Geoffrey Rush has joined calls for more women behind the camera in Australian film. Speaking on the Sydney film festival red carpet, the Oscar-winner said: “I’d love to see a hell of a lot more to bring it up to an equal balance.”

Rush is currently starring in Simon Stone’s feature debut The Daughter, which premiered at the festival. The film has two female producers, Jan Chapman, producer of The Piano, Lantana and Somersault and emerging talent Nicole O’Donohue, who produced Griff the Invisible and The Last Impresario.

“It’s an ancient statistic that men have always pushed themselves rather annoyingly to the front of the queue,” said Rush, who is president of Aacta (the Australian Academy of Cinematic and Television Arts). “But when I think of working with female directors of photography, female directors, [there’s] a very interesting quality that is not a male mind that goes into the creative process.”

The 2015 Sydney film festival features a number of stage plays adapted into screenplays, including The Daughter, based on Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck; Brendan Cowell’s Ruben Guthrie, an original Belvoir theatre commission; Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man, first produced for Sydney’s Griffin theatre; and Last Cab to Darwin, written by Australian playwright Reg Cribbs.

Geoffrey Rush on the Sydney film festival red carpet

Photo via Instagram @gdnausculture Photograph: Guardian

One of Australia’s most established theatre actors, Rush said he had no “zeitgeist theories” about the run of plays-turned-films, but said it “reflects something about the fertility of what’s around”.

He added: “It takes a very seasoned producer like Jan Chapman to look at Simon Stone’s growing body of theatrical work and for them to have a meeting and [say]: ‘I think this could go further.”’

Rush will play King Lear in a Sydney Theatre Company production in November, directed by Neil Armfield. He is also due to star in Final Portrait, written and set to be directed by Stanley Tucci. The film looks at the friendship between American art critic James Lord and Swiss painter Alberto Giacometti (Rush). The actor said filming was currently in “a state of flux” due to cast and crew availability but that he was looking forward to the start of shooting.

“Stanley Tucci’s screenplay is really a gem,” he said. “As an actor, it’s a role that I connected with the moment I read it.”