The fanatical Bruce Beresford: celluloid heroes.

Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This: True Stories from a Life in the Screen Trade, by Bruce Beresford; HarperCollins, 2007, $39.99.

THROW AWAY your textbooks on film theory. Shred your reports from the Film Squad of the Arts Police. Then buy a copy of Bruce Beresford's recent diaries. It will tell you all you need to know about producers, directors, actors, editors and all those conmen and predators who have made most movies almost impossible to watch--unless you area child.

Beresford remains Australia's most successful film-maker. His Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Breaker Morant, Don's Party, Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy, Mister Johnson and Black Robe are a permanent part of the repertoire. When he writes about film--the art and the business--he writes with authority and humour.

Here is a tasting.

Directors:

   If you're going to con your way in the film business, directing is
   the way to do it. Editors, cameramen, designers and so on must know
   something about their craft but a director can have no talent at
   all and the film will still be made around them. It won't have
   individuality or distinction, but it will still be a film.

      Many become so successful they live sheltered lives, mixing only
   with the wealthy. An Australian director working in Canada issued
   instructions that anyone who looked at him was to be fired.

Producers:

"Who is this Rachmaninoff?." she (a visiting American producer) asks. Classical music seems to

be a closed book to film producers and financiers. A few years ago when I was pushing a script (Bride of the Wind) about Gustav and Alma Mahler around Los Angeles, I was asked, in reference to Mahler, "Why would you want to make a film about a nonentity?"

Actors:

   Why do so many actors feel obliged to tell
   everyone how intelligent they are? I suspect
   it is because they are in such a trivial occupation,
   one which often provides such lavish financial
   rewards and leads to so much undeserved adulation,
   that a bit of self-aggrandisement is necessary for
   self-esteem.

Scriptwriters:

   Most scriptwriters seem to be drawing their
   inspiration--could that be the word?--from other
   movies, not from their observation of life ... The
   first question always asked with any script is "Who
   will we get to do the rewrite?" This has produced a
   situation where screenplay credits are notoriously
   unreliable. Some writers have achieved world
   fame--and riches--on the basis of a reputation for
   scripts they didn't write.

But the basic theme of the book is the frustration, heartache and excitement of setting up films, in particular the many projects Beresford worked on for about twenty-two months between 2003 and 2006.

It is a sobering story. The diaries begin with a disaster. By late 2003, Beresford had spent eighteen months in Mexico making And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself with Antonio Banderas in the leading role. But the endless directives from television executives for recuts, deletions and additions compelled him to leave the whole project to these television geniuses and return to Australia.

Then began a series of projects which foundered on the difficulty of finding writers, actors, backers. Most of them were Australian--Madeleine St John's Women in Black, Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahony, David Malouf's Conversations at Curlow Creek, Christopher Koch's Highways to a War and a script of Cloudland by Nicholas Hammond and Denny Lawrence, set in Brisbane during the Second World War and culminating in a big brawl between Australian and American troops. His non-Australian projects included Jeffrey Archer's Walking off the Map about the heroic English mountaineer George Mallory who died in a blizzard at the top of Mount Everest in 1924. (His corpse was located in 1999.)

THE DIARIES DOCUMENT the misadventures in trying to turn these projects into films--although Beresford takes nerve-wracking tensions in his stride: they are normal in this fantastic business.

Take The Women in Black, Madeleine St John's brilliant and disgracefully neglected novel set about 1960 in a department store like David Jones. Beresford and the producer Sue Milliken wrote the script. Isabella Rossellini and Sam Neill wanted roles in it. But such respected names are not enough to satisfy most investors, who always insist on big stars.

In November 2003, Beresford called on the dying Madeleine St John in Notting Hill, London:

   I have to tell her that I've still not found the finance to film
   The Women in Black. She affects indifference, but I know it must be
   bitterly disappointing. She has emphysema, is almost permanently on
   oxygen and is so frail that I imagine that every visit I make will
   be the last. She doesn't complain, is as witty as ever, and we
   arrange to go to a concert at the Albert Hall ... Quite an ordeal
   ...

