What interests me particularly at the moment, about Hollywood, is we've got these extraordinary issues happening, not least with such things as the rise of Islam, and Hollywood just stays completely clear of this. It was interesting seeing the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which was not a very good film - the first one was a fantastic film, very counterintuitive and all the rest of it - but the second one, if ever there was a case for putting forward that in fact there was some entryism, Islamist entryism into the American establishment, they could have done it there, but no, they sidelined that and went for big business, yet again, and I thought: this is somehow very predictable. This is what they would do. And that is frustrating to me, to which you might say in that case, people with other views should make films. But when they do, they are often very bad. The Zucker brothers have made something called American Carol recently, which is meant to be a movie from the centre Right. I imagine it's terrible, because it always comes down to just poking fun at political correctness, which is very silly and very trivial. But usually like in the theatre, you do know you're going to get a certain viewpoint.

PF: Well, for a great many years, particularly from the mid-1930s up until 1967, the American cinema, and through it much of the world, was dominated by the Hollywood Production Co, which insisted upon the observation of certain values. They came from two particular sources, the people who devised the code; one was the Catholic Church, and the other was the middle class. These were the values imposed on movies, and the intention of films was to inculcate particular social standards and values.

It then became a contest for the filmmakers to try and subvert these values, without people understanding what was happening, like the films of one of the greatest satirists and social commentators of Hollywood cinema, Billy Wilder, and the way in which, say, genres were used to criticise society. I think there has been a general sense among American artists, this goes right back to the time of the Civil War, that the artist was in an adversarial position to the general culture. This is what has informed the best of American literature and the finest critics, people like Edmund Wilson, people who have at various times been associated with aspects of the Left, and in some cases with communism.