Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This, and other lies from a life in the screen trade - Bruce Beresford

I'm not quite sure how I ended up reading an unhailed memoir by a director none of whose films I have watched. I idly picked it up from a mate's bookshelf and ended up finishing it a couple of days later.

Beresford writes smoothly tells some interesting stories, but I'm not sure I like the bloke. He is snobbish, offers up banalities as insight, and describes the physical attributes of virtually every woman he meets in tedious, lecherous detail.

Where the book does deliver is in its revelations about the life of a fair-to-middling director trying to get films made in Hollywood. There are endless meetings with dodgy financiers and rewrites of hopeless scripts, between which he occasionally gets to watch a couple of movies on a miniscule screen during a plane flight. The true irony comes at the end, when the only project that actually gets made is the one he has been trying to get out of for most of the book.