PF: Yes, right at the beginning of cinema people found it very difficult to distinguish between film and life itself - that is to say, when the first film was shown, in 1895, The Train Coming Into the Station at La Ciotat, in the very first Lumière show, people thought that a real train was coming into their faces, and they ducked, or jumped back, and people were shocked by "Broncho Billy" Anderson firing a pistol directly at the camera, in 1903, in The Great Train Robbery. The distributors of the film said this shot could either be placed at the front of the film, or at the end - they said: "This is bound to startle the audience." And then one particular attraction of the movies was to get into a simulated train, and there would be back projections, and audiences thought that they were travelling around the world. The first job of the Lumière cameramen was to go around the world recording sights that people had never seen, only dreamt about or seen on postcards.

The cinema has developed in two particular directions, which also correspond with the way people perceive art: the Lumière brothers were observing the world, just recording it, and Georges Méliès was exploring the magical, mystical and - before the term was coined - surreal aspects of cinema. So cinema has had these two parallel tracks, which we still go along, and sometimes they intertwine, interestingly and usefully, as you see in Slumdog Millionaire, a likely Oscar contender, which manages to combine the mysterious, the magical and the surreal, and the escapist, with a very realistic, almost unflinching look at the violence and poverty of everyday life in India.

PW: You mentioned the Oscars there. That's one huge change that I've seen even in the last 15 years: the tail now seems to wag the dog. Everything in the movie industry is now basically arranged around the Oscars and people seem quite obsessed with awards - you mention the movie buffs, knowing about the money and everything - there's also been a change in a way that people look at films, they come out and say: "I thought that performance was great, and wasn't it beautifully edited?" It's almost as if they've picked up a kind of language. You think: yes, but did you like it?