E-insight

Peter Greenaway Takes On Morality, Genitalia, and The Thirty Years War

Brandon Judell

---

(indieWIRE/5.26.2000) –If you have trouble following a Kevin Smith caper, by all means drive full speed away from a Peter Greenaway offering. This most intelligent of directors readily creates features that entwine the more complex elements of mathematics, science, architecture, psychology, philsophy, film history, art and especially the metaphysical. Luckily, he also relishes with great glee sex and romance. Otherwise, his audiences would be totally comprised of Film Forum subscribers, film festival cognoscenti, and aging deconstructionists.His latest effort, “8 1/2 Women” (Lions Gate Films) besides being a deliciously immoral tribute to the Fellini classic “8-1/2,” is an often hilarious study of men’s sexual fantasies about women. The father/son protagonists here soon learn that wealth, whiteness, and the penis only wield so much power, and the power game can be surprisingly turned against them with unexpected results.indieWIRE caught up with the director of “Darwin” (1993), “M is for Man Music,” “Mozart” (1991), “Drowning by Numbers” (1988), and “The Belly of an Architect” (1987) at the Paramount Hotel coffee shop in New York City.indieWIRE: Your films deal a lot with “what is life?” especially in “A Zed and Two Naughts” (1985) with its whole obsession with decay. Nowadays, in such a film as “American Psycho” and the novels of Dennis Cooper, people are being sliced open in search of their souls. The heroes here are looking a for a cure to their own and society’s soullessness. The answer, they feel, maybe just below the flesh. Have you wondered where the soul is?

Peter Greenaway: Well, you’re obviously primed to ask exactly the right questions. I made a trilogy of films of which the third part is incomplete, and it was about the self-same subject. The trilogy of films was “Prospero’s Books” (1991) about the uses and abuses of wisdom, the “Baby of Macon” (1993) which is about uses and abuses of religion, then there was a film which is basically about necrophilia and was about searching the soul.

It is interesting in European history how the soul has traveled from the belly where it used to be with the Romans up to the heart where it was with the Christians to up here in the sort of I suppose the 19th century post-ancien r間ime. Now presumably its up here somewhere and its outside the body all together. But the story was set during the Thirty Years War when Europe was filled with corpses, and an anatomist is looking for the soul. He still believes that the soul could physically be an organ like a spleen or part of the brain. He’s determined to find the seat of the soul as a physical organ and possibly to be able to eradicate evil by creating some form of manipulation or experiment or physical operation on it. But people around him are also very keen to help him find the soul, so they trick him. Men and women are tricking him into finding the soul, but I won’t elaborate.

I was also interested in necrophilia. and I also wanted to make a film, since it was set during the Thirty Years War, about the problems of war. And since war is conducted by old men, and we have an extraordinary number of ancient very, very good male actors in England, I wanted to utilize them. So my entire cast was over 65, and because we would have problems with all the prosthetics because it’s difficult opening up all these corpses with the sort of budgets that we have, most of the film took place in the dark. So you can imagine what my financiers thought about a film about necrophilia with all the actors are over 65, and the entire film happening in the dark. So we have not yet found the money to make it. But it’s on the drawing board, and we’ll make it sooner or later.

iW: Maybe we can ask the kind folk reading this interview to donate to the project.

Greenaway: Their bodies?

iW: Bodies or money. Moving on to your current release, the hero, the father, in “8 1/2 Women” is 55. I’m not sure if you’re near that age.

Greenaway: I’m 57.

iW: You describe Philip Emmenthal in your published screenplay as a very handsome man which describes you more than the actor you cast in the part. So how autobiographical is the film?

Greenaway: I’m basically an English, London-born and bred bourgeois. There’s a way, of course I suppose, if we create an alter-ego, he’ll always be larger than life than we would see ourselves. So the circumstances and the adventures that my alter-ego would be subjected to would be far more fantastic than I could ever create for myself. It’s the Fellini/Mastroianni situation maybe. Fellini couldn’t fuck all the women he wanted to so he sent Mastroianni out to do it instead.

iW: Jeanne Moreau once said, getting John Frankenheimer in trouble at the time when she was making his film “The Train,” that she has affairs with all of her directors.

Greenaway: Uhhmmmm.

iW: Has that situation happened to you?

Greenaway: Mmmmm. By no means as large as the circumstances that some of my characters would suggest.

iW: There are scenes in “8 1/2 Women” that are quite shocking.

Greenaway: Like what?

iW: Well, first of all, the father and son here have sex together. Then there’s a speech in the published script (Dis Voir, 1999; $19.95) which I’m not certain made it into the final film, about how a character loves vaginas and wishes he could cut them off so he could look at them whenever he wanted to. (Philip, after one of “his women” commits suicide: “It’s a terrible waste of the most beautiful vagina I have ever seen. That’s not true. Palmira’s is bolder and bigger and more embracing and smells like heaven. And grips me like an octopus. I wonder if you could cut it out and keep it? In a fridge perhaps . . . “)

Greenaway: That didn’t make it into the film, no.

iW: In a sense these scenes shouldn’t be quite so shocking in the year 2000 but we’re奺specially in America, every time an actress has a nude scene and there’s a press conference, the question is always asked, “What was it like playing without your clothes on?” So do you find it odd that the idea of relishing sex so openly as you do is considered unconventional or at times offensive by so many?

