker’s art succinctly and then proceeds to uncover the forces that shaped him or her. Leave it to Stone to look beyond the suave, elegant image of Spain’s late Fernando Rey and discover a still-anguished Loyalist. She provides succinct overviews of such major figures as Brazil’s late Glauber Rocha, founder of his country’s New Cinema, and introduces us to a filmmaker from Mali.

Stone’s book contains more than 200 interviews with filmmakers from 40 countries, and it’s the kind of book that invites random sampling. Quite a few of the interviewees are world-famous, like Akira Kurosawa, and often interviewed, but Stone digs deeper than most of her colleagues.

She also has managed to get access to some major figures who have eluded most reporters, none more notable than the late Sergei Paradjanov, who, in his cramped quarters in Tbilisi, Georgia, revealed to her the tormented genius that informs his dazzling films, a filmmaker whose sexual orientation and bold exotic style got him into trouble with authorities and landed him in prison.