Peter Greenaway Regis Dialogue with Peter Wollen, 1997

Bruce Jenkins: This dialogue of 1997 is the final event in a wonderful month, an adventure through the body of Peter Greenaway in our G Is For Greenaway series.

Bruce Jenkins: He's been here with us today and I will shortly be bringing him on stage. Tonight really is a night of Peters. We not only have Mr. Greenaway but his interlocutor tonight, Peter Wollen.

Bruce Jenkins: And then finally a Peter you won't see who I want to acknowledge at the beginning, Peter Murphy, who for the better part of a decade has been masterminding these evenings that so elegantly run with excerpts from the films being able to be interpolated into the dialogue. So, my thanks to Peter Murphy who will be the invisible Peter tonight.

Bruce Jenkins: Just a couple of words of introduction. Peter Wollen and I first met as a graduate student about 20 years ago. He has continued to teach for the last eight years at UCLA. He is the author of what at one time was the leading book on film theory, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, but he's also continued to publish and write. A regular contributor to the British journal Sight and Sound. He has lectured widely, he has continued to do a great deal of things, including screenplay writing. You may know him a little bit from the screenplay he did for Antonioni's The Passenger, as well as his last visit here to The Walker with a wonderful allegorical film Friendship's Death.

Bruce Jenkins: He's going to need those skills tonight, as he's matched against probably the most iconic classic figure in contemporary cinema. Someone whose writings about film and whose work in film, which now numbers 74 films, it's an amazing career in 30 years. But not just cinema. He's been involved in opera, he's a painter, he's got commissions now for new exhibitions in Japan. He'll be, I gather in a year or so, doing a re-installation of the Brooklyn Museum's permanent collection. He's really quite a renaissance man.

Bruce Jenkins: Tonight, to talk about an extraordinary body of work, to give you a little bit of a sense of a new film that will be released in June, The Pillow Book, and really reflect on three decades of trying to reinvent this medium that last year turned a hundred. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome Peter Greenaway and Peter Wollen.

Peter Wollen: I'm very pleased to be here. I'm going to begin because I get to ask the questions. We haven't rehearsed this in any way, this is spontaneous, but I'm going to begin by asking ... I did warn him about actually, to be honest, about what I was going to ask at the beginning, which was to talk a bit of childhood. Which, as I said, I could validate by pointing out how important childhood is in your films, but actually I'm just really interested in what did your parents do and especially what children's books you remember.

Apr 30, 1997 1

Peter Greenaway: Well, I suppose the most significant parts of my childhood that I would still make public and probably use as a raw material, certainly initially, although maybe I glorified this a bit, my father was a very, very keen ... you can't call it ecology way back in the 1930s and 1940s, you'd probably have to call it natural history.

Peter Greenaway: So, my father's great passion was birds, ornithology, flying. He wasn't a particularly educated man, but he did have a great sense of observation. He did also have an extremely large library of natural history books. I think that's basically all he had. So, there would be very great works of fiction in my father's library.

Peter Greenaway: The possibilities I suppose of making a professional living as a natural historian, or indeed as an ornithologist, are quite difficult now. Although of course, there are many, many opportunities with television etc. etc., to become, to rework yourself as a David Attenborough. But those sorts of opportunities certainly didn't exist then.

Peter Greenaway: So, my father had this great frustration that certainly he had to pay the bills and look after me and my brother and the family etc., so he was a businessman in the City of London. And on every single opportunity he could possibly find, he used to drag us screaming and kicking up to the marshes of East Anglia. And for any of you who've seen the film Drowning by Numbers, it's that particularly sort of landscape which I certainly tried to evoke in that film, and also all the associations that I remember.

Peter Wollen: And children's books? I'm actually interested in Kate Greenaway and, "Apple is for apple, and B bit it, C cooked it."

Peter Greenaway: Well, my father I think, through some peculiar form of cultural snobbism, which perhaps even he didn't quite understand, certainly tried very hard to pretend that we were associated with Kate Greenaway. But it was extremely difficult to prove genealogically. My family I suppose is split. One part of the Greenaways come from Essex, Mrs. Thatcher's favorite part of the world, and the other come from Somerset. And Kate Greenaway herself did in fact come from Somerset, and we did indeed have ancestors in the same cities. But it's very, very difficult to swear on the Bible that in fact there is a blood relationship.

Peter Wollen: And what did you read? I mean, what do you look back on now in childhood as-

Speaker 4: Can you place the microphone a little closer?

Peter Wollen: This one?

Speaker 4: Yes. Quite a bit closer.

Apr 30, 1997 2

Peter Wollen: Quite a bit. Okay.

Peter Wollen: Okay. Is that better?

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Peter Wollen: Okay. Sorry. What do you remember with pleasure from your childhood reading?

Peter Greenaway: I suppose, again, I'm going to slightly twist your questions-

Peter Wollen: Okay, fine.

Peter Greenaway: ... in order to service my imagination.

Peter Wollen: Yeah.

Peter Greenaway: Again, Drowning by Numbers really is a key to this, because that particular film is very much about childhood memories, and it is full of references to English illustrators. Not just Kate Greenaway of course. But we have I suppose a very, very bourgeoisie tradition of the character of Rupert Bear.

Peter Wollen: Bestall.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed. I mean, there were many writers and illustrators but he's the most famous. And I suppose for about 30 or 40 years this character was syndicated in the Daily Express, which was a rather middle-brow paper which my father took. But the great excitement I suppose every Christmas was to open yet another annual of the Rupert Bear.

Peter Wollen: Yeah, I got those.

Peter Greenaway: And okay, it was a cozy, comfortable world, and everything ultimately turned out all right. But the actual picturing of an idyllic English landscape, with the church in the right place and the fields operating as they should do, and the notion of lots of typically country rustic activities, I think fitted very much into early ideas of my imaginations about the country.

Apr 30, 1997 3

Peter Greenaway: I mean, although I was born in Wales, most of my early education was associated with suburban London, so the escape to the country was a bit of an urban dream, but it was I suppose in some ways focused by this particular story of a small bear child who had all these extraordinary adventures in the country.

Peter Wollen: What about The Chinese Magician?

Peter Greenaway: Well, my favorite character, and I want to bring her up in the next film - you see how I'm twisting your answers - was a character called Tiger Lilly.

Peter Wollen: That was his daughter.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed. But it was she, I suppose, the sort of proto potential sexual relationship between the bear child and Tiger Lilly always fascinated me.

Peter Wollen: Then you went to school, right? And that was hell on earth or delightful?

Peter Greenaway: No, I went to one of those typical English public schools, sort of sadomasochism, various forms of both spoken and unspoken homosexuality, fagging, violence, bullying, etc. etc. One of those places that I'm sure that the Duke of Edinburgh sent his son, and we know what happened to him. But I certainly didn't like it. It was too authoritarian, too rigid, too straight-jacketed. And I was deeply unhappy and very unpopular.

Peter Wollen: What did you take refuge in?

Peter Greenaway: Okay, we say so many things bad things about the English public school system, but they were deeply interested in the humanities so I learned Latin and Greek and of course had a very deep investigation certainly into English literature. So, we're moving away now of course from childhood literature to a very, very thorough grounding in everything that's represented by the notion of English letters.

Peter Wollen: And then why did you go to art school rather than university?

Peter Greenaway: Well, my father again I suppose being a businessman, hoping that his son would be able to find a sensible way of living with a decent relationship with his bank accountant, insisted of course that, or laid down certain parameters, that indeed I should go to university. I certainly got a place, but I rejected it. I was determined that that's not what I wanted to do. I had been encouraged by a whole series of people that I had some sort of talent that I could capitalize on. As being a draftsman or a painter, and though my attitude towards those particular subjects I suspect was deeply impractical, I decided what I wanted to do was to go to art school. Apr 30, 1997 4

Peter Greenaway: So, I broke with my family, moved to the other part of London, and indeed went to art school.

Peter Wollen: And what was that like?

Peter Greenaway: That was a relief. It was an extraordinary renaissance. Here, I was moving away from a single-sex school to a school where there were women. There was the opportunity to fulfill all the excitements that I'd anticipated in terms of drawing from the nude figure, from enormous amounts of moving away from a straitlaced situation again of an English public school education. So, it was an enormous relief. I can remember now how excited I was by that sense of relief on the very, very first day that I went there.

