For a man who ranks as one of Britain’s best film-makers of the past 30 years, Stephen Frears looks like a tramp. He even wore his trainers – with a smart suit that he still managed to make scruffy-looking – to the Oscars ceremony last March.

It is now exactly a quarter of a century since Frears directed the television film that launched Channel 4. Walter, which starred Ian McKellen, signalled not just the start of a channel, but Film on Four (later Film4), and a successful and innovative collaboration between big and small screens. Film on Four became a bedrock of the British cinema industry. Frears went on to forge his own relationship with the channel, through movies such as My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and, more recently, its TV film The Deal, the story of the fight for the leadership of the Labour party in the early 1990s. After his success with The Queen, last year, he will get first refusal on directing the latest Peter Morgan script, rounding out a Blair trilogy, about the former PM’s relationship with Bill Clinton.

As is the case with many of the best Film4 projects, Frears is at his best when observing British society up close and personal. It could be the low-paid illegal immigrants of Dirty Pretty Things or, at the other extreme, The Queen, or gay literary life in 1950s London, with the Joe Orton film Prickup Your Ears. But his career has been, as he puts it, “a scramble”. “My films are made like acts of piracy,” he says. “I hang around on street corners, like some bandit, grabbing what I can.” For more than three decades, he has cobbled together his movies, usually with middling budgets. “They are known for their quickness in arriving on screen and in the making. They are fleet-of-foot films. I need 40 days max to shoot, not the 100 days of Hollywood.”

Unlike Ridley and Tony Scott, or, in his mid-career, Alan Parker, Frears has had no long-running affair with Hollywood, though he enjoyed making the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters and High Fidelity. The last, an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s book, successfully transplanted from north London to Chicago, was “decently funded”, he admits. “But we gave it that low-budget look, which it needed.”

In fact, Frears can’t really cope with big budgets. “There are too many expectations of you from the studio,” he says. “And if you fail, as I have done with some of my Hollywood movies, they come after you with sticks.” Or they give you a heart attack, as happened to him following the pressure of directing Mary Reilly and Accidental Hero, both big-bucks productions and, as it turned out, his only two significant flops.

His relationship with Dustin Hoffman on Accidental Hero was not always easy, and he much prefers directing women to men. He seems to bring out the best in them. Helen Mirren took the Oscar last March for The Queen, and five other actresses – Glenn Close, Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston – have received Oscar nominations for their roles in his films. “Women are easier to work with,” he says. “I suppose, too, I have an empathy with them, though I don’t see myself like George Cukor, who was described as a ‘woman’s director’. I find actresses to be uncomplaining and stoic. They also know their place in films. They are there to look pretty.” (Such a sexist remark may come back to haunt him.) “It’s the male actors, I find, who are the prima donnas. I have a feeling that, in part, it’s because they don’t know their role in movies today, as they don’t in life itself. They are rather lost.”

Britain, too, Frears believes, has rather lost its way in film-making. “We used to make big movies on big subjects, like the empire and the second world war. But we don’t have such big subjects now to make films about. So we turn to books instead. I accept that the public love Jane Austen adaptations. But, personally, I don’t. I might like to read her books, but they are all about manners, and, as a director, manners do not interest me.” He reveals that Emma Thompson (and executive producer Sydney Pollack), who did the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, offered him the chance to direct it. “I told them I could do the ‘sense’ bit, but not the ‘sensibility’,” he says.

One common charge levelled at British feature films is that many of them are really television movies; that British directors, admittedly often without decent budgets, fail to give movies the big sweep and visuals needed for the cinema. Frears, who worked in the BBC drama department in the late 1960s and 1970s, is well aware of the criticism. “But it’s no use apportioning blame. It is a simple fact that many British directors come from television and theatre. That’s our tradition.”

But surely it is the “smallness” of British movies that leads to box-office disappointment? Frears ponders. “I would certainly say a British film has to be that much better than an American one to get audiences. It has to climb the proverbial Everest.” It’s sadly true that even The Queen, the top British film at the box office last year, was still way down the list, with Hollywood dominating. “The public wants to see American films, mainly because Americans know how to make popular movies,” Frears explains.

Thanks to the poor weather this summer, cinema attendances in Britain were up on the same period of 2006. But you cannot rest your hopes on the rain. Frears knows this. He also points to the speed with which films now get a DVD release (often about two months after a cinema run) and the growing number of widescreen television sets in people’s homes. This will inevitably mean more potential cinemagoers preferring to watch movies in the comfort of their own living rooms. “I still hope the communal experience of the cinema will remain,” he says. “But over the period I’ve been involved in movies, cinema is no longer so central to young people’s lives. It is now entertainment and pop music.”

So, what can British film-makers do to claw back their audiences from these rival entertainments? Frears thinks they have a lot of political ground to make up. “The British film industry is leaderless. We once had Dickie [Attenborough], then David [Puttnam], to lobby on our behalf. Now other art forms have their own cultural impresarios, like Nick Serota, Neil McGregor and Nick Hytner. They can go to No 10 and talk directly to the prime minister.”

Yet the 66-year-old, who chaired the Cannes film festival jury this year, has not been a slouch in trying to do his bit for his industry. He is a governor of the British Film Institute, teaches whenever he can at the National Film School, and has been fighting to get money for the National Film Archives. On Wednesday, culture secretary James Pur-nell announced an award for £25m to save many of the old films from disintegrating.

At the end of this year, Anthony Ming-hella, virtually the one British film-maker who does know Gordon Brown pretty well, steps down from chairing the BFI. Will Frears throw his hat into the ring?

“It’s not a job for me. I’m too ungrand and too ruffled to pop in to see ministers. Remember, I’m that street-corner bandit.” I look down at his shoes. He is wearing, as usual, his tatty trainers. “Ah, but they are my lucky shoes,” he laughs.

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