I made a film called Love Serenade which won the Caméra d’Or at 1996’s Cannes film festival. One of the many heady experiences that resulted from this was that one day, incredibly, Warren Beatty called me up out of the blue to tell me how much he liked it.

He was charming and full of compliments and at one point, thrillingly, he murmured down the wire that I must be “some can of peas”. He even hazarded a guess that I might be tall, which I am. Finally, very kindly, he invited me to his house for dinner next time I was in LA – perhaps little imagining that since I lived 12,000km away in Sydney, I would actually take him up on it.

But I did. Because somewhere in this phone call, I had got it into my head that Warren Beatty wanted me to direct his next movie.

Well, he was just as urbane and good-humoured a host as you would imagine. There were a number of guests present, but I seemed to be the only one drinking, and I drank freely, as I remember feeling remarkably thirsty, possibly from the jet lag. The evening passed pleasantly and without incident, but with no further mention of me directing any of his upcoming films.

So at the end of the night, just as he was ushering me towards the front door, I brought up the subject, since it seemed to have temporarily slipped his mind. Warren stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me.

“You want to direct my next film?” he asked in disbelief. “You? I mean, maybe I’m too much in awe of your film, maybe I should sit down and try to find some faults with it, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined that you would want to direct me in a film!”

Was he sending me up? Was I going mad? I slunk away, bewildered and mortified. And yet it got worse. As I was getting into the car, he held out his arms wide in a gesture I dizzily interpreted to mean: “Let’s hug!” Well, certainly I held out my arms wide like that whenever I wanted a hug from my children, and they’d hurtle themselves in for a cuddle.

So that’s exactly what I did. I threw myself headlong into Warren Beatty’s arms. And just as I did, I was gripped by a terrible thought: Warren was just stretching.

Shirley Barrett’s first novel, Rush Oh!, is published by Virago at £14.99, or £11.99 from bookshop.theguardian.com