Peter Wollen: And did it include art history or was it-

Peter Greenaway: Yes. I suppose by contemporary standards it was very much based upon postimpressionism. All the lecturers tended to come from an enjoyment of a late Parisian sort of Vuillard-Bonnard background. Now, the favored English painter at that particular time was Sickert, and so we used to walk the corridors in derision of our tutors chanting, "Sick sick sick sick sick sick Sickert."

Peter Wollen: Great. This is at Walthamstow, but did you go onto the Slade or something? I don't know.

Peter Greenaway: No, I didn't. When I finished the four years I was determined then, I had had this Road to Damascus experience, that not only was I interested in still images but I was also interested in moving images. One particular afternoon, before in fact I got to art school, the public school I went to was very, very keen on cricket, and the fat boy in the class, a boy I'd hardly ever knew, suggested that because cricket had been rained off on this particular afternoon, suggested we should go to the local soft pornographic fleapit and see what was on offer.

Peter Greenaway: And in those days, and we're talking about the late 1950s, early 1960s, anything Swedish was softly pornographic. And the cinema manager, and certainly the fat boy and certainly me, had no inclination whatsoever that this particular afternoon was showing a certain Swedish film by a certain director called Ingmar Bergman, and that film was The Seventh Seal.

Peter Greenaway: And it was an absolute revelation. I of course had been to the cinema many, many times, but treated it very much like a social activity, as most adolescents in some senses do. I'd seen, of course, hundreds and hundreds of American language, English language cinema, but I suppose this was the first foreign language movie I'd ever seen. And it seemed to me to satisfy so many of the things that I was interested in. And I think a lot of people of my generation would turn to that particular film. I know Melvyn Bragg, for example, regarded it as an important part of his background in the industry.

Apr 30, 1997 5

Peter Wollen: Yeah, absolutely. I saw it when I was at university. It was a big deal. But there's a leap between that kind of cinephilia and thinking, "This is wonderful," and actually becoming a filmmaker. I mean, what were the steps that took you into filmmaking as such. I mean, for instance, nowadays in art school often filmmaking is taught. Was that the case or did you have to do it by yourself?

Peter Greenaway: Not at all. Again, this happened about six months before in fact I did go to art school, but as soon as I'd established myself and settled down and got used to the fact there were women around and all those other things, it was suggested that we should form one of those typical English film clubs of which there are so many. Or there certainly used to be so many once upon a time.

Peter Greenaway: So, I was responsible for organizing the program. And I suspect my education in that vein was extremely autodidactic. I never really understood perspectives of what was what. So, I managed to get all sorts of probably incredible bad movies, simply because not knowing the parameters. But I remember, I think three evenings of every single week in term time we rolled out the projector and we showed what to me were extraordinary foreign films. And I began at that particular time to really feel that somewhere in my life at some stage, again totally impractically, I wanted to be associated with the notions of cinema.

Peter Wollen: So, how did you set about it?

Peter Greenaway: Well, when I left art school I had various quite successful painting exhibitions. I realized that somehow there was still a gap. I wasn't really satisfying what I really wanted to do, and I thought it would be very, very important for me to see if I could make my ambitions in some senses practical. And I knew that certainly my paintings indicated, and my background, that I was interested in collating, collecting, organizing, and it seemed to be very imperative to me that I should try and make myself, turn myself if possible into a film editor.

Peter Greenaway: That happened by very, very slow degrees. I started very, very humbly in cutting rooms, cutting documentaries for BBC Thames Television. And ultimately I fetched up at a place which I know always causes a smile to flicker across people's faces. It was an institution called The Central Office of Information. It sounds very, very Politburo.

Peter Greenaway: It was in fact an extension of the English Crown Film Unit that had been responsible for so much documentary activity during the war years. It didn't quite know what it ought to do in peacetime, but we still, I suppose, were in the throes of losing the colonies. The colonies were becoming the Commonwealth. And the British Home Office were very keen to keep contact with all these countries, especially in India, especially in Australasia, especially in Africa, and they aided and abetted the setting up of individual television distribution situations by providing from London huge amounts of documentary material, magazine programs and documentaries about the British way of life.

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Peter Wollen: But then at some point you must have started to make films for yourself, rather than for the COI?

Peter Greenaway: Because the salary was good, because it was regular, because I had access to editing equipment, there was a way, indeed I suppose even from the first week of my establishment in the COI, I was able to afford small sums of money to find and buy stock and buy cameras. And indeed parallel with my professional activity, as it were, at the COI, I began to make very modest black and white, clockwork burlesque movies. Those were the days of 16 mill Bolex black and white film.

Peter Wollen: When you were doing that, what did you think you were doing? In your mind, who was going to see them and how did you set about getting-

Peter Greenaway: Well, I expected my audience then would probably be my assistant film editor, my brother, and his dog. Very, very audiences of course. I had no idea, I had no conception of who the audience would be. I had had a lot of association with the BFI. I had performed various temporary jobs with them in the distribution department. I was certainly very much aware of the very large BFI 16 mill archives, and that way I would be interested I suppose to many, many years of what could be described I suppose as underground filmmaking.

Peter Wollen: Yeah.

Peter Greenaway: I was certainly aware of American underground filmmaking of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. And that was particularly good example to marketing, because they could demonstrate that you could make very, very interesting films indeed on very, very slim resources.

Peter Wollen: Okay. Now, we've got to the BFI, maybe we can move onto a clip for a film that you did for the BFI, which is The Falls. But I just wanted to ask one more question before we did this, which I forgot to ask earlier. Did you collect things as a child?

Peter Greenaway: Yes, and that has never left me. I'm a great, great hoarder. Going back, for those of you who might have seen Drowning by Numbers, there is a small child in it by the name of Smut. And he certainly collects many, many things. He certainly collects dead bodies. He collects his corpses and he certainly is I suppose an amateur entomologist. That in some ways I suppose would relate to my father's discipline, because there was no way on earth I was going to be particularly interested directly in what my father was interested in, but you can understand the relationship of insects to birds. So, whereas he studied the birds, I studied what they ate.

Peter Wollen: Okay. Let's watch the clip from The Falls, which does indeed have bird reference in it.

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Peter Wollen: Okay, I think probably the time has come to ask you to tell me about Tulse Luper.

Peter Greenaway: Well, I'm sure we're all familiar with the notion of being very small and inventing a friend. Somebody who could made responsible for all domestic accidents. The person who sat apparently on the empty chair beside you at breakfast who was responsible for spilling the milk. And I suppose, though certainly I didn't call him Tulse Luper, that would be the origins.

Peter Greenaway: But I suppose during the period when I were making all these films at the COI, I was very painfully maybe putting together a sort of picture of what knowledge and filmmaking would be and how it would be particularly valuable to put it into a position so I could use it.

Peter Greenaway: And I was discovering all sorts of people who had a great influence, not only in terms of my education professionally, but also my own personal investigation. And there were a whole series of people like Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, certainly John Cage. I suspect also a bit later people who'd had a great literary influence on me, people like Borges. And maybe even later still the cameraman that I habitually used, Saskia Boddeke. Maybe also my father would probably be in there. And who knows, maybe The Chinese Magician out of Rupert Bear that you mentioned.

Peter Greenaway: So, it was an opportunity to construct a semi-fictional character with characteristics of all these people. And also at that particularly time I was far too nervous and shy to ever suggest that Peter Greenaway was responsible for anything, so I invented this alter-ego, which I suppose was an amalgam of all the things that I wished in some senses that I represented.

Peter Greenaway: This character Tulse Luper first appeared in a film called A Walk Through H, which actually predates The Falls that you see on the screen here. And very rapidly he created academic enemies. He had various sexual relations with certain people. Perhaps the most celebrated for me would be with somebody called Cissy Colpitts, who then turned up times three in a later movie called Drowning by Numbers.

Peter Wollen: She's in The Falls too.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed she is. There was a character called Van Houten, there was a man called Le Frenic. And I suppose I played lots of games with these people, both in an obvious way and maybe in a slightly indirect way, because the character of Van Houten did in fact turn up as a Dutchman in The Draftsman's contract, and did make an appearance indeed in A Zed and Two Noughts, as the keeper of the owls of the Amsterdam zoo.

