Auteur unplugged

Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This: True Stories From a Life in the Screen Trade By Bruce Beresford Fourth Estate, 325pp, $39.99

Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This: True Stories From a Life in the Screen Trade By Bruce Beresford Fourth Estate, 325pp, $39.99

IT'S well known that many in the political and military hierarchies are barking mad, as are leading poets and chess grandmasters. But for insanity on the widest scale you can't beat the film industry. Megalomania abounds among studio heads, producers, agents and actors and with directors is the norm.

So the question arises: are directors born mad and attracted to a profession where madness is de rigueur? Or are they driven mad by the process and the insanity of others? I don't think Bruce Beresford is insane. Not quite, not yet. When working with him decades ago, however, I realised he was eccentric. But amusingly so.

His symptoms? Despite his passion for music (when not directing films he wanders the world directing operas), he was reluctant to use it in his films. Whereas other directors pour orchestral emphases on scenes like chocolate syrup on a sundae, Beresford had to be begged, cajoled and bullied into employing a single note. And after the prolonged agonies from pre to post-production (his book reminds readers that the film shoot is the easy part), he had a profound aversion to attending an opening night.

Other quirks? Though staying gainfully employed has always been a challenge -- his 25 features are vastly outnumbered by the films that have failed to eventuate -- he once told me he'd rejected an overture from George Lucas. To direct an episode of Star Wars. His reason? That there wasn't much a director could do with actors in a Star Wars movie. Leaving aside the drivel of the dialogue, there was the problem of directing the cast against the blue screens that allowed lavish imagery to be added later.

If saying no to Star Wars was odd, many of those he chose to direct seem odder. This is what makes Beresford interesting. Like many a famous painter, name directors stake out a piece of territory. There is a thematic and stylistic consistency that identifies them. Take Steven Spielberg, whose debut feature, Duel, pitched a frail human against an implacable force, that dirty great truck. Later Spielberg would morph the truck into everything from a shark to Nazism. In almost every one of his films a vulnerable human confronts forces beyond his control.

In contrast, the only way to identify a Beresford film is by reading the credits.

With the exception of his Barry McKenzie sequel, Beresford never repeats himself. He'll go from a houseful of Australian drunks (Don's Party) to the Old Testament (King David), or from a portrait of a couple of broken-down vaudevillians (Side by Side) to an anthropological epic on Native Americans' conflicts (Black Robe). He'll direct Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies or Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, two films that won Oscars, but not, sadly, for him. He seems driven by one thing only, the desire to tell stories.

And not just on the screen. A great gossip whose anecdotes improve with age and repetition, Beresford is also a considerable diarist. Thank god this volume covers only his recent years, so the cast of characters copping it does not include yours truly.

Which brings us back to madness. In his amiable way Beresford describes the Marat/Sade madhouse of an industry where even a saint might contemplate becoming a serial killer. The reader, like the author, is confronted by an endless parade of ratbags (almost an endearment in the Beresford vocabulary) who drive him to the brink. Everyone else in his world is deemed insane, from financiers and insurers to obnoxious actors whose mental processes, such as they are, cry out for additional therapy and sedation.

Then come the studios, by his account crowded with bureaucrats of such bizarre judgment that they should be taken to padded cells. Equally culpable in the cinematic cuckoo's nest are producers who can't. First they can't produce the money and second, if by some miracle they do manage that, they've no idea how to produce the film.

To dull the pain caused by imploding projects, Beresford spends much time buying pirated DVDs of obscure films, including his own, and discovering among them many a treasure. Thus he finds a spirited account of the life of Amedeo Modigliani and wonders why he's never heard of it. It turns out that like many other films, it was never released. It belongs to the new world of straight-to-DVD productions. Other films of comparable quality don't even get this far.

Yet the cinemas of the world are chocka with dross. Yes, the entire production and distribution system is not merely dysfunctional but deranged. Little wonder that Beresford seems increasingly bewildered by his chosen calling. This is particularly true when he misses out on making films in which he has invested considerable time and interest, only to see them made by others. The diary describes being caught in the cleft stick of contracts, forced into projects he despises in the back lots of Bulgaria while those that have thrilled him are nicked by others.

Thus an epic on William Wilberforce's crusade against slavery and the story of Beatrix Potter's rapturous relationship with rodents are lost to him while he toils over mediocre scripts on minuscule budgets. He reports one case where the only way he could get another five days of desperately needed shooting was to pay for it himself. Which he did, if only to prevent his name appearing on a straight-to-DVD epic that would be even worse without this sacrifice.

Beresford's first film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, told the Candide-like story of an innocent Australian trying to deal with ratbag Poms. The diaries cast Beresford in much the same role as Bazza; except that at twice his age, this Candide is trying to defend his innocence in Hollywood and its global branches. And just as Bazza survived with his virtue and virginity intact, Bruce gets to page 322 with his ethics and his artistic sensibility in reasonable repair.

It's good that he has recorded his misadventures so amusingly. The Beresford I first met in the early 1970s was less inclined to candour. David Marr, who edited our Nobel laureate's correspondence, will be shocked to know that Bruce told me, during the Don's Party shoot, that he'd just burned a huge pile of letters from Patrick White. As I recall, 200 of them. Apart from being conclusive evidence of Beresford's eccentricity, this conflagration is a great pity. Because you can bet they'd have provided the basis for a fascinating film.