'This entertaining collection of pieces from the acclaimed director of Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer features memoirs, brief lives and revealing accounts of the film world.
'Alongside unsung heroes from behind the camera and producers of dubious repute are Madeleine St John and Clive James, Margaret Olley and Jeffrey Smart, as well as a particularly seductive 1963 EH Holden - and Bruce Beresford’s father, whose strange and startling decline in old age is charted in a brilliant, poignant essay.
'Opinionated, wry and engaging, The Best Film I Never Made will provoke and delight in equal measure. It is the ideal gift not only for cinema buffs but for anyone interested in music, art or literature. ' (Publication Summary)
'Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’' (Introduction)
'Ten years ago, Bruce Beresford published a gem of a memoir titled Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This. Written in diary form, the book chronicled a year or two of Beresford’s life in the trenches of the modern film industry. Ideally, of course, Beresford’s job is to direct movies. And his CV is thick with garlanded pictures: Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer. But, as his first book gorily demonstrated, even a filmmaker as successful as he is must spend an ungodly proportion of his time developing projects that go nowhere slowly.' (Introduction)
'Ten years ago, Bruce Beresford published a gem of a memoir titled Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This. Written in diary form, the book chronicled a year or two of Beresford’s life in the trenches of the modern film industry. Ideally, of course, Beresford’s job is to direct movies. And his CV is thick with garlanded pictures: Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer. But, as his first book gorily demonstrated, even a filmmaker as successful as he is must spend an ungodly proportion of his time developing projects that go nowhere slowly.' (Introduction)
'Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’' (Introduction)