Peter Greenaway: There is a way, of course, subsequent filmmaking pushed this mythology back and back and back. But I'm so delighted you asked me this question because the next film we're going to make is called The Tulse Luper

Apr 30, 1997 8

Suitcase, and is a huge attempt for me to go back to that certainly private mythology but I hope it has a lot of public connotations as well, and virtually, to make a film which is the history of this fictitious character.

Peter Wollen: Great. I'm really looking forward to it. The other question I wanted to ask was just a little bit more about the whole experimental film world. Because, in a way, you began within that world. Most of those films from this period, culminating in a way with The Falls, would be seen as experimental films. What kind of connections did you have with organizations like The Coop, or what knowledge did you have of filmmakers like Michael Snow or Hollis Frampton and so on?

Peter Greenaway: Sure. Well, those names of course I had come across in terms of the British Film Institute library. My great hero from that particular period would be Hollis Frampton, and I certainly tried very, very hard to see absolutely everything he'd ever done. There was a way a little later, when I'd established myself just a little more, that indeed I did pay a pilgrimage to Buffalo to see in fact if I could meet my hero. But unfortunately I arrived in Buffalo about four or five weeks before sadly Hollis died of cancer.

Peter Greenaway: I suppose there were three influences. First of all, there was very much the documentary tradition, which was very much present at the COI because after all their legacy had been picked up after the whole Grayson phenomenon of the notion of the British documentary. The second indeed was the one that I just mentioned, a somewhat uninformed but very excited brush with all these very, very interesting essentially American but also North European underground filmmakers. And third of course was the basic European art cinema, which was available in many, many cinemas in London in the early 1960s.

Peter Greenaway: And I think we all, well, a lot of us would look back to that period, that were a great many fascinating European film directors who were doing a lot of extraordinary work. I'm certainly old enough to have seen most of the Nouvelle Vague films as they came out. My enthusiasms for early Truffaut, which I have to admit never extended much beyond Jules Et Jim, but certainly those first three extraordinary movies. I made every effort making the pilgrimage again, not coming west but indeed going east and trying to find them before they ever came in London. So, I would make trips to Paris to go and catch them very, very early.

Peter Greenaway: And I thought certainly at this particular time that my cinema would be somewhere posited between Hollis Frampton and Alain Resnais. I don't know whether the circumstances of Hollis' films are particularly well- known now. He was a bit of a recherche taste even then I think. I'm sure that you knew all about him and there was a-

Peter Wollen: He was a major influence on me too.

Peter Greenaway: ... coterie of people in England who were deeply fascinated by him. But there was a certain sort of apocrypha about the gentleman too, because there was a way one always imagined his films perhaps far more easily than it was possible often to actually see them.

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Peter Wollen: That's very true. Which Resnais films?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I suppose it was the great trilogy. I have a feeling that we can all play this game. I feel certain there's a way in which all filmmakers are allowed three extraordinary films. Sometimes they're bunched very conveniently together, or sometimes of course you'd have to have a whole lifetime and there will be a way in which these films could be selected, maybe out of an oeuvre based upon 40 or 50 years.

Peter Greenaway: But for me Resnais' three great films all came together. Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Last Year in Marienbad, and Muriel.

Peter Wollen: And I read somewhere that when you came to make The Draughtman's Contract you screened films for the cast. Which ones were they?

Peter Greenaway: If I can remember accurately, there was Resnais' first rather surprising film, which is rather different from all his subsequent films. The [French], I think it was called.

Peter Wollen: No, that wasn't the first one.

Peter Greenaway: That wasn't the one?

Peter Wollen: That was later. Lion in the Streets may be the first.

Peter Greenaway: Well, the first one was that extraordinary fable about the woman who becomes pregnant and doesn't know who the father is.

Peter Wollen: Right.

Peter Greenaway: You know that film? No, we don't share that same vocabulary.

Peter Wollen: No, no, okay.

Peter Greenaway: Another one was certainly Fellini's film about the Italian lover. Who's that? We should all know who that is. You see how misty this becomes now?

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Peter Wollen: Yeah, I know, exactly. You needn't answer anymore.

Peter Greenaway: Exactly. Last Year in Marienbad certainly was on the list. Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris I think was on the list. And I think there were two more. The idea was, I suppose, because I've never certainly ventured into making a feature film ever before, although I suppose already on my filmography there must have been about 14 or 15 short films, I thought that by showing my cast and crew what I thought The Draughtman's contract should somehow be about, that we indeed did sit all our actors certainly, and one or two members of our crew, in front of these particular films.

Peter Greenaway: Even now, subsequently, what these people thought of these collection of often unrelated material is very, very difficult to say. I rather suspect that most of them fell asleep or left the cinema.

Peter Wollen: And what induced you to shift from these hybrids of documentary and structural experimental film to narrative, dramatic film with-

Peter Greenaway: Well-

Peter Wollen: ... scripts, costumes, etc. etc.?

Peter Greenaway: I'm sure that, Peter, both you and I know because we were both associated in perhaps different sorts of ways with the British Film Institute at that time, there was for me certainly a very enlightened gentleman, a man called Peter Sainsbury, who ran the British Film Experimental Fund.

Peter Greenaway: And he finally suggested, because he found the wherewithal to support me, for about three BFI movies, comparatively small sums of money like this one you've just seen a quote from, The Falls, and he suggested that I should maybe eschew my notions of deliberately perverting or subverting the ideas of the documentary. And I should make a film where people instead of talking to you, the audience, should talk to one another.

Peter Greenaway: And the result of that was the script of The Draughtman's Contract.

Peter Wollen: Okay, let's watch the next clip, which is from The Draughtman's Contract.

Peter Wollen: You did the drawings?

Peter Greenaway: I'm afraid so, yes. Apr 30, 1997 11

Peter Wollen: With a perspective grid?

Peter Greenaway: Yes, indeed. It was perhaps one of the most painful things to do for the whole of the film.

Peter Wollen: Just curiosity, but how long did it take?

Peter Greenaway: A long, long time indeed. The notion of the film revolves around the idea that one should, or an artist should, certainly in the context of the terms and the aesthetics of the film, to draw what one sees and not what one knows, and that's quite a difficult proposition to pursue. We did initially employ an architect draftsman, a gentleman now with a very large reputation at the Architectural Association, but I'm afraid he tended to draw what he knew rather than what he could see. So, since that rather spoiled the veracity of the plot I felt that I was obliged to do the drawings myself.

Peter Wollen: The words which are there, and which you've just re-quoted, about seeing and knowing and intelligence and painting, are those your ventriloquistic words, or are they dramatic fiction?

Peter Greenaway: No, I think they are related to my particular anxieties and disquiet about what I thought I was trying to do. I was always described at art school as being far too literary, which maybe is the English painterly disease. We remember famously how Francois Truffaut suggested how English cinema is a contradictory term. It perhaps could be sad that English painting is the contradictory term.

Peter Greenaway: I suppose the only true painters maybe who had an entirely imagistic as opposed to a literary vision, the only three painters perhaps we can offer the international painting establishment would be maybe Constable and Turner and possibly Francis Bacon. There are indeed many, many, many, many, many English painters, and certainly I tried to quote a lot of them in Drowning by Numbers. But our abilities, I suppose, very self-evidently are more to do with the production of a literary view of the world than they are particularly of the painterly view.

Peter Greenaway: And I suppose that I too had been, I suppose for all sorts of reasons of cultural baggage and background etc., was certainly accused at art school indeed of making my paintings far too literary. So, some of the criticisms, I suppose, that certainly my tutors made towards me, are invested in that particular dialog.

Peter Greenaway: I do think there's another situation too, that I tended to admire those people who certainly would have an intellectual approach to the business of the manufacture of imagery. And Western history I think, in terms of cultural painting, is littered with characters like Vasari and Reynolds. To a certain extent people like della Francesca and Poussin, who may be, certainly for me and of course for the general painterly establishment, in some senses are very important people.

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Peter Greenaway: But they perhaps do not really grab the human central excitement and the emotional association that maybe the even greater painters that have been responsible for the manufacture of images in the Western world. So, I'm sure that certainly Rembrandt for example has a greater ability to pull in terms of the manufacture of imagery, than should we say somebody indeed like Poussin. And I suppose that particular dilemma I felt in some ways would always be associated with me. So, the dialog, the little conversational piece that you've just seen on the film, would be my, I suppose, my contemplation of that particular situation.

