by Wojciech Orlinski of "Gazeta Wyborcza"
Just a few words about the circumstances of this interview. I was invited, among some other journalists, to the set of the new film by Greenaway, "Eight And A Half Woman". The film is about to have its premiere January 1999. As far as I know, the story of the film looks interesting. It's a black comedy, about a disgustingly rich father and son, who can buy for their incredible money their own sexual fantasies. Wooow, wouldn't it be nice... oops, I almost forgot that I'm a Marxist :-).
This is not as much an interview, than a briefing - after a long day of work, Mr Greenaway talked to three of us. But as I'm a natural-born jabber with bad manners, my questions dominated the whole conversation. My questions are marked [WO:], the others are marked just [Q:]. Read and enjoy.
Peter Greenaway: I made this film for three reasons. The title "Eight And a Half Woman" obviously refers to Fellini. I think it's the most intelligent movie about the cinema, ever made. Later there were many films like that, but this one is about the very conception, it's about where the ideas come from. It's a very important film for every filmmaker, and it also celebrates Italian Fellini women, in the famous fantasy sequence. It is a centerpoint of some era in European filmmaking. After that point, what I call "Casablanca syndrome" begun to break up. It all begins with quoting Fellini films, and finishes with quoting Godard films, because Godard is the man who broke the European cinema apart.
Every technology has its inventor, its consolidator and someone who breaks everything apart. For me, Eisenstein would be the inventor of cinema, for an American it would be Griffith, for a French... I don't know, Melies perhaps... Fellini would be a consolidator, and Godard the one, who broke it. For me, Fellini is an extraordinary image maker. I don't refer to the structure of his thinking, his Roman Catholicism, but to his amazing, amazing ability of crating images. And then I very much enjoy the self-consciousness of Godard. When you watch Godard film, you are always aware that you are watching a film. It deals with illusion, but it always says: "it's only a film", unlike it is with another English filmmaker, Mike Leigh.
So, if you talk about self-reference in cinema, you have to mention those two names: Fellini and Godard.
The second thing is, I suppose, that I made a lot of films about art, many films about artists. My films "A Draughtman's contract" or "The Belly of An Architect" could be easily titled "A Filmmaker's contract" or "The Belly of A Filmmaker". I never made this one move, because I thought that making a film about the art of making a film is too easy. But finally, after having made eight films - or, in some sense, eight and a half film - I wanted to talk openly about it.
And the third matter is politically incorrect male sexual fantasy. The film presents eight, or in some sense eight and a half, male fantasies. We live in a civilized society, where we are supposed to keep our fantasies underneath a table. Many males fantasize about fucking a nun, about fucking a woman who loves horses, about fucking a pregnant woman, about fucking... what we might call a "madame Butterfly syndrome". Western men are involved in a long line of oriental sexual fantasies, that goes back to David and Delacroix, and then to the Puccini opera, and still goes on today. Western men go to Bangkok to fuck little boys, repeating the same situation: the West goes to the East to have some predatory sex.
In this film we have eight, or eight in a half, male sexual fantasies, which are of course unacceptable, but still are a part of Western sexual tradition. I have uses this cliche, but not without development, so it becomes quite complex.
So, to repeat: it's a hommage to Godard and Fellini, it's a film about the structure of film language, and about politically incorrect male sexual fantasy.
Wojciech Orlinski: Reading the script I was blushing ashame, because I felt that I would behave quite similarly to your male characters, if only I would be as rich as they are. Was it your intention: to make every male feeling ashamed of his own masculinity?
PG: Well, if you saw my previous films you are obviously aware, that usually women make the journey there, and the men stand still, or it's the men who are mediocre, and the women superior. And the same happens here. The women take hold of male fantasies, and they run them to exhaustion.
WO: It's a bit like in some movies by Almodovar...
PG: I've never seen any.
WO: He pictures a similar situation: women fulfiling male fantasies into extreme, and thus becoming the winners. Like in "Kika", for example.
PG: Well, it might not be an original concept, but a fenomenon common in England now is the idea of men behaving badly. It's a backlash against the feminism of the eighties. Men behave sexually badly in an extravagant and exhibitionist way, in order to take revenge on all the extremes of feminism. It's rather pathetic. There is a way in which we could say, that women have always despised men, especially with the most predatory aspects of their sexuality, but never before the end of twentieth century it was so widely acclaimed. One of the female character in my film says: "men love women, women love children, children love hamsters, and it never works the other way around".
Q: It's not your first film shot in Luxembourg, do you like working here?
PG: You're a Luxembourgeois, so you know it all about it. The film is happening between Geneva and Kyoto. I should shoot all the European parts in Geneva, which is now a sort of prostitution capital of Europe. When the Berlin wall came down and the Yugoslavian war broke up, the women of all the East ran to the West. They hoped to work as waitresses or baby-sitters, but they rapidly fell into the prostitution market. I was working for eight months in Geneva, and I heard an awful lot about it. Geneva, like Luxembourