Peter Greenaway is not a face to normally be found at a creative documentary festival like International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
However, the director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989) and A Zed And Two Noughts (1985), both screening at the festival as part of a Greenaway retrospective, has always blurred genre boundaries.
His work combines elements of art history, anthropology and magical realism - and he has made both documentaries and mockumentaries. Greenaway lives in the Netherlands and has strong Dutch connections. Perhaps, then, his presence isn’t such a surprise.
As part of the retrospective, the festival is also screening Greenaway’s new film, Walking To Paris, the distribution of which has been held up by rights issues. His next project is Lucca Mortis, starring Dustin Hoffman, which is set to shoot in Italy later this month.
He spoke with Screen ahead of an on- stage talk with IDFA festival director Orwa Nyrabia on November 12.
What lured you to IDFA?
It was a bit of a surprise to me [to be invited to IDFA]. If I have a reputation at all, it is as a maker of feature films. But my early beginnings were as a film editor. I used to work for an institution in London called the COI, the Central Office of Information. It sounds like a Russian politburo. It was really a purveyor of images and ideas about the British way of life. We are talking about the 1960s and early 70s. I learned my craft and took on more and more directing jobs. I was both editor and director of propaganda for the British way of life from Concorde to the Beatles.
Did some of these films have a Greenaway stamp?
I did conduct a somewhat schizophrenic activity. I had a very young family. I needed to earn money. The earnings from film editing were reasonable. They always put a bottle of white wine on the table so to speak, very bourgeois. But I also used the money from the wages in order to promote my own particular fascinations. There was a connection between the two. I was always interested in film as propaganda and I made a lot of what have been described as ‘mockumentaries’ trying to convince you of certain things.
My calling card was a very long film, about three and a half hours long, called The Falls (1980) which was a consideration of facts and fiction, false ideas and true ideas. There was a time when I made two films simultaneously. One [1980s’ Act Of God] was about people struck by lightning who survived to tell the tale and the other [The Falls] was this complete fiction based on this society called the VUE, the Violent Unknown Event, which discussed the relationship between birds and civilisation in general. The curiosity was that a large number of people thought the film about people being struck by lightning was all fiction and the vast encyclopaedia about man’s relationship with birds was fact. Of course, the opposite was true.
How do you believe you fit into British cinema?
My concerns are often very eccentric, very privatised. I was trained initially as a painter. I still like to believe that I make cinema very much involved in the visual image. It is my contention that we [in the UK] have a cinema organised basically on questions of text. Curiously, we have a writer’s cinema. You know and I know that practically every producer you can think of has to have a text before he can find the money to make a series of images. That to me is a great irony, an irony I constantly play with.
Do you feel you are now an honorary Dutch man?
I am married to a Dutch woman. I have Dutch children. I live in Amsterdam and we have a small cottage also on the North Atlantic coast. Landscape in Holland is extremely flat. Most of it is below sea level…I have grown to rather enjoy the Dutch flat landscape. The Dutch are an extremely civilised people with a great sense of democracy. I thoroughly enjoy living here.
Tell us about your new film, Walking to Paris, which follows the journey from Romania to Paris of Constantin Brâncuși.
The whole film has been finished. There is a 120-minute cutting copy of which I am completely satisfied. It is the story of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși who in his early years wanted very much to become a member of the international community of sculptors. He wanted to go to Paris where everybody was at that time, Modigliani was there and it was the early days of Picasso. His father was a poor shepherd. They had no money. They couldn’t even afford train tickets and so he walked.
My idea was to follow Brâncuși as a young man walking all the way from central Romania to Paris. It took him approximately a year and a half. It’s about 2,000 miles. He tended to avoid the major cities and walked in rather obscure places. We completed the film over about two years, stopping and starting. The film was completed to my satisfaction…and then we had three separate co-producers, one in Switzerland, one in Italy and one in France. Inevitably, there were issues about collaboration and a lot of squabbling went on…ultimately when I finally finished making the cut copy, it ended up in laboratories in Rome where it still is now. It is sitting there waiting to be post-produced.
What are you up to now?
While you are speaking to me, I am in the city of Lucca which is in Tuscany. In about two weeks’ time, we are about start a new feature film which is called Lucca Mortis and which has Dustin Hoffman as its central figure. The film is very much about the modern condition and notions of death and dying. A group of Americans go to the city of Lucca searching for the origins of the family background of the central figure.
Who is Dustin Hoffman playing?
He is playing the character of Jacob. If you know your bible, you know Jacob fought with the angels. In a curious autobiographical way, it is me fighting with the angels.
Was Morgan Freeman originally involved with the project?
Yes, once upon a time, but we changed producers. The finance became richer and richer. It is quite an expensive movie and so now we are using the very, very exciting possibilities of working with Dustin Hoffman.
Who are the producers?
They’re a group called Facing East. They have a lot of connections indeed with China and the Far East. Our financing is American, Swiss and indeed Chinese.
And you’re all set to go in two weeks?
Well, filmmaking is always subject to issues and problems. But the idea is that we start turning the camera over in about two weeks’ time.
No comments yet