Peter Wollen: And it's Duchamp too I guess?

Peter Greenaway: Certainly.

Peter Wollen: He's certainly very similar to that.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed. In the 20th century. Yes, absolutely.

Peter Wollen: I mean, confronted with the idea of narrative, what led you to this hybrid of the English detective story, the country house murder story, with the restoration comedy? How did that come about?

Peter Greenaway: Again, I suppose because of my background, which you so cleverly teased out of me at the beginnings of this little talk, I certainly would be interested in natural history and ecology. And that would mean an interest, I suppose, in the beginnings of English landscape gardening, which would have been happening about this time, 1694. I was interested in the way that the English landscape went through a big revolution from about this time right up till the middle of the next century.

Peter Greenaway: I was certainly interested in the country house culture and how it created pockets of provincial but quite intense, civilizing qualities. I was deeply interested, and 1694 is a very important year for English history. It seeds the beginnings of the Married Woman's Property Act, around which notions of female emancipation in some senses this film revolves. It's the year of the founding of the Bank of England, independence of the fiscal and the state apparatus. And it also sees the beginnings I suppose of the essentially big change from a Stuart, Frenchified and probably Catholic domination of the ideas of United Kingdom, with the whole new beginnings of the following century with associations of German and Dutch influence. So, all that particular history, which to some people might be extraordinarily academic, was of great fascination to me.

Peter Greenaway: But I was also interested in fruit symbolism. I was interested in how Catholics and Protestants treated their servants differently, in the way in which I suppose gardens as exteriors and the planning of English country houses as interiors was deeply related. And I could go on with this academic list. But what I wanted to do was to see if it was possible to make a multilayered film which would have an opportunity to contain all these particular ideas, but at heart essentially was one of those very familiar country house detective dramas. So, Apr 30, 1997 13 if you didn't want to know about color symbolism and you couldn't care less about how Roman Catholics treated their servants, there was a way in which there were various ways into this movie.

Peter Wollen: And the wigs.

Peter Greenaway: And indeed the wigs, yes. We piled them up and made them far taller than was ever historically ever possible.

Peter Wollen: In a way, the wigs actually leads me onto something else, which is to do with fashion. I mean, I detect right through your films an interest in fashion. I know you made a film about Zandra Rhodes. Gautier is going to come up in The Cook and The Thief. There's a couturier in The Pillow Book. Where's all that coming from?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I've always been a sucker ... Let's think of Seventh Seal. It's a historical drama. I've always been fascinated by the notion that cinema can very, very successfully apparently take you into places where it's absolutely impossible to be in reality.

Peter Greenaway: And I suppose the whole genre of the history movie, the movie that moves you through historical time, has always been a great, great fascination. I will go a long distance ... Correction. I used to go a long distance to see any historical film, however bad or indifferent it was. I'm excited by that notion of being able to conjure up, to recreate, to manufacture received notions of a foreign period, an exotic universe. I like the fact that it's almost like examining notions of science-fiction, so you can create parallel universes without in any way being particularly anecdotal about your present day existence.

Peter Greenaway: I suppose The Draughtman's Contract is about power politics. It's certainly about the gender war. And these phenomenon of course can exist well outside the particular conditions of a historical drama set in 1694.

Peter Greenaway: I am interested in how the world wants to treat itself, how it wants to be represented, how it's interesting in terms of fashion and stance and etiquette and local fashionable manners. I've always been interested in that particular I suppose ephemerality, if you wish, because it has so many markers about notions of representation again. How a particular community, or an individual or a person or a society, wants itself to be seen.

Peter Wollen: And-

Peter Greenaway: I notice by your raised eyebrows you don't think that's a very adequate answer?

Peter Wollen: Well, no, I thought it was a very full and comprehensive answer, but actually the specific thing I was interested in was what led you to do a film on Zandra Rhodes for instance? Apr 30, 1997 14

Peter Greenaway: Well, I suppose that was something to do with paying the mortgage, I admit, initially. A lot of the COI production was associated with ideas of the phenomenon that journalists called swinging London, the swinging sixties. Zandra Rhodes was a big popular figure associated with pop artists and the English cultural scene at that time. We were in fact, like all television series, very interested not just in one-offs but series, and Zandra Rhodes I think was going to be the flagship, pilot film to make a big discussion about notions of London fashion at that time. But, I mean, I have to admit that that was a received commission rather than an idea that initially came from me personally.

Peter Wollen: Because she has the same sort of exaggerated ... I was just curious if the things were connected. But I think we should move on towards the next clip. Television, I was going to ask about next. I mean, one thing about your career is you've worked across wide varieties of media. How did you come to be involved with television?

Peter Greenaway: Well, a lot of the products of the COI itself were often, as I suggested maybe a little earlier, often shown not in a cinema situation abroad but on television channels. A lot of the product I suppose inevitably was slowing moving, certainly in the five or six years or more that I spent at the COI, from the notion of film into TV. Channel 4 Television virtually was being set up about the the same time, early 1980s, as indeed The Draughtman's Contract was made.

Peter Greenaway: In fact, the BFI I think, and certainly I, was extremely grateful, since the budget for The Draughtman's Contract was getting larger and larger as we made the film, that Channel 4 Television, which had been set up in I think 1981, 1982, actually came in and helped us finally finish the film. And it was with all those excited new commissioning editors, who were I suppose enjoying the abilities for newfound freedoms in British television, and I was repeatedly offered various opportunities to make films within British television. Primarily, of course, Channel 4.

Peter Wollen: Which do you find you get more independence, in film or television?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I suppose in the area that I was working in, which didn't necessarily have to find a very intense equation with being commercially successful, there were certain sorts of freedoms. But that particular period in the early 1980s, with Channel 4 Television there did seem to be a great interest in a certain amount of risk-taking. And a lot of my commissions didn't come directly from the film department, but came from other departments. For example, there was a commissioning editor for sport who suggested we should get together and make a celebratory film about the British synchronized swimming company, who were about to come I think to the Los Angeles Games and come about 28th in the competition. I mean, it's rather curious that maybe an eccentric English filmmaker should be commissioned by the Minister of Sport, say to speak.

Peter Greenaway: Then there was a very good music department too in Channel 4 at those times, and we were very interested making connections with a whole series of music organizations in London. There was a very advanced and investigative theater called the Almeida, and it was their particular policy to invite certainly American composers to come to Europe and to play concerts there. And that was the excuse for me to be commissioned Apr 30, 1997 15 by Channel 4 Television to make a series which we called Four American Composers. One of my heroes, as I mentioned before, was certainly John Cage, and I certainly wanted to make a film about him. And they suggested again, like all television companies, "Let's have a series as opposed to one," and we ended up with making films about certainly John Cage, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley and Phillip Glass.

Peter Wollen: And who commissioned Dante's Inferno, which is the next clip?

Peter Greenaway: The commissioning editor of Special Documentary Programs. Again, an extraordinary, maybe rash opportunity. A gentleman called Michael Cousteau. He was incredibly long-suffering. The budgets again for this production grew and grew and grew and we spent ... I say we because there were two co-directors.

Peter Greenaway: There is an English painter called Tom Phillips who probably is about five or six years older than I am. He was responsible, I think, along with the American painter who settled in England, Ron Kitaj, R.B. Kitaj, for allowing me or permitting me great legitimacy in my particular interest in painting. And we paired up. Rather, I suppose, like two intellectuals playing with the gizmos, playing with the material, dabbling in the possibilities of a new language to make indeed, or to start making because it was never finished, an attempt to try and make a version of Dante's Inferno for television.

Peter Wollen: Great. Let's watch a clip from that.

Peter Wollen: Whose are the faces that are flipping past just in that very last-

Peter Greenaway: All my friends and enemies, and all the film critics that I ever knew.

Peter Wollen: Really? Consigned to hell? No.

Peter Greenaway: Well, why not? Ideal place for them. But you probably almost recognize Bob Peck who-

Peter Wollen: Yes, I did.

Peter Greenaway: ... perished miserably in Jurassic Park.