Greenaway: I presume you are asking that rhetorically because you know the answers. Your puritanical background. You’re Protestant, maybe Calvinistic sort of, concerns for all those sorts of difficult problems that you have. The way that I would answer those sorts of questions is that I’m a European. I suppose we would see these things from a different perspective. I was trained as a painter. I’m very familiar with the nude body, masculine and feminine. I do I suppose have a soapbox position, and I want to be certain that the human body is in the center of the frame. Its physicality is important and is always very, very strongly positive because I think that that physicality would begin to lose perspective over all the other senses. So these are almost polemical positions as well as I suppose positions of enormous personal curiosity about gender situations and gender politics.

iW: I’m not sure if you saw Lars von Trier’s “The Idiots” where all of the penises of his actors are blocked out with black rectangles. With you, penises are just a normal thing. There’s a great speech here where the father says how the penis inspired him to become an architect. (Philip: “Contemplating my father’s prick, I often think that was how I got interested in engineering奣he penis — if you think about it — is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable — cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive — practically every engineering characteristic — towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships — no man-made engineering structure to match it”). Did the penis inspire you to become a director?

Greenaway: (laughter) Well, again a sense of irony. Well, this film has irritated and exacerbated a lot of people because of its sort of up-front male sexual fantasy but I think if you’re going to deal in male sexual fantasy, you better come out with it. You better be there because we have organized, for example, nine sexual male stereotypes which are pretty frank in their concerns: Wishing to fuck a nun, wishing to fuck a woman who’s always astride a horse奅tcetera. Etcetera. I suppose it’s deeply politically incorrect to even imagine a scenario where two men, leave alone a father and his son, have the means to create a private bordello which is deeply妛hich should not be considered in civilized circumstances. Though again it might be a sexual dream by either or both sexes.

iW: All the men in your films tend to be normal or well-endowed. One would think that if you were a director with a very small penis, none of this male nudity would be so easily bandied about.

Greenaway: You think so?

iW: Yes, one gets the sense from your films’ sensibilities that you must be very satisfactorily endowed.

Greenaway: I feel very comfortable about discussing sexual matters under these circumstances in context. I suppose also I’ve created for myself now a platform on a rostrum whereby the confidence grows picture by picture by picture. The very fact that you are asking me these questions suggests there’s a legitimacy which is perfectly possible to discuss. Where speaking with other directors under other circumstances, it might be more difficult to make that as an open subject. I suppose on another level, I’m often irritated that, basically, certainly should we say Hollywood orthodox cinema deals in nudity primarily from the point of the view of the female body and she has to be aged between 16 and 30. What happens to the rest of us? What happens to the whole mass of man/female, masculine/feminine kind who do not get represented in this context? We ought to be there along with everybody else.

iW: How do you react to charges of misogyny in your films? Do they bother you?

Greenaway: Well, there’s a thin edge all the time. I suppose you’ve got to be very, careful how to play it. I remember in “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1989), which might be a film you saw, there is a way in which the Helen Mirren character certainly ends up literally and metaphorically on top. She’s a victor but she has to be incredibly humiliated in order to get there. Now is my sense of humiliating Helen Mirren part of a misogynist plot or is it a natural path taken in order for us to reach closure. I would of course fall down heavily on the second part of that.

iW: That film spoiled a date of mine. It’s definitely not a first date movie I found out the hard way.

Greenaway: (laughs)

iW: In “The Pillow Book” (1996), you treat homosexuality and bisexuality so naturally, so wonderfully. Few other directors would be capable of making these acts seem so natural, such a part of everyday life. Is that because anything dealing with sex is normal to you?

Greenaway: Yes, indeed. Could I pick up on how you talked about perversity? I mean what is perversity?

iW: Things your parents don’t want you to do.

Greenaway: (Laughs) The other curious comment often made which surprised about me about American commentators is how they regard me as “fetishistic.” I can see by the way they use the word, it has deep in their minds pejorative overtones. But why should we believe that fetishism is pejorative? Why would an American think that fetishism is pejorative?

iW: We’re just a very uptight nation. We’re quite afraid of sex.

Greenaway: Why is this? We can talk about inherited Puritanism and the pilgrim fathers and the values of the family and so on, but it still doesn’t really answer the question.

iW: Well, our ancestors came here supposedly to separate religion and state, and they failed. And just as long as religion is involved?/B>

Greenaway: But that was such a long time ago.

iW: Edmund White once said that Frenchmen think we Americans are crazy because 3/4 of our population insist they talk to God. So we really believe in sin. Maybe sin makes sex more pleasurable to folks when they think they will be punished for doing the nasty.

Greenaway: Maybe.

iW: Well, I want to thank you for?/B>

Greenaway: It’s been my pleasure.

[Brandon Judell is a regular contributor and critic for indieWIRE. He has been a contributing editor to Detour since 1992 and also contributed articles to The Village Voice, The New York Daily News, FILMMAKER Magazine, The Advocate and Prevention's Guide to Weight Loss.]

————

Peter Greenaway, a controversial director/artist. One of the three directors among Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock whom I respect and admire.

—————————–

E-Insight, 2007