Parker Warms To Critics

British director Alan Parker has finally found a form of peace with the British film critics. Speaking to Irish website WOW, the director - who's currently doing the rounds with Angela's Ashes, explained how his attitude towards film journos has mellowed somewhat. When I started out, I wanted to kill them all,' he explains. 'Anyone who said something bad. In the early days when I called the critics predatory scum or whatever - I don't feel that anymore. Because there will always be people who don't like my stuff. All I ask for is the criticism to be well reasoned.' Parker went on to say that the critics he had a particularly prickly relationship were no longer in power. 'Most of the loonies have gone. The new generation has a love of film that is much more multi-various...[the new generation] can look at a commercial American film and still see it as creatively valid, you know. And not everything that comes out of the Czechoslovakian Republic is great. I think those days are gone. The cahier du cinema bollox finally is gone. And that's what I was fighting really; pretentiousness.'