This week I used the East festival - a sprawling, six-day collection of informative events across the East End and the City, starting on March 5 - as an excuse to go and have a chat with Steven Berkoff. The Jewish, Stepney-born actor, writer and director is, of course, up West at the moment, starring in his own superb staging of Budd Schulberg's dockside drama On the Waterfront at the Haymarket. But we meet in the converted warehouse on Narrow St where he's lived for 25 years and Berkoff proves agreeably full of opinions about his old stomping ground. What's surprising is that he seems pleased - with reservations - about the area's recent colonisation by the bar and art-gallery crowd.

"I think the East End has broken away to a great extent from its origins as a kind of doss house for immigrants, which is what it’s been for centuries," he says. He ticks off the communities who have passed through, sometimes leaving a mark but often just using the area as a staging post: Huguenots, Jews, Irish, West Indians, Asians. "Now it has evolved through all those disparate elements into an incredibly dynamic society, partly because of the adventurous spirit of young English people who see it romantically, taking all the old rotting warehouses and making galleries and restaurants and even doing up flats. So the whole of the East End has undergone a fantastic regeneration."

He retains a suspicion of property developers, who he compares to the 60s slum landlord Peter Rachman, and blames for the vampiric sucking of life out of areas like Notting Hill, as well as for the demise of the characterful antiques markets of Camden Passage and Antiquarius on the King's Road. Perversely, though (he is a reliable contrarian), he believes the Thatcherite entrepreneurial push that resulted in the development of Docklands and Canary Wharf (and his own home) was a good thing, a "creative use of capitalism". He also thinks the "young people" who have created the new bars, galleries, restaurants and shops of the new East End are entrenched enough to fight off further yuppiefication, or encroachment by the chains. The "compromise" over the redevelopment of Spitalfields market (where several events in the East Festival take place) has been "a great success".

Berkoff does, however, believe the East End's Jewish heritage is neglected. Photos he took of the area and its inhabitants in the 1960s, blown up to huge size, rub shoulders with muscular Peter Howson paintings in his flat. There is no plaque commemorating the internationally famous Yiddish theatre, the Grand Palais, he says. Pivotal moments in London's history, from the Sidney Street Siege to the Cable Street riots, when united Jews and Irish dockers fought off Mosley's black shirts, are not celebrated in film or on stage. (This is partly a class thing, he suggests. One of the reasons he was drawn to On the Waterfront was that it was a rare example of a heroic celebration of working class culture.)

Most surprising of all, though, is Berkoff's attitude to the 2012 Olympics. I thought he would side with the Hackney scribe Ian Sinclair in decrying the sporting hullaballoo. But no. Although Berkoff is a fan of Sinclair's dense psychogeographical writing, he is not a fellow traveller when it comes to opposing the Olympiad. "I think it's an incredible thing, it will regenerate old, dirty, rotting areas beyond the East End, and ripples will spread from there to Hoxton and Hackney and Dalston," he says. "So I think the Olympics are fine, a good thing." He compares the scepticism over the future use of Olympic sites to the sniping at the Dome/02 Arena, "an incredible Richard Rogers building" written off as a white elephant, and now triumphantly reborn as a performance venue.

I do advise you to see On the Waterfront, and perhaps to compare it to his early work East, which is being remounted as part of the East Festival. For more details on the festival, go to www.findeast.co.uk.

On the film front - the head of Film4, Tessa Ross, although bouyed by the Oscar success of Slumdog Millionaire, warns again of dark days ahead for British film, and a likely cut in her annual budget from £10m to £8m. The interview with Ross appears the very day that ITV announces slashing cuts in its staff and drama budgets. IN such a climate, Ross's decision to set up Warp X with the Film Council and Optimum Releasing looks very smart indeed. Warp X produce genre pictures such as Donkey Punch, and oddball cheapies like A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, for around £1m a throw: the creators, mostly young, work cheap on a promise of a share of profits. I've just seen their latest, Hush, the first feature by Londoner Mark Tonderai, who has worked in radio and TV but used another previous job - putting up posters in service station toilets - as the springboard for a horrific thriller. Hush isn't perfect - the early dialogue in particular could do with brushing up - but it is grimly efficient and shot and paced with a genuine sense of menace. It doesn't look cheap. Warp X, it strikes me, could become the new Hammer.