effect than actor, it didn't matter what any critic said about him and his films -- they did fantastically well at the box office, crap as they might well have been. What particularly pleased me was, originally, the BBC didn't want to review foreign-language or arthouse films because they thought that with the programme being on BBC1, the films reviewed had to be mainstream. I argued that this was rubbish and there were some bloody good films in those categories, and I ended up reviewing them anyway. I did have quite a considerable influence on the size of the audiences for those types of cinema. I felt these were ambitious films was trying to do something other than merely entertain, so I was very happy about that result. During your career, were there any debut filmmakers who you rightly predicted would go on to bigger and brighter things? I can't honestly say as I was terribly good at spotting that kind of talent. I was always weary of it as many first-time directors who had done a great film, usually didn't turn out that way. Their second, third and, if they were lucky, forth films normally weren't nowhere near as good as that first feature. Are you much of a cinemagoer nowadays? Not really. I occasionally attend screeners, but I live 30 miles out of London and to travel all that way in means virtually most of my day gone, and I can't afford to waste that amount of time.