peter greenaway
page four

Are there aesthetic considerations as well as technological ones when deciding between film and video hardware?

Well again, to use that old analogy, I probably had lots of cultural snobbisms about cinema; cinema had a vocabulary which had all the letters of the alphabet, all the vowels and all the consonants, and I used to have this feeling that television had only the vowels. But it was a poor analogy, because I think that television has its own alphabet, albeit of a different nature.

My disappointments with the medium of televsision occurred when I first saw The Draughtman's Contract on TV. There's really no point in me moaning about this, because obviously most of my audience is a television audience. This is ironic, since I want to make "big cinema," for the big silver screen, which is bigger and noisier than you are. Inevitably, my movies are going to be seen by more people on television than they ever would be in the cinema, which I think is the fate of any filmmaker now. So I had to come to terms with that; I had to determine to find for myself a television language. I was happy that Channel 4 Television in England started up just at that time; television was then an enormous mouth that needed to be filled, and, in taking all sorts of enormous risks, it decided to employ me. So I began to learn by myself, I hope, certain ways of learning television's language. But there always remains that frustration of everything being down in that little box, the question of scale.

Did you ever see our version—and I say "our," because I worked with an English painter caled Tom Phillips—of A TV Dante, a version of Dante's Inferno? Again, an incredibly complex investigation into that original and very ancient text; but seen on a small screen, there was a visual frustration in not being able to see the images clearly. So I think that out of those frustrations grew the desire to make Prospero's Books using television languages, or particularly post-production television languages, and to see them on a larger scale. We can't imagine a Jackson Pollock that small, or a Rothko; scale is important to the image. For the technology, we had to turn to Japan, and most of the technology there is high definition. The quality of transference between the high definition image and the cinematic image was much closer there than is possible in the West or in America. Japan is undoubtedly far ahead in the field; I think they're now broadcasting five hours of high definition television a day, publicly; there's nobody anywhere in the rest of the world that's doing that, even remotely, at the moment. I'm not so sure if our work was entirely successful, but again, that's not really of prime importance; it's the investigation and the process which is of prime importance in that respect. I certainly hope to pursue it further. My next film, which we're making in Japan very shortly, will again use some of those technologies.

An important frustration I always have with cinema is that it is hopeless with simultaneity, whereas the theatre and the opera can handle simultaneity very well. The business of finding a vocabulary to layer, as it were, scenes, one upon another, is an attempt to create a sense of simultaneity. It's common parlance in the drama of theatre and opera to do that.  

It's very rare in film.

You see the corny examples, I suppose, of the split screen of the 1930s: two people on a phone…  

Or in different bathtubs!

Do you ever want to direct adaptations of other operas?  

No. Absolutely not. I've been asked, many times. I think ever since The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover, the offers have been flooding in from all over the place, and I've always resisted. I have no contribution to make, you know, to the seven-hundred-and-twelve-thousandth version of Madame Butterfly, I have nothing to say at all. I don't want to become involved in that sort of thing; a lot of it is to do with out-house and not in-house, it has to do with what happens in the opera interval; it has to do with the opera establishment, with all those people. . . who are probably very useful, to keep this elitist bubble afloat; how else could it be patronized? But still, I suppose, something like 80% of opera house audiences around the world are well-heeled, self-confident bourgeoisie who have notions of "culture" which perhaps have got nothing at all to do with contemporary life.

We've got to be careful here. I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find—but, of course, on my terms.