There's a kind of a self-aggrandising posturing that goes on in Hollywood. I think that it simply comes down to a sort of rebelliousness which has grown out of the '60s mentality. The worst thing that you can be called in an American movie is a Republican. I remember there's a line in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, when the woman in it is about to tell the man something very important, and he says, "Oh you're about to tell me you're a Republican." And the thing is, this isn't even a funny line - it's somehow accepted that this would be a terrible, terrible thing.

DJ: Philip, you mentioned earlier that once upon a time the Church and the middle class had a stranglehold over Hollywood - that doesn't seem to be the problem now, does it? I'm not sure that anybody does actually. For all the faults of Hollywood (whatever they may be), it still dominates. It still brings people in. If you go down to the cinema and see what's on, the vast majority of films will still be whatever Hollywood has produced. So why is that? How has Hollywood maintained its hegemony?

Is there a difference between what Europeans think cinema is about, and what Hollywood thinks it's about? And just to throw into that mix the role of the critics, since you're both critics - have the critics in a sense become too powerful? Have they forgotten what it is that the public still go to the movies for?