Bruce Beresford is sitting in his Sydney home amid piles of film scripts that belie the fear that he's too old to attract the type of work that made him one of the world's best directors.
An e-mail arrives to suggest a meeting about adapting the David Malouf novel The Conversations at Curlow Creek. He's tormented by feelers from would-be producers of Boswell for the Defence, a film about the 18th-century English lawyer and biographer that's been close to production since the millennium ticked over.
Beresford, 67, has been on the mainland to survey a possible film on Eric Liddell, the Scot who won the 400-metre track event at the 1924 Olympics before working in China, his birthplace, as a missionary.
By February he hopes to be back in China filming Mao's Last Dancer, based on the memoir by Li Cunxin, the graduate of Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy who defected and became a leading dancer in the west.
Beresford is never short of offers, and he has no trouble identifying the quality scripts, but after more than 40 years in the film industry he still has no way of knowing who is telling the truth about the huge amounts of money needed from various sources to keep a movie moving.
'The problem is I don't know how many of the films are real. Nobody can ever tell,' he says with a laugh. 'There's a group of international scumbags in the film industry, but I don't question the sincerity of all these people. They're all trying to get the films going. They wouldn't say they're lying. They'd say they were optimistic. They'd tell me anything. They'll say the money's definitely coming through and, of course, they're hoping it will. And sometimes it does.'
A couple of years ago, Beresford started to think that his diaries - kept simply to remember the status of the dozens of film projects floating in his orbit - would make a good book.