Peter Wollen: Yeah, I know, I did indeed. I turned him down for a part and told him to tell his agent that it was because he was in Jurassic Park, and I got this message back saying, "I never thought anyone would refuse me a part because I'd been in Jurassic Park." Anyway, that's-

Apr 30, 1997 16

Peter Greenaway: Well, I mean, I also have. Okay, let's be very bitchy. I asked Bob Peck to appear in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and he absolutely was livid that ever I should possibly consider him appearing in such a deeply amoral film.

Peter Wollen: Okay. That's-

Peter Greenaway: No wonder he went to Hollywood.

Peter Wollen: Exactly. To Hell, one might say.

Peter Greenaway: ... European literature. A huge compendium, a massive Encyclopedia. Maybe Dante was the last person in a sense that could represent everything that was in the world at any one given place. Certainly his place was Northern Italy, written around about the year 1300. So, there is a way that Dante's Inferno tells you about butchers, how to tie a baby's nappy, how to make love in 74 stages, how to reach God. It's an extraordinary compendium of everything that existed in the world at that one time. And we very, very ambitiously hoped to find a late 20th century equivalent for that.

Peter Wollen: When did CD Roms first appear?

Peter Greenaway: This is just a little too early for CD Roms I think.

Peter Wollen: So, that still wasn't-

Peter Greenaway: It wasn't really discussed in any form. I mean, obviously this would make ideal material. I mean, the next stage I suppose would be to continue these experiments, rework them, maybe we'd have to start all over again, and to make a presentation where the whole thing was so much more sympathetic to contemplation by an audience so that you an audience, or indeed any audience, could examine all this multiplicity of material in a way where the audience had the timeframe and it wasn't the responsibility of the director.

Peter Wollen: And how long did it take? That must have again taken quite long.

Peter Greenaway: Well, each canto, and there are 38 cantos I seem to remember, each canto took us about a month to make. We were making something like, I don't know, 30 seconds of film a day which was incredibly expensive. But the notion was that neither Tom Phillips nor I could possibly spend our entire lives illustrating Dante's Inferno, so the notion was that-

Apr 30, 1997 17

Peter Wollen: Why not?

Peter Greenaway: I mean, I have great problems myself retrospectively about the notion of illustration, which I feel a great sense of disquiet and anxiety about anyway. But the idea was that if we wouldn't stay with it, it would be handed over to a whole series of people who maybe had the same intensity, not only about the subject matter but also about the medium. And following 10 cantos after we finished were handed over to Raul Riaz who produced an entirely different viewpoint. Brian Eno was going to do 10. There were various other people who were suggested should become involved. Unfortunately, I think in the end, Channel 4 got thoroughly, how shall we say, frustrated by our particular machinations and interest. Although the whole series has not exactly been dropped, it's certainly been put very much into the cupboard for the moment.

Peter Wollen: And meanwhile, the filmmaking side of your career sort of left England at that point. How did that happen?

Peter Greenaway: Well, the intimations of that probably started much earlier, because after I'd shown The Draughtman's Contract at the Rotterdam Film Festival, a very young Dutch producer, a man called Kees Kasander. Came up to me with a most extraordinary proposition.

Peter Greenaway: He said that he and I should clear the decks of everything else that I was involved in, and settle down to make three pictures in three years. An extraordinary opportunity for somebody who was very much still at the beginnings of trying to understand what his interest was in cinema. I certainly didn't want to put all my eggs in one Dutch basket, but we indeed made one film together which was A Zed and Two Noughts. I then went away and worked with other producers. But then Mr. Kees Kasander came back again after we had finished making The Belly of an Architect, and offered his extraordinary offer all over again. And basically Kees Kasander and I have continued to work in tandem ever since.

Peter Wollen: And where was he coming from?

Peter Greenaway: He was the sort of understudy for the man called Hubert Ballst who used to run the Rotterdam Film Festival. I don't know what you thought about it either then or now, but I thought was one of the most exciting film festivals in Europe. It certainly catered for all sorts of alternative filmmaking activity, and was responsible for I suppose, "discovering," so many independent filmmakers.

Peter Wollen: This is an aside, but what do you feel about festivals in general? I have a friend called Artur Omar, who gave me a long lecture about how a new genre of film had appeared called the festival genre, which had its own rules and codes, and which festival audiences and juries recognized just as you would recognize a western or a gangster movie.

Peter Greenaway: I'm sure the parameters of his description are absolutely accurate. I'm sure both you and I know, certainly Apr 30, 1997 18 throughout the 80s and 90s, there were often young filmmakers who made one film and then spent their entire lives going from festival to festival with it tucked under their arm. They never ever touched base again, they never came back. They never made a second film either.

Peter Wollen: And you came back to England for The Cook and The Thief, which is going to lead us into the next clip. Was that a decision on your part, you wanted to come back to England, or was it by happenstance that that happened?

Peter Greenaway: Well, thanks to this Dutch producer there was a way I was introduced to a very European collection, or I suppose not just simply the crew but everybody else who was responsible for the manufacture and distribution of a film. So that basically our setup was bound very much around my major collaborator, who would be Sacha Vierny, a French cinema photographer.

Peter Wollen: He shot Marienbad?

Peter Greenaway: And also Belle de Jour. And also apparently, though he's very, very reluctant to admit it, he was in fact a minor part of the camera team way back on Cocteau's Orphee. So, he has an extremely long-

Peter Wollen: It's hell again, hell again.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed. But our design department was Dutch. Most of our grips and rigging crew were Belgian. We certainly had a lot of Dutch and French associates. So, we felt ourselves to be certainly not particularly English but very, very European, I have to say very, very quickly. At that particular time, it was much, much cheaper to make a movie in Holland than it was in England.

Peter Wollen: And The Cook was shot in studio?

Peter Greenaway: It was. It was shot at Elstree in London. Again, we needed, for those huge big open spaces, to have a very, very large studio indeed. Studios like that did not exist in Holland. Subsequently, we made Prospero's Books in a deserted oil tanker building establishment on the Rotterdam docks. But at that particular time we certainly needed a studio which would be suitable for all the English actors we were using, because you didn't want to spend huge sums of money on transporting actors around the world. And I think also there was one or two attractive tax incentives. So, we came back to England, and indeed made The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and & Her Lover in England.

Peter Wollen: Ok, let's see the next clip.

Apr 30, 1997 19

Peter Wollen: Thatcher. These are the Thatcher years. That anything to do with this?

Peter Greenaway: Sort of. An English critic once said that The Draughtman's Contract was strangely a film to begin the Thatcher years, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was strangely a film to end them. But I still think we have ... It's tomorrow I think isn't it, May the 1st, the English elections?

Peter Wollen: Yes, May Day.

Peter Greenaway: Still even until tomorrow Mrs. Thatcher's influence remains, and let's just hope tomorrow that will all finally change.

Peter Wollen: What led you to the restaurant setting?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I was interested I suppose in the notion of extreme cannibalism. When there is nothing left to eat in the world, we will end up eating one another. Again, I suppose, and I've noticed the manufacture of The Pillow Book has a very, very similar strategy. It discusses the metaphor, and then I suppose as a mourning we should discuss metaphor with a great sense of responsibility because it might often have ... Or create the circumstances where the metaphor becomes reality. And I suppose that really is basically the strategy of this movie. Halfway through, two thirds of the way through, discussion of ideas about cannibalism have the inevitable outcome of beginning real.

Peter Greenaway: And I suppose the circumstances again, under a different set of ideas, is the way in which The Pillow Book has been organized. There's one moment for me which is most significant in the film, is when Albert Spica picks up a book and says, "Does this book make money," which seemed to be for me exactly what was happening in Great Britain, and no doubt maybe all over the Western world in terms of personal greed and gratification, extreme forms of vulgarity and excessive, almost a Philistinism. Which I think was certainly part of the situation in terms of British culture and ideas through the latter part of the 1980s.

Peter Wollen: But your interest in the food chain goes way back before that. Where does that come from? It's in a lot of your films, this thing ... well, the food chain.

Peter Greenaway: Well, there are lots of comparisons to be made, and of course this goes way, way back in terms of Western culture, about sex and food, about copulation and digestion, about the anatomical parts which we basically use the same channels to do both functions. So, there's a way there are many, many metaphors that can be instantly changed.

