But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.
I go into meetings with some film-makers and they literally have nothing to say, they're almost bored by their own material. I'd rather work with people who are very passionate and very animated about what they want to do. People who just want to tell stories.
Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.
My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!
I think it's important that we have a new batch of British film-makers that aren't doing the same old stuff. And that includes me.
Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.
Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.
The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.
San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
At least I know that one film-maker in my career has had the initiative to come to me and thought of me as being capable of doing interesting and complicated work, and so I have a new-found belief that other film-makers will see me in a different way, the way that Patty did.