DJ: What role do you think politics plays in the cinema now, and is it on the whole benign, or is Hollywood in particular, or perhaps also European cinema, conformist, tending to say the same thing, whatever the subject may be?

PW: I would say that it is incredibly conformist; there's an orthodoxy that pretty much exists in other artistic areas, so you roughly know what you're going to get. It doesn't stop you enjoying a film, but you do know what its attitude is going to be, broadly speaking. It's not a crude thing necessarily, I'm not just talking about documentaries, but I saw one this week called The End of America, which is a Naomi Wolf thing, rather like the Al Gore documentary, in which you pretty much knew what the argument was going to be: America's an incipient fascist dictatorship, and so on.

But when it comes to general movies, in Hollywood movies I find it interesting that on the one hand you will have the American Beauty tendency and the Ice Storm tendency, which is that traditional suburbia is somehow incredibly dysfunctional, that it's wrong, that it should be criticised, and somehow should be deconstructed. But to me that is not really challenging at all, it's what you expect; if it's going to be a film about a family you expect that it's going to be very critical, do you not feel, Philip? I feel that there is a certain sort of attitude that goes through...I don't think it's some kind of conspiracy, I'm not saying that, and I'm certainly not taking a religious point of view. But you do know, on the whole, what you're going to get.