BBC Four: The book is full of conflicting anecdotes and stories. Did you anticipate that kind of minefield?
PB: I guess so. Obviously a lot of this material was 30 or 40 years old so people's memories were not good. Usually if a story was important and colourful enough I would try to interview several different people involved and weave it together or actually state the contradictory sides. With some famous conflicts, like whether Robert Evans saved The Godfather Part II, I just finally despaired about getting the truth out.

BBC Four: Do you have any favourite stories that you feel sum up the whole era?
PB: There's so many of them. The whole Apocalypse Now story is very revealing. It's an extreme version of what happened to all of those people. One of the themes of the book is the sort of auto-destruction of this whole generation. Partly through drugs, but also through power and success at an early age. Billy Friedkin says that when you become successful you become to some degree isolated from the community you grew up with before you were famous. He said, "Once you take your first tennis lesson it's all over". I always thought that was a telling comment.

BBC Four: How much were the directors to blame for the end of that era of creativity?
PB: I think the directors were to blame for their arrogance and insularity and that was fuelled by cocaine in many cases. In the beginning they were grateful to be able to make movies through the studio system. They were careful to stay on budget and were to some degree humble. But as they became more powerful they disregarded the shooting schedule and they went way over budget. They were disdainful of the studios, which to some degree is understandable, but they went way over board. They to some degree destroyed themselves. Not all of them but enough of them to make it factor in their decline.

BBC Four: What do you think of the current state of American cinema?
PB: I think you have to distinguish between Hollywood studio films and what people are now calling "Indiewood" films, distributed by studios, like Adaptation, About Schmidt and Far From Heaven. I think a lot of those films are pretty good. I think the straight studio films, the big budget spectacles, most of them are not good. Although I did quite enjoy Spider-man. But that middle-range is quite good.

BBC Four: And the blame for rubbish films should be laid at the feet of George Lucas?
PB: I'm sure you don't mean that really. George Lucas made Star Wars and he didn't know it was going to be that successful. Really the blame is on the economic system: on human nature and on capitalism. Obviously if you stumble upon a Star Wars that makes more money than God then you want to make another one. I don't think Lucas is really at fault. I guess you can say the way he conducted his career after those first three films then maybe you could blame him in terms of what you do with your money once you get there.

BBC Four: It's fair to say that a lot of the people mentioned in the book were not very pleased when it came out, isn't it?
PB: Not everybody in the book. I think several of the principal characters didn't appreciate it and bad mouthed it. Other people responded differently and are fine with it. Some are philosophical and say if you can't take the heat then get out of the kitchen. Nobody likes to have some of their more personal peccadilloes aired in public. My feeling was you couldn't really understand some of these people without talking to some degree about their personal lives. In part some of their collapse was how they conducted themselves personally.

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