England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.
The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?
In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.
The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.
People in England talk about stupid Hollywood idiots, but the industry attracts some of the cleverest people in the world.
Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.
I don't like class distinction, and there is far too much of that in England.
The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies.