"The hostility the film received from the US Catholic Legion of Decency came as a total surprise. I'm a lapsed Catholic myself. We had to make cuts for blasphemy and nudity, and the film was censored even more heavily in the UK. But I'm being asked to talk about it a great deal at the moment, with the pandemic. ... The Red Death plays almost as if it were about the coronavirus. And Prospero's behaviour – shutting himself away in the castle – is not dissimilar to our former president's."