Film director Stephen Frears has spent his career commenting on the workings of society, from My Beautiful Laundrette to The Queen. So despite the crash, the crunch and the cuts, he sees a beginning in the end of neo-capitalism...

The world was more stable when I was young. The Welfare State saw the emerging into the light of large numbers of people who didn't have opportunities before. I was from the middle classes, I was brought up in Leicester and Nottingham where my father was a GP with a working-class practice, so I acquired the values of the time, which seem to me to have been good ones.

I wouldn't say that 30 years ago the world was fundamentally a better place, but capitalism is high risk and the Welfare State was more stable.

The Welfare State ran out of steam and was replaced with another system. This appeared to begin with tremendous optimism and with plans for making the world a better place, but those plans soon went awry. For me, the politics of the last 30 years haven't been very sympathetic. I didn't like Mrs Thatcher and I didn't like New Labour. Gordon Brown is a rather tragic figure. In Budget week I thought he was having a nervous breakdown. The only time I ever met him I thought he was brilliant, but something seems to have gone wrong.

Now we're in a mess and it seems to make less and less difference who is in charge; there is no longer any difference between the parties, they will all have to tax and cut. So another period is at an end and I can't say I'll weep for it.

Everywhere you look, you're confronted by unfairness, which seems to me ridiculous. Do we not all wish for a fairer world? Of course we do. So the credit crunch could well have a positive effect on society. Will the society that will emerge be as foolish as the last one? It's hard to imagine anything being that bad.

People are endlessly ingenious and I have nothing but admiration for the young people today who are turning their back on the current system. I'm sure they will work out a new way of doing things and I'm sure it'll be much more interesting than what has just gone. I'm with Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, I think this is an opportunity - as he recently said, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Poverty is always a source of strength.

However, let's not pretend that whatever is created out of this mess will not itself run into the sand some time in the future. Is this pessimism? No! It's Ozymandias: no system, however powerful, is unassailable; everything crumbles in the end. That's just what happens.

Is that pessimistic? Actually I think I'm astonishingly optimistic. I was very lucky to have made the films I did when I did. It's tougher now, much tougher than it was, and to somebody starting out in my business now, I would say, 'Be lucky. Just be lucky.' I don't think all my success is down to luck, I'm not an idiot. But I think luck plays a large part and it's the best advice I can give. Would you say Gordon Brown was lucky? No. Would you say Tony Blair was? Yes. You might say he was Machiavellian but in the end people chose not to find him out. He was lucky. He got away with it.

So maybe... Michael Parkinson asked Robert Mitchum what advice he would give his son. Mitchum rather reluctantly said he'd say: 'Don't get caught.' Then he paused and said, 'Nobody ever caught me acting.'

Stephen Frears' new film Chéri is out now