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.