Apr 30, 1997 20

Peter Greenaway: There is a way also that I've always been fascinated simply in pictorial terms about the notion of the table, all the way from The Last Supper and all its ramifications, right down to a simple humble painting like van Gough's The Potato Eaters. The notion of the table representing community, opportunity for people to be seen together, to display manners, to display their wealth and their social function.

Peter Greenaway: It is also, I suppose, at heart very, very interesting, that of all the paintings in Western culture that we can think of about tables, very few painters actually depict the sheer act of eating. Occasionally in great paintings, like maybe Veronese's Marriage at Cana, you will see one or two people picking their teeth and maybe one or two ladies drinking, but the actual approach of food to the mouth is not only quite difficult to paint but it also rather spoils the notion of portraiture. So, there's a nice irony there.

Peter Greenaway: In fact, if you examine all the many, many feastings and table paintings and table scenes in a lot of my movies, you will see it's more like as tableau vivant about the notion of eating and drinking, rather than the notion actually of digestion and mastication.

Peter Wollen: Yeah. I mean, actually to support that, I worked for a time for a left-wing political photo magazine called Seven Days, I don't know if you ever saw it. Of which Alexander Coben was the photo editor. And he always gave instructions to anyone going out to photograph, say a Tory MP, to photograph them when eating. The photographers were fanned out around the land to photograph villains eating.

Peter Wollen: It's basically the same idea. But I mean, just to get back to the food chain for a minute. The food chain is always presented as by nature hierarchal, X eats Y which eats ... Do you accept the idea that nature has that basic ... This is a philosophical question so I'm sorry but here we go. Do you accept the idea that nature has a hierarchy like that into it, or is it something which could be changed or which you would want to see changed? What's-

Peter Greenaway: I would certainly agree with that premise. The 1980s in England also saw the great sense of social habitat, notions of nouvelle cuisine, the way that certainly in England we don't really have a cuisine. We have some of the best restaurants in the world, but it's not really our particular food.

Peter Greenaway: And the whole notion of eating out and being seen to eat out, it was very much again part of that yuppie culture. Because basically English prefer to eat at home. It always reminds me of that Borgesian story about reversing the idea that whereas in the world we are prepared to eat in public but defecate in private, what about the reversal of that and see what would happen?

Peter Wollen: The other thing I wanted to ask about, well, two other things, is about singing begins to be important in this film. You've obviously got this interest, which seems to grow over time, in opera, and I wondered if you could say anything about that aspect of your interests?

Apr 30, 1997 21

Peter Greenaway: Well, do we really believe in the notion of silent cinema? Was there ever such a thing as silent cinema? Even those very, very early Lumiere films had some sort of musical accompaniment. And I've always been fascinated by the way in which we can organize the excitements of cinematic experience in terms of music and image.

Peter Greenaway: And I suppose there are very many examples, certainly in the movies that I've made, about trying to make those sorts of connections. A longstanding relationship with the English composer Michael Nyman, for example, we must have made 30, 35 films together, not just feature films.

Peter Greenaway: We'd always argued that composers and music for the most part had been very badly treated largely by the cinematic establishment, because there was always a way in which the image necessarily had to come first and the music was always an adjunct for decoration, for food and extra excitement after most of the strategies had been already organized.

Peter Greenaway: Michael Nyman and I certainly used to use, I suppose some people say now apocryphal relationship that Prokofiev had with Eisenstein in a film like Alexander Nevsky, so that we would organize our strategies in terms of music and image a long time before one single note was recorded in a recording studio, and certainly before one single frame was turned in the camera.

Peter Greenaway: I think the subsequent relationship certainly that we had was never, ever as good after The Draughtman's Contract, because you probably remember, certainly the BFI was never necessarily in a hurry to get the film finished. There was a lot of time to deliberate. But I think that that general premise would be always very important for us, to see if it was possible to find the ideal balance so that music didn't have a secondary or tertiary relationship to the image but was intrinsically related to it. I became more and more fascinated by that.

Peter Greenaway: I also I suppose had a lot of doubts about the idea what could be described as dead music in the cinema. So, the ideas of dead music would constantly want me to see if these sorts of ideas that I was using in a cinema could also be used on an opera stage, and I think that's very much been part and parcel of why I've been interested, certainly latterly, in the whole business of making operas.

Peter Greenaway: But the last reel of The Cook, His Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, is as I see it very, very operatic indeed. People don't sing but they do practically everything else, which is a condition I suppose of 19th century grand opera.

Peter Wollen: And opera, what about 20th century ... I mean, is your interest in opera basically in 19th century grand opera or in 20th century?

Peter Greenaway: Well, again a little schizophrenically, I am, certainly in terms of the last reel of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife Apr 30, 1997 22

& Her Lover. And certainly in The Baby of Macon which is very much deliberately organized on a typical Verde grand opera, which has three acts, two intervals, a prologue and a coda. And is organized much in real time and is also associated with those big characteristics of grand opera which associated with the notions of costume drama. All that is part and parcel The Baby of Macon.

Peter Greenaway: But in terms of my opera work I have, I wouldn't had a huge number of offers, to be able to participate in conventional opera. But I've always rejected those invitations which suggested that I might have something to add to Madame Butterfly. I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to add to Madame Butterfly.

Peter Greenaway: So, if I want to or wish to, or get the opportunity, to make opera in conventional opera house situations, it has to be essentially a brand-new work, working with a very contemporary composer. And of course the notions of opera that we have at the end of the 20th century are certainly somewhat different than notions of opera at the end of the 19th century.

Peter Wollen: Okay, let's move onto the next clip, which is from The Tempest.

Peter Wollen: Where did the list of names come from?

Peter Greenaway: I think the same categories before. All the people that I've ever known, all sorts of references that I wanted to make, recapitulations of previous movies.

Peter Wollen: Did I see Simone Rodier.

Peter Greenaway: You might very well have done, yes.

Peter Wollen: It just struck me as I tried to scan them. And Sir Gielgud, I mean, how did that come about?

Peter Greenaway: Well, working on a TV Dante, we had worked with Gielgud playing the part of Virgil. Because it took so long to make, there were many, many opportunities for conversations with Gielgud about all manner of different things. And it very, very soon came up that he was interested in making the possibilities, or considering the possibilities, of making what he thought, since he was quite convinced that Shakespeare wrote Prospero just for him, of the possibilities of making a film version of The Tempest.

Peter Greenaway: His great rival Laurence Olivier had already made three, or maybe shall we say two and a half performances on film that would last. Hamlet, Richard III. I would say the half was Othello. And since their lives had run in tandem for so long, he had a feeling that he wanted to put down some sort of performance to be remembered by. I think he'd discussed this proposition with a lot of people all around the world. Kieslowski I think had Apr 30, 1997 23 discussed it. He'd even discussed it with Bergman. I know for a time Derek Jarman and he had discussed The Propositions. For all sorts of reasons, some of them very, very practical, some to do with temperament, it never, ever happened. I discussed the proposition with my Dutch composer Kees Kasander, To see if it would be a valid proposition.

Peter Greenaway: And just to test the water I wrote, I think, a scenario about, I don't know, the first act I think of The Tempest. Discussed it with Gielgud and he seemed to be very intrigued by it. He's played the part, I think, at least 15 or 16 times. I think he played it first when he was very, very young, when he was about 23 or 24.

Peter Wollen: Did he play it the way in which he wanted it to be played? What was the relationship between you-

Peter Greenaway: I think it would be very, very difficult to try and persuade such a gentleman as John Gielgud to go against the grain of what he thought would be appropriate.

Peter Wollen: Did he talk to you about what underlay his interpretation of the part?

Peter Greenaway: We did discuss what he felt about the magic island, what his relationships should be towards Miranda, ideas of forgiveness and recapitulation, and all the grand themes that are present very much in The Tempest. He was particularly struck, of course, and this is something we capitalized on, that maybe The Tempest is the only play that seems apparently to have a direct autobiographical gesture at the very end when the character of Prospero turns to the audience and makes a farewell, not only in terms of his position in that play, but also a generalized farewell to the notions of theater anyway.

