Peter Greenaway"s agreement with genocide Film

Playing with genocide ... Peter Greenaway. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

"I don"t know majority about you," says Peter Greenaway, sipping his packet tea, "but I do know dual things. You were conceived, dual people did fuck, and I"m unequivocally contemptible but you"re going to die. Everything else about you is negotiable."

Nightwatching Production year: 2007 Directors: Peter Greenaway Cast: Eva Birthistle, Jodhi May, Martin Freeman, Natalie Press More on this movie

Negligible, too. For Greenaway, there"s sex and there"s genocide and "what else is there to speak about?" He believes, he continues, as loose as if presaging sleet tomorrow, "that all sacrament is about genocide and art"s about life. Religion is there to say: hey, you don"t have to be concerned – there"s an afterlife. Culture represents the conflicting of that – sex. A unequivocally foolish Freudian approach of seeking at it, but one is certain and one is negative. Especially conflicting people similar to you. All religions have regularly hated females."

Steam billows up from the crater in to his face. He looks half David Attenborough, breath fogging the lens as he explores the Arctic (he has the same energy, the same radiant curiosity), half Chris Tarrant, rising from a clouded cover of dry ice.

We"re in a cafeteria on a grand, slightly wet block in Amsterdam; Lady in Red on a loop, sausages on the menu. Greenaway, 67, lives circuitously with a entertainment executive called Saskia and their dual immature young kids – he additionally has integrate of grownup daughters from a prior matrimony to Carol, a potter. Looming conflicting is the Rijksmuseum, of that Greenaway has only since me a first-class tour, embracing the role with relish: rolling his r"s, spitting his t"s, hammering good low cleaves in between each syllable. Tourists stop and goggle, not indispensably at the Vermeers.

We wound up at The Night Watch, Rembrandt"s musket-heavy board and the theme of Greenaway"s ultimate film, Nightwatching. It"s a sort of Renaissance-era CSI (a show he admires; he"s additionally a Midsomer Murders fan) questioning the puzzles in the portrayal itself and the poser of the artist"s remarkable tumble in to practical penury. Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: infrequently trustworthy and mostly nude.

In actuality Nightwatching is rather some-more required than majority of his behind catalogue. It"s an simply eatable hearing of – yep, sex and genocide – and Greenaway"s alternative key concerns: painting, snobbery, conspiracy. It"s the ultimate in an ongoing plan to unpick 9 art masterpieces by movies and in attendance installations. He"s already knocked off The Last Supper and The Marriage at Cana ("Which I think is the marriage of Christ"). The motherlode is Michelangelo"s Last Judgment. Talks, he says, are underway with the Vatican.

The Night Watch, he reckons, is the initial work of genuine cinema, on comment of Rembrandt"s strategy of synthetic light. Though were Rembrandt around today, "he would have been sharpened on holograms. He would be post-post-James Cameron." He shakes his head. "All unequivocally inestimable artists, creators, have make use of of the record of their time and anybody who doesn"t becomes rught afar a fossil."

In Greenaway"s case, that equates to relocating towards "feature movie as essay. Like Montaigne. It"s majority some-more discursive. It doesn"t cling to on to a mental account and it"s not impressionistic. I don"t wish to take you anywhere. It"s not a block of escapism."

At 67, Greenaway is no longer meddlesome in motion picture per se – it"s a half-dead middle squandered by receiving the cues from books, "telling time to go to bed stories for adults. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are with pictures books. Not cinema. I wish to be a budding creator. As each self-regarding artist should do."

He believes motion picture needs to figure out a approach to get out of the dim ("Man"s not nocturnal"), get absolved of the frame, and the camera, too. "We have a motion picture of what we see, not what we think." Until that happens, though, he"s still creation films. And still, apparently, eager by their possibilities. He talks as majority about dual alternative drive-in theatre he has in the tube as he does Nightwatching: one about Eisenstein losing his decency in Mexico, an additional – "my first, real, dyed-in-the-wool pornography" – about a 17th century Dutch engraver. He fishes a postcard from his blazer pocket. It"s an additional Rijksmuseum highlight, this time by Hendrik Goltzius. "Here you can see Lot and his dual daughters; this is a couple of mins prior to they fuck him in sequence to furnish a delay of the human race."

Why does he do so much? "Maybe it"s a hunger. A abhorrence of the dull space. Without wishing even remotely to stir you, I"m concerned in twenty-six projects at the impulse all over the world. It"s a stately event to make use of being an artist."

Greenaway is an incorrigible self-promoter, perpetually ready with a fusillade of stats about how majority people he VJ"d in front of in Gdansk, or have seen The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. There will regularly be, he says, "people who transport thousands of miles to see a Greenaway film. And I"m still portrayal – I"ve got a big vaunt entrance up in Milan soon. And that"s even some-more private."

Yet it is on show to the public? "Yes. Well, do you think a chairman who keeps a diary keeps it for himself? Anybody who writes a diary insists it contingency be review by someone else. So if I"m creation unequivocally in isolation drive-in theatre I wish people to see them; of march I do."

There"s a tenderness underneath the swagger. In England, at least, Greenaway contingency be his own cheerleader. He"s come underneath conflict from his peers; even a little of his defenders validate their praise. He"s additionally had a severe press review in a lot of interviews. He suggests assorted explanations: since he"s a jack of all trades, not a specialist. Because he"s not Oxbridge. Because the English are "textually disposed … and so those who rehearse the picture are regarded as not kosher." He cites an fan in undervaluation: RB Kitaj, an additional artist of ideas. "He had a big vaunt in Tate 10 years ago and he was positively excoriated by people similar to you since he did your pursuit so majority improved than you can. He accepted it so majority some-more than you did."

He"s happy in Holland. He likes the miss of snobbery, the openness, the freedom. "For a prolonged time right afar they"ve been means to speak about homosexuality, termination and euthanasia at the breakfast table. Elsewhere people spin afar in annoyance or run for the hills." He is, he says, formulation to take value of the leisure afforded and kill himself when he"s 80. "My youngest daughter will be twenty-one so I can see her to full adulthood. Why would it be sad? I"ve got fourteen years left. They contend the majority profitable thing about genocide is that you never know when it"s going to happen. But I think this a curse. I think if we knew we"d have majority improved have make use of of of life."

To a little extent, this self-murder plan is an additional e.g. of his zeal to be at the slicing corner – "I think unequivocally shortly we"re all going to have to severely plead mandatory euthanasia." But it"s additionally nobler. He"s an ideas man to the end, who"s penetrating to put them in to make use of – and not only in film. He has a genuine clarity of responsibility.

"I"ve had a illusory hold up and I"m still enjoying it and am an intensely happy man, but there has to be a trade-off somewhere. I"m a Darwinian. All I can think is that we"re here to fuck, to procreate. And we"re incredibly focused towards it. All the novel and radio is pulling us towards it. But I upheld on my genes a prolonged time ago, so I have to clear my place in the human competition a little alternative way."

You might have to prepare up a role in hold up for yourself "since we"ve thrown afar God and Satan and Freud", but he"s devout about the prerequisite of you do so. "I"m not here to fool around tiddlywinks and I don"t think you are either."

He"s off shortly after, striding opposite the block in his thick pinstripes, sepulchral in to his mobile, ripping to crack on with those twenty-six projects whilst he"s still got the time.

• Nightwatching is expelled on twenty-six March. Peter Greenaway will be receiving piece in a QA for Nightwatching at the ICA in London on twenty-eight March.

• This is a longer version of the talk published in FilmMusic.