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PRODDING SPICY SICHUAN chicken around his plate, Matthew Reilly looks more like the nervous teenager who loved taking part in the amateur musicals of his suburban theatre society than a man preparing to wrestle Hollywood to the ground.

'It's certainly interesting food,' he says, unconvincingly, pushing away the bowl of chillies that came with the chicken. 'It looks delicious. But I've just never been able to handle spicy food.'

The exotic food has made a rare breach in Fortress Reilly, the compound from which the 29-year-old Australian novelist has sold two million action-thrillers and plotted his rise as an entertainment mogul.

His fifth novel, Scarecrow - which had its worldwide release  here two weeks ago - depicts a young tycoon hungry to take over The Brinderberg Group, a cabal of billionaire industrialists.

It's easy to see Reilly as the young gun with similar ambitions to usurp his heroes: authors Michael Crichton, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer and directors Steven Spielberg and James Cameron.

Reilly finished his first novel, Contest, when he was 19 and studying law at Sydney University. Rejected by publishers across Australia, Reilly printed 1,000 copies of Contest himself and took them to bookstores.

Cate Patterson, a commissioning editor for Pan MacMillan, noticed Contest in a store in 1997. By the time she tracked down Reilly, he had written 50 pages of another novel, Ice Station, from his parents' home in Willoughby, an affluent suburb of northern Sydney. Instead of the conventional image of the tortured, reclusive student writer, Patterson found a kid who loved cricket and was  studying Australia's most prestigious law degree to satisfy his parents.

'I sort of swooped in like an anvil from outside the literary establishment,' Reilly says of the deal he struck with Patterson at the age of 23. 'You can produce great literature by being tortured, but maybe only one piece of great literature. I accept that some people like to write books that are challenging for readers, and there is an enjoyment in that, but my kind of book is about showing the reader a good time. It's about me doing the work for the reader.'

Reilly admits  his first love is film. Most  of his novels are structured with what he calls cinematic writing - each chapter is made up of short episodes separated by white space. Reilly likens these  to shots in a film. The white spaces are cuts.

The books read like movie scripts based on computer games. Scarecrow takes place over 18 hours of pounding action. The plot does not so much move forward as move up to the next level of play.

'I like to think that my books exist on a James Bond level of believability,' says a smirking Reilly at the Marriott hotel in Admiralty.

Scarecrow's action stops only for elaborate descriptions of the military hardware that creates the explosions. The novel has pages on the capacity of guns, bombs, fighter planes and military strategy, leaving little room for character development.

Conversation among the good guys rarely extends beyond, 'Now that was close.'

Rather than waste his white space on description, Reilly often chooses to use the same short word twice. One of his good guys, 'a killing machine', dispatches bad guys 'with brutal - brutal - efficiency'.

'I grew up with blockbusters,' says Reilly. 'While my literary inspirations would be the likes of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, if somebody said, 'Who's your biggest inspiration?', I'd say George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, John McTiernan with Die Hard, Bruce Willis movies.

'I have an awful time reading books because I find them too slow. I always wanted, when I wrote, to get the geopolitical complexity of Tom Clancy. But I always found his books a bit slow. I wanted pace and action.

'A lot of people think kids play computer games and switch off. But they're absorbing information at an astonishing rate. I bombard the reader with information because I know the reader can handle it.

'What I have that other authors don't is that I know that audience, because I am that audience.'

After discovering the kinds of books his movie-loving audience would read, Reilly is more than confident of his ability to direct films for the same kind of people.

'With the dollars I get from books I've got the capital. Movies are expensive. You can invest in shares or you can invest in real estate. I invest in myself.'

He recently joined the William Morris Agency to negotiate his entry into Hollwood and hardball Pan MacMillan into a new publishing deal. The agency pitched one of Reilly's scripts, Altitude Rush, to another of its clients, Jackie Chan. Reilly spent the month before his Hong Kong visit rewriting the script for the action star.

'Two thieves have to get from one side of New York to the other. But the object they've stolen has got an altitude sensor on it. They can't touch the ground. They have to swing from cranes and run across the tops of buses to keep 10 feet off the ground and get to a place where they can open this super-duper document case. I hope Jackie likes it. I love his stuff.'

Reilly has written another script set during the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Concerned that Olympic emblems around the city would be taken down before he had the chance to make the film, Reilly hired a helicopter and camera crew. 'We buzzed the Harbour Bridge and then my pilot did a pass of the Olympic stadium. Air traffic control said we could do one pass, but be aware that the SAS will be watching you through the cross hairs of rocket launchers. I've got the most amazing footage. As I write my next book I want to get this film off and running.'

He completed a course in operating 35mm cameras in between meetings with Hollwood players such as Rob Cohen, director of XXX and The Fast And The Furious, and Mel Gibson's production company, Icon.

'I don't owe anyone in Hollywood anything. I can meet with Rob Cohen. The idea that he told me about was okay, but I told him I'd rather write about something else. There are Hollywood screenwriters who would kill to get into that sort of situation. They'd write anything. They'd write his laundry list if they could.'

Reilly attributes his confidence to the Willoughby Musical Society, whose amateur productions  he joined - with his parents - as teenager, meaning  he spent more time with adults than kids his age, he says.

His family are still a big part of his life. Last month he proposed to Natalie Freer, a psychologist who read the drafts of Contest while the pair caught public transport to university 10 years ago. His brother, Stephen, last year released his first novel. 'I might have arranged an introduction,' Reilly jokes.

He clings to his roots as aggressively as he plots to conquer the entertainment world, leaving the impression that naivete and nous have been just as influential in his success. 'I just bought a house in Willoughby at the other end of the suburb. Close enough to my parents, but far enough away. I play golf. My goal was to get down to a single-figure handicap. I'm down to nine, so I have to find a new goal, which is probably getting it to seven.'



The life of Reilly