In August 2004, Beresford turned to the Film Finance Corporation in Sydney. Two of the three people he meets could barely conceal their contempt for the script/project:

   I could feel their hostility across the room. They asked what I
   most liked about the project. I thought for a moment and said "the
   humour". The female committee member who could be perfectly cast as
   a dominatrix in an Almodovar movie, replied, "But there's no humour
   in the script." We're doomed with this lot. No point in complaining
   as the FFC is not under any obligation to finance my pet projects.

St John died a year ago and Beresford is still trying to find backers.

The other major project in these diaries is an American film, The Contract, a thriller starring Morgan Freeman as a contract killer. Beresford never liked it. But his agency steered him relentlessly to it. (They represented both the leading actors and saw huge commissions.)

At one conference in Los Angeles eight people attended. Before the meeting started, they drifted out of the room one by one. After a decent interval Beresford asked the receptionist what was going on. She said everyone had gone to other meetings in various parts of LA. Beresford's meeting hadn't even started. He waited a little longer and then strolled off to a nearby second-hand bookshop.

Beresford persevered with the exhausting and seemingly endless process of getting the script of The Contract right, settling locations (in Bulgaria), finding technicians, signing up the stars and casting the minor roles. Shooting it also meant giving up other more promising projects including Wilberforce, Easy Virtue and Miss Potter. Michael Apted finally directed Wilberforce under the title Amazing Grace, Stephan Elliott did Noel Coward's Easy Virtue and Chris Noonan Miss Potter. ("The first I knew that I was no longer director on Miss Potter was a short piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.")

At one stage Beresford wondered if he could get out of The Contract entirely. But he was legally bound to it. He was philosophic: "I shouldn't complain. I always wanted to be a film director." In future, he says, he will not allow his enthusiasm to shoot anything lead him into rash decisions, as had already happened with Her Alibi and A Good Man in Africa. But even he had not counted on being told that he would have to pay for the final six days of filming. Otherwise a partially completed film would be released under his name as director.

Meanwhile there is another project--a film about Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter, singer, drug addict and poete maudit who died after falling from a hotel window. Beresford had a meeting with an enthusiastic Josh Hartnett. (Hence the title of the book.) The actor delivered an hour-long monologue about his intention to make a wonderful film and his unique dedication as an artist--a dedication not shared, he implied, by anyone else involved in the project. Beresford could not get a word in. (This was at least better than his meeting with Harrison Ford, who only uttered occasional guttural ape-like noises.)

The diaries are not only about setting up (or not) films. Beresford has much to say, usually generously, about his crews and collaborators. He wouldn't have made Breaker Morant without the resourcefulness of his first assistant director, Mark Egerton. Once in South Australia in terrible weather, with impassable roads and a tight schedule, Egerton arranged to take the entire crew, cast and equipment out to the bush location on horseback.

He regards Donald McAlpine, the bluff, unpretentious, former physical education teacher, as "one of the all-time great lighting cameramen". He has shot ten films for Beresford, including The Getting of Wisdom and Don's Party, although he turned down Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy because his wife didn't like the scripts (both of which won the Academy Award for best screenplay).

Another is Bill Anderson, the Irish-Australian occasional pub-brawler who edited Breaker Morant. He is a natural talent who edits with flair and a refined understanding of characterisation. Like Orson Welles, he does not go to movies and he knows nothing about film history ("not all that unusual in the film business"). Now living in Hollywood and recovering from a throat opera tion, he has been cleaned out financially by the American doctors. "I'll have to send something to help him out."

Despite his setbacks Beresford is optimistic. His other projects, including Women in Black, Curlow Creek and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony are all inching forward in the pursuit of finance, cast and crew. He knows his experience is typical:

   All but a few of the biggest studio films with the biggest stars
   and most commercially successful directors have the same kinds of
   problems I've discussed in this book. There are a lot of dedicated,
   not to say obsessed, producers and directors around who will fight
   to realise their pet projects long past the point where logic would
   tell them to quit and open up a bookshop or a market stall.

The book ends with Josh Hartnett declaring that he is still enthusiastic about the Chet Baker project. He has one reservation. He will only do the film if Beresford is not the director.

But the book begins with Gustave Flaubert's dictum: "There is no art without fanaticism." Beresford remains a fanatic.

Peter Coleman's books include Bruce Beresford: Instincts of the Heart (1992).