Peter Greenaway: So, we developed the idea of this triumvirate. We would concern ourselves with a strategy whereby Shakespeare, Gielgud and Prospero should all be the same man. Shakespeare's saying goodbye to the theater because this is, I think by common consent, Shakespeare's last play. Gielgud is saying goodbye to the theater. And of course Prospero is saying goodbye to the theater, as he understands it, in his position as being a royal figure. Indeed regulating, as it were, forcing a permanent exile in his position as being the Duke of Milan.

Peter Greenaway: So, this particular strategy is really the way in which controls the whole scenario for this particular version of the play. And we were at pains, of course, not to call it The Tempest, but to call it Prospero's Books. Because to certain English purists, we did something absolutely unforgivable, we introduced new material. As an account of that, a lot of English critics said in this particular version of The Tempest there was far too much Greenaway and not enough Shakespeare.

Peter Wollen: And how did you set about thinking the books?

Apr 30, 1997 24

Peter Greenaway: 1611 is supposed to be the second performance of The Tempest. I think 1603 is supposedly the time it was written. There is a suggestion that we are in, certainly in English terms, into the end of the general renaissance influence into the beginnings of mannerism, and there is a way that the notion of the academic studio is becoming very, very important.

Peter Greenaway: The idea of the Wunder Camera and the idea of the beginning of the first Europeans museums. So that the figure of Prospero is a great collator and organizer of information. So, almost certainly back in Milan he would have a library. And I think we legitimize our strategy because there are just two or three lines in the original Shakespearian text, which suggest that Gonzalo, his great friend, did dump in the bottom of the boat that brought them into exile a series of books. There are various mentions throughout The Tempest of Prospero's books, and the famous lines at the end about drowning his books.

Peter Greenaway: So, we tended to exaggerate or elaborate that, and to speculate what those books would be. We invited 24 books which ultimately contained from the position of Prospero all the world's knowledge on the one hand. But also it's calculable from the text to know that Miranda and Prospero spent 15 years on the island and he had to colonize it, he had to educate his daughter, he had to create a magic paradise for all the circumstances that were to happen afterwards.

Peter Greenaway: So, we invented a library of 24 books, which would not only respond to all the knowledge of that particular time, the early 17th century, but would also provide Prospero with the wherewithal to create the magic on the island. So, we virtually ran our list down all the different types of genre. There was a floral, there was a pornography, there was a book of mathematics, etc. etc. etc.

Peter Wollen: Again, I seem to matter reading somewhere you talking about the cook in terms of Jacobean revenge drama and John Ford and all that. And this one looks to me like a mask, and that was conscious I presume?

Peter Greenaway: Yes.

Peter Wollen: How did you think about that?

Peter Greenaway: Well, again the evidence that when the play was revised in 1611 for the marriage of James I's daughter, that this was really the beginning of the elaborate court mask as practiced by Inigo Jones and Ben Johnson at this particular time.

Peter Greenaway: And the whole of The Tempest is seen as one elaborate symbolic supporting the notion of divine right of kings, the ideas of James I's notion of where he was posited in a system of masks which were deeply symbolic and full of processions and etiquette and demonstrations of how the hierarchy of England, as seen by the Jacobeans, should be organized. Apr 30, 1997 25

Peter Greenaway: And so if you read the play under those sorts of circumstances, it can indeed be seen as one extraordinary, symbolic organization between the Gods and men, which can be associated very much with the ideas of dance, idealized movement, etiquette and ritual. And I think it's certainly our wish to promote and emphasize those particular characteristics in this film.

Peter Wollen: And how much time do you actually spend on research before you start writing a screenplay?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I'm sure you would agree with me that maybe research under certain circumstances are the last thing one should ever do, on the grounds that research entirely kills the imagination. So, I think the general premise that I would perform on would be basically to write the script without any research, so-called, certainly not any particular pouring over books in the British Museum. And then if we felt it absolutely necessary afterwards, then maybe check one or two of our facts.

Peter Greenaway: And I suppose that that particular process has been responsible for all the films. I suppose I have a great curiosity and interest, I have an avid ability to hold and retain information, and there is a way in which I certainly would like to use that. Despite the fact that Pauline Kael once suggested that I was a cultural omnivore who ate with his mouth open. I'm very, very keen that that sort of information, researched or non- researched, should make the fabric or the layering of these films.

Peter Wollen: I mean, how many books do you own?

Peter Greenaway: Oh, I suppose about 80,000 or 90,000.

Peter Wollen: I thought as much. There's a line running through from TV Dante through Prospero's Books to The Pillow Book. How would you describe the differences as you go along that line?

Peter Greenaway: Curiously, a sense of disenchantment about cinema, how it continually seemed to be unable to deal with so many excitements for the late 20th century mind. All the other things that were already happening in a very exciting way in terms of painting, gallery installation.

Peter Greenaway: I suppose the two big phenomenon, which often sound incredibly fashionable and you can be very dismissive about them, but notions of interactivity and multimedia which the cinema cannot handle. That on the one hand continually wanted me to take more and more risks in terms of utilizing a filmic vocabulary, and also embracing all the new technologies. But also turned to me in some senses away from maybe the limitations of what cinema seemed to be capable of, certainly within the confines of what I always described as the Casablanca syndrome cinema. And that would have led me to an examination of, again as we've intimated already, all sorts of activity outside of cinema in terms of making exhibitions and so on.

Apr 30, 1997 26

Peter Greenaway: My disenchantment still continues as of the moment, because I don't really think we've seen anything really exciting and radical in cinema for maybe 25 years or so now. I think the last experimenters, the last people to actually wish to widen out the potentiality of cinema vocabulary, you would have to go to maybe the Germans in the 1970s. The people like Fassbender, maybe early Wenders, those sorts of people.

Peter Greenaway: Indeed. Certainly my favorite still, again deeply unfashionable, is Herzog. And there is a way in which I think ever since then there has not really been any great new visual vocabulary in cinema. But despite this current pessimism, I am indeed extremely optimistic about what's going to happen next. I think the notion of a hundred years is probably about right. Most aesthetic technologies last about a hundred years before they are overhauled and revitalized by the possibility of new ideas, new thoughts, and indeed as is so very, very apparent in the whole history of the manufacture of imagery, the technology of making those images which are so essential for new revolutions.

Peter Wollen: And then leading into The Pillow Book. Actually, I wanted to say one thing. What about Zeidelberg?

Peter Greenaway: Yes. You know that phenomenon that there never is, or never can be, one film that doesn't offer you one nanosecond of excitement? That doesn't mean to say you've got to look at an awful lot of nanoseconds to somehow really create a total excitement about the phenomenon of cinema. My inspiration certainly for the last maybe eight or 10 years has certainly come from extra cinema activities.

Peter Greenaway: A lot of energy and excitement, I think currently, in terms of British art. Always certainly I've been deeply fascinating by what still photography and painting and literature is always doing and experimenting with. Because there is a way that cinema is a deeply, deeply conservative medium. We could say and excuse it and justify it by saying it apparently has to be so expensive. And certainly in some cases it's a huge compromise art because it involves so many collaborators.

Peter Greenaway: I'm never quite sure though that those two particular characteristics really excuses the fact that the movements, and the attitudes and the perspectives in cinema, have not been so exciting, for example, as in terms of other forms between 1895 and 1995. Look what has happened in literature. Look what's happened in music. Look what's happened in painting. In exactly the same period of time.

Peter Wollen: Let's have the last clip and then I guess we throw questioning open to everyone.

Speaker 23: I saw the other day in a reprint of interview with you, you said that Prospero's Books was supposed to be the first of a trilogy on similar themes. Is that still planned?

Peter Greenaway: Yes indeed. It only occurred after we were I suppose halfway through making the second part of the three

Apr 30, 1997 27 parts of this trilogy. So, the first part was Prospero's Books, uses and abuses of magic. Second, The Baby of Macon, uses and abuses of religion and superstition.

Peter Greenaway: And the third one was going to be called Agveganfelt. Don't worry too much about that title. You all remember Koyaanisqatsi which once upon a time was unpronounceable but now we can all pronounce it. The third one was called Agveganfelt and it was about the uses and abuses of war, sens de la qua. There was a way in which it became extremely difficult to make this third part. The Baby of Macon was absolutely smashed very, very severely in London, and certainly in some parts of Europe. It was dragged screaming and kicking out of the cinemas. Everybody detested the movie from the extreme right-wing press to the extreme liberal press.

