You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. In this week's episode, the film director Stephen Frears talks to the LRB's editor at large, Andrew O'Hagan, about working in Hollywood.

Stephen Frears' movies include My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, and The Queen. He's also written once or twice for the LRB, and his diary from 1990 on how he came

not to direct Donny Brasco, it was idiotic, he wrote later, to try to set up a film about the

mafia halfway between Goodfellers and Godfather 3, appears in a new anthology of pieces from the

LRB Archive. LRB Collections 10, Why Goldwyn Ward Jodpahs, writing about Hollywood from the London

Review of Books, was an introduction by Andrew O'Hagan, also includes contributions from

Gabriella Annen, Betsy Blair, Angela Carter, Jenny Diskey, David Hare, Michael Rogan, David

Thompson, B Wilson and Michael Wood.

Stephen Frears and Andrew Hagan began their conversation with reflections on the New Hollywood of the 1970s.

I read a book called The Movie Brats that Linda Miles wrote,

and I read about these young Americans, and I just thought, blimey, I didn't know people.

I mean, of course you read about their swimming pools, but you just, these people were so imaginative and given such freedom.

Now, I can remember lying on matured bunk beds reading this book and thinking, what incredible lives.

I mean, I think Scorsese is younger than me.

Well, they were certainly around my contemporaries or my generation.

I couldn't believe.

And they were making the godfather and close encounters.

And I was so jealous.

Well, this leads us right into the book that we're here to discuss because David Hare's

review of Linda Miles' book appears in this book.

And let me quote you from...

Of the movie, perhaps.

...