PF: Well, we do see Hollywood in its totality. We tend to see other national cinemas only in a very selective way, unless you carefully study them. When I grew up, Hollywood was generally, excepting a few individuals, held in contempt by intellectuals and by most critics, or at least was looked on with a certain disdain. If I was involved in any particular movement or had any influence, it was around 1960, when I first started to write and was sympathetic to the aims of the magazine called Movie. It introduced the auteur theory into this country and was trying to change, in fact all too successfully, the appreciation of American films. I had always preferred in my heart of hearts American movies. I began to realise that they were as good as the best elsewhere, and in many cases, a good deal better, and that Hollywood was misunderstood. This critical campaign helped to break down the distinction between what people call "film", and "movie".

One of my first books was about Hollywood, was about understanding the nature of the people who created the studios, how genres developed, and the particular strength of these in Hollywood cinema. Then I talked about the idea of authorship. As long as you provided what was popularly entertaining, you could within obvious limits put in critical and social ideas of any particular political stripe.

For me, the greatest period of the cinema was roughly from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, when you had the great Hollywood filmmakers at their peak - in many cases people who started off in the silent cinema - and one thinks of Hitchcock, and Ford and Hawks, who were doing fine work then. At the end of the period, you had the new American directors coming out of film schools. Some of them had done graduate work at the informal school run by Roger Corman, making B-movies. You had the Godfather films, you had the arrival of Scorsese and Spielberg. Suddenly Hollywood really came back as the dominant fashion. The landmark would be 1975 and a new kind of distribution with Jaws, and then with Star Wars.