Here’s the plot: “There’s this old bloke, he’s sitting on his bed thinking, ‘What am I going to do today? I know, there’s this girl down the road, maybe she’ll show me her tits! Great!’ And that’s what Venus is about.”

It’s not exactly the kind of enticing précis that’ll impress either Bafta voters, the film’s financial backers or even prospective audience members. But then again the 52-year-old Hanif Kureishi, the writer of the bleakly poignant comedy drama Venus, has always enjoyed the status of a cultural controversialist. So why stop now?

In a long career as a playwright, novelist and screenwriter, Kureishi has crafted provocative drama from the issues of race and homosexuality (My Beautiful Laundrette), Islamic fundamentalism (My Son the Fanatic) and transgressive sexuality (The Mother). Thus it makes sense that his latest movie luxuriates in the drooling desire that a slithery septuagenarian charmer (Peter O’Toole) maintains for a nubile 19-year-old girl (Jodie Whitaker). Furthermore, his forthcoming short film Weddings and Beheadings tackles the sensitive subject of terrorist kidnappings with an edgy irreverence.

Of the latter film he says, with typical insouciance: “If you can’t make a comedy about beheadings, what can you make a comedy about these days?”

Of course, the controversy, with Kureishi, is always something of a feint. You penetrate the recalcitrant posturing and quickly perceive a sensitive and relentlessly perspicacious mind. Weddings and Beheadings, for instance, a short monologue by a fictional Iraqi cameraman, is actually “about the media, the role the media is playing in what’s happening in Iraq right now, and how difficult it is for the media to be objective.”

Similarly Venus, a critical favourite and a hot tip for this year’s Oscars, is clearly more than just a movie about the pervy fantasies of a superannuated lecher. It’s about the nature of desire, says Kureishi. And what keeps us moving forward as we get older. It’s about what’s left when everything else, including friends, family, career and physical health, has been stripped away — in this case, not much left at all. As O’Toole’s character Maurice says: “I am about to die and I know absolutely nothing about myself.”

“I think that’s a more interesting view than the idea that old people are wise and have all this experience,” says Kureishi. “In a way it’s worse to do that to old people, to dignify them with the idea that they have this incredible wisdom. Because you don’t, and you don’t feel as if you do, and it’s no use to anybody, either.”

Kureishi adds, half-defensively, that he’s only in his fifties by the way, and not 80, or anything like that. And yet surely this, combined with his most recent movie, The Mother (about an affair between a 70-year-old woman and a much younger man, played by the new Bond, Daniel Craig), plus his 2003 novel The Body, with its 65-year-old protagonist, all point to a writer who’s obsessing about his own approaching senescence? Are we currently in the throes of Hanif Kureishi: the Autumn Years?

“Nah,” he says. “It was just something I got interested in. I was bored with everything else. I was always writing about Pakis, rock’n’roll, drugs and things like that. So I wanted to write about older people, I guess. You write about it for a bit, and you get fed up with it, and you go and do something else.”

And are you fed up with it yet? “Yes.”

So what are you doing instead? “I’m writing a long novel about an immigrant family. It starts in the Seventies and finishes with the 7/7 bombings. I’m writing a film too, with Roger Michell (the director of Venus). It’s about what happens when a marriage breaks down.”

Is that difficult dramatic territory to mine? “It’s no more difficult than writing a film about a 70-year-old woman who gets f***** by James Bond.”

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