Peter Greenaway: So, it was always going to be very, very difficult to find the money to pursue those sorts of ideas. The third film indeed was going to be again another exposition of my interest in the sense of the baroque 17th century, making all sorts of analogies about suspension of disbelief in Roman Catholicism and the suspension of disbelief in the cinema. And the story was basically about an anatomist in 1610, when certainly The 30 Years War was still devastating Europe, moving all the way I suppose from Scandinavia right across to Turkey, when the whole of Europe was covered in dead corpses. Not just corpses of soldiers because everybody was embroiled, male, female, young, old, Africans, members of all sorts of different armies were continually maneuvering backwards and forwards across Europe.

Peter Greenaway: And the story was about this young anatomist, who in 1610 still believed in the possibility that the human soul was a part of the physical body, maybe part of the cortex of the brain or like a spleen or the liver. And his fond, is somewhat naïve hope, was that if he could locate the soul he could possibly organize an operation in order to eradicate evil. So, you can see, full of metaphors as well as the literal concerns. But because all our movies are made for very, very small sums of money, it would be absolutely impossible to spend huge sums of money on making all these excellent dead bodies. I also would like the notion of making a film almost entirely in the dark, but you could see if I did make it in the dark maybe I could get away with a lot of things which full light of day would not allow me.

Peter Greenaway: I sincerely believe that it's the old men that basically, certainly in Western culture, have created the circumstances of war and sent the young men off to fight it. We also have in England a whole coterie of very, very good and elderly actors. Alec Guinness and Gielgud being but two. And I've always wanted to find a way of utilizing all these old talents who are very, very rarely used now.

Peter Greenaway: So, you can see the circumstances, the characteristics of the film. All the actors would be over 65, the entire film happens in the dark, and the subject is necrophilia. After the lack of critical and box office success of The Baby of Macon, extremely difficult to raise the money. But we certainly hope to make the film someday.

Speaker 24: I'm particularly interested in your creative process. You obviously do a tremendous amount of research in the property on the story and in the fine use of material you use in your work. But I'm very curious of your process about developing an idea and turning it into a script.

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Peter Greenaway: Well, I would like to think that I am interested in the notion of a cinema of ideas, and the ideas are always the prime reason for going on each journey of each film. If I could take some examples. The Belly of an Architect. There was a time, I think in the mid 1980s, when the English became obsessed with the notion of the responsibility of architects and architecture. An argument that it is said was most alive the last time after the Great Fire of London, when everybody wanted to have some say in how London should be rebuilt. And you probably know that into this debate in the 1980s entered Prince Charles, with all sorts of unfortunate, reactionary, very, very stupid comments.

Peter Greenaway: So, I wanted too, as a private individual, to engage in this debate, talk about the responsibilities of architecture etc. So, that was the general premise, but I'm not a polemicist, I don't want to be a documentary filmmaker. I want to discuss these ideas in an entertaining and narrative form, although latterly again I have great suspicions about use of narrative in the cinema. And therefore it was essential to find a character, to find a plot, to find a circumstance and to find a location.

Peter Greenaway: I suspect, since I am interested in classical architecture, and there's a concern I suppose with the horizontal and the vertical and notions of symmetry which are all part of the vocabulary, that having got the idea let's talk about architecture, the next thing is let's talk about classical architecture, where's the best place to find that? Let's go to Rome. Then I suppose an examination of Roman architecture, dividing it up according to the plan of the Seven Hills of Rome, several architectural periods, you can see how the notions of structuring begins to happen. From a completely different source, I was interested by the painting by Bronzino of Andrea Doria.

Peter Greenaway: There is a way in which I ought to be honest too about certain autobiographical incidents. When I went to Rome to publicize The Draughtman's Contract, I was struck down by a most appalling stomachache. I think since that stomachache vanished the very moment that I went to Da Vinci Airport and caught a plane home, it must have been psychosomatic in a case of nerves. But I was fascinated about the idea of a man having a stomachache in Rome. So, you can see again how these ideas are accumulating. I had a lot of material to play with. And gradually I identified also with a fact, another biographical detail, that my very large, fat father, who had an enormous belly, died of stomach cancer.

Peter Greenaway: So, here we again have all sorts of personal, autobiographical, general, theoretical ideas which gradually wove themselves into a film. When I felt ready and had I suppose considered at least in jottings on a few sheets of paper where I was at, then it was necessary to discuss the proposition with a producer. And if there was encouragement and indeed development money, then I would sit down maybe for two months and write the script. And I think that that generally processing, of course with variations, has been the way in which all the films have been engendered.

Speaker 25: Whenever I ... Excuse me. Whenever I see the films that you make, I feel a little bit challenged, or almost close to an idiot. The script contains a lot of information and images move fast and each frame has such a manicured and composed decoration, the stage. Any different director might spend 20 minutes with one frame that you just let it fly. I was wondering about the message behind this presentation. Apr 30, 1997 29

Peter Greenaway: Well, I certainly think that if one's going to invest a lot of patience and money and intelligence into a product which should be extremely, as I would see it, well-made, well-wrought, well-constructed, I would necessarily also feel that this product should be seen many, many times.

Peter Greenaway: So, I would like to invest matter energies in a highly repeatedly-viewable cinema. Cecil B. DeMille once said if you didn't understand everything in a film in one go the film was a failure. Well, rubbish. Absolute rubbish. It's perfectly reasonable and absolutely necessary to read poetry many, many times. It's viable and necessary to read a novel many times to get all of its nuances. And if you begin to consider what is necessary in order to understand music, then it is absolutely essential again to develop your own sensitivities towards it, in some senses to come halfway, to develop a full understanding of the artifact.

Peter Greenaway: I'm sure that it's all our experiences that the works of art that have really had a big effect on us, we in a sense have made a halfway journey towards it. We have worked at it and it has continued to reward us continuously afterwards. I would like to imagine that we could use cinema under the same sorts of circumstances. It would be extremely facetious of me to suggest of course if you come see the film many, many times, that must also be good for the box office. That is not my intention.

Peter Greenaway: I would certainly like to respond and to make films in the way that I myself have enjoyed other people's films. And I think in terms also of the way in which television and all the other post-television arts are now encouraging a diversity of information, a great potential for discussing metaphor and literal meaning, there is a way in which the post-television arts in some senses are educating us into new ways of looking at visual information. So, I would make no apology for the density of information. I would certainly make no apology for the way in which they are structured. I would just ask your sympathy, the sympathy of audiences, to regard this as the proposition of an artifact which should very reasonably be viewed many, many times.

Bruce jenkins: Yeah, and from that I'm going to take one more question.

Peter Wollen: Well, that's really good, I've got real power here. The one who's furthest back? Yeah, you.

Speaker 26: Well, this is a philosophical question, forgive me for this. How would you describe the relationship between what we've been calling your literary imagination and all for this interest that you clearly have in layered images? Is there some way to connect those two things?

Peter Greenaway: Well, I suppose this last good question really does give me a space for my favorite platform. I do not think we have seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen a hundred-year prologue. We have seen a hundred years of illustrated text. So, whether your name is Scorsese or Spielberg or Godard of Wenders, you have to have a text verse before you can have an image. We have just seen the travesty of The English Patient. What a waste of time, money and effort that was.

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Peter Greenaway: Why do we feel so culturally insecure about cinema that we constantly have to go to the bookshop for our inspiration? Why can't we make true cinema-cinema which operates completely from ground zero. And I suppose The Pillow Book is for me yet another example or possibility to try and find new ways of making a reinvention of cinema. The proposition behind The Pillow Book is this notion of the Japanese or oriental hieroglyph, which is both an image and a text at one and the self same time. The history of Japanese painting is almost entirely analogous to the history of Japanese literature. And certainly in the West we have this sort of fortress separation by the notion that painting is here and literature is here, and surely the cinema would be the ideal place in which to bring those two things together.

Peter Greenaway: So, this is the second film I've made very deliberately which has the word book in its title. Prospero's Books and now The Pillow Book. If only to draw intense attention to what is happening in terms of what we think cinema is all about. And of course this film is redolent of the uses of text and image, and the connections, and the propositions about the activities of the primacy of the text versus the primacy of the image. It is an essay about the misalignment, if you like, about the conditions in some senses of the cinema we've arrived at after a hundred years.

Peter Wollen: Thank you.

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