Peter Greenaway on a career spent treasuring artificiality, avoiding Hollywood, and playing games.
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Back in the 1980s and 90s, Peter Greenaway was more than just an acclaimed art-house filmmaker.
Here was an unabashedly intellectual director and writer who didnt fuss with typical notions of narrative and character.
He structured his films around games, numbers, and lists.
But the pictures were majestic and hypnotic.
Thats probably why these films were often genuine hits.
Among directors who came later, Wes Anderson and Ari Aster clearly owe a great debt to Greenaway.
And Yorgos Lanthimos probably just plain wouldnt exist without him.
TheDrowningrelease arrives on the heels of a recent restoration ofThe Draughtsmans Contract.
The director hasnt stopped working, continuing to make movies in his distinct style.
As we speak, hes preparing to direct a new movie in Italy, starring Morgan Freeman.
In recent years, Greenaway has traveled the world giving multimedia presentations about famous artworks.
(Of course, this being Greenaway, some of the facts he related were completely made up.)
It does seem like your films have been experiencing something of a renaissance.
BothDrowning by NumbersandThe Draughtsmans Contractwere recently restored and rereleased.
There were those people who were fascinated about the relationship of painting to cinema.
There were those people who were interested in my embrace of new technology not necessarily the same people.
So I think those people still stayed on.
And I do get very, very encouraging correspondence: Mr. Greenaway, you changed my life.
One has to be careful about that sort of approach.
I will not name names.
Let me be indulgent.
Theres a beautiful and really artificial-looking landscape, sunset behind them, rather like copying Caravaggio.
The sun is going down, and the light isgreen.
Thats really rather strange.
We were blessed with a very good female cast with three interesting actresses.
Joely Richardson is still around.
The eldest of the three ladies, Joan Plowright, is still alive, but unfortunately shes now blind.
And I occasionally bump into the middle Cissie, Juliet Stevenson.
Its very difficult, isnt it?
But that was a deliberate sort of Chekhovian idea.
My God, Im 80 now.
So its a hell of a long time since we made this film.
Still lots and lots of problems.
Its your first brush with Hollywood?
There were people knocking on my door all the time.
And looking back, do you remember a film calledWho Framed Roger Rabbit?
I was the first director asked to actually film that.
Would you believe that?
I found that absolutely extraordinary.
I think that was because of a Hollywood agent who didnt really understand my cinema at all.
But I was the name to conjure with for six months.
Did you ever seeWho Framed Roger Rabbit?Yes, I did.
I always admired that actor, Bob Hoskins.
The little boy, Smut, is really me at age 10 or 11.
(Not that I would remotely think of circumcising myself, of course that has to be fictionalized.)
And the circumstances of the geographical location I knew very well.
My father had a very small cottage in a place called Walberswick.
It was an area where Sunday-afternoon painters used to spend a lot of their time.
I mean, look at us now.
Were playing a sort of game, arent we?
The interviewer-interviewee sort of phenomenon.
Im a full believer in: Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?
Game playing obviously involves elements of cheating, too, and that sort of cheating is somehow curiously legitimate.
Ive always been interested in something we could call a nonnarrative cinema.
I dont really believe that cinema needs to tell you a story.
Im trained as a painter, and the very best paintings, I sincerely believe, are nonnarrative.
They are about statements, about ideas.
And I took this particular viewpoint into the manufacture of cinema.
The idea of narrative concerns, Im sure, is very much essential to all conventional filmgoers and filmmakers.
But I wanted to continue my fascination with painting landscapes.
There are extraordinarily moody landscapes of late Rembrandt, for example.
This sounds a rather strange thing, but we deliberately used artificial light in God-given light.
There was sort of a game between God and our artificial lights.
I tried very hard to do as much filming as we could at magic hour.
Those are very brief periods.
It was meant to be a summer film.
And the elements of artificiality are, for me, to be treasured.
You say youre not the biggest fan of narrative structure, but film is a temporal medium.
You have, say, two hours.
And you have to keep holding an audiences attention.
So when Wait a minute, I can see where youre going!
You dont have to go that way, of course.
You must have seenThe Draughtsmans Contract.
Its like a series of turning pages in a book or going to a picture gallery.
Theres this image, theres this image and this image.
And theres not always a determined urgency to tell you a story.
But with a nonnarrative cinema, how do you work with actors?
Actors are often looking for motivation or emotional through lines.
So it couldnt have been too uncomfortable for them.
One of those people was Alec Guinness, because we wanted to use him in a very early film.
But I think he discovered I was an atheist, and hes a very profound Roman Catholic.
(Or was the gentleman is now dead, of course.)
So maybe there were reasons which have nothing necessarily to do with civics but with beliefs.
Well, you dont.
You just have to listen to me, and Ill tell you what to do.
Do the actors know what theyre in for when they sign up?Well, they have a script.
I write a very fulsome script.
And lo and behold, I dont want the actors to move too far away.
I wont be so obstinate to say, You cannot actually offer me some of your own ideas.
Thats what actors are there for.
But there is a way.
But look, I am not a realistic filmmaker.
I believe cinema is imminently, and indeed eminently, artificial.
Lets preserve that artificiality.
I think Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes inTheBaby of Maconare incredible.
You wont necessarily become famous or celebrated by being in a Greenaway film.
But you watch the film youre in next will make you a celebrity.
And curiously, although were game playing again, a lot of that was true.
Julia Ormond, I think, was virtually unknown before she appeared inTheBaby of Macon.
Not that she would, I think, wish to repeat the experience.
It was a torturous and difficult role for her to play.
I cant do this anymore.
But there she was first woman on the set the following morning.
I think its probably part of the mythology of being an actor.
They really want to be challenged, dont they?
Do the worst, Mr. Greenaway.
Do the worst, and Ill come and present myself.
I was really struck by Brian Dennehys performance inTheBelly of an Architect.Me too.
I know a lot of other people have thought the same thing.
I want to ask about your collaboration with Michael Nyman.
He had a sense of irony.
Its quite difficult, isnt it, for music to be ironic?
And cinema had a great change in its uses of music in all sorts of different ways.
It was a continuity there.
Whats the current situation withWalking to Paris, your film about Constantin Brancusi?
But there was an enormous quarrel between producers.
But the Italians ran out of money and that became a bone of great contention.
The cutting copy was a comparatively 4K standard, and I was quite happy with it.
But we still had to refine the details and grade it properly.
There were lots of tricks of fire and water and so on, which had to be engineered.
So they have now virtually kidnapped the film, and its stuck in a Roman laboratory.
I cant access it, they wont sell it back to me, and I cant get the rights.
And the original producer, Kees Kasander, has proven to be a very difficult character to deal with.
You must know this: Avoid attorneys.
Whats the new film youre working on?Its calledLucca Mortis.
We spent, what, maybe the last three decades arguing ourselves into the ground about sex.
Now its about time we put death really under the examination.
I made a film in Mexico about Eisenstein,Eisenstein in Guanajuato.
Many Mexicans encourage you to treat death as a friend and not as a stranger or an enemy.
Lets embrace notions of euthanasia, questions of personal suicide.
Its very much in the news now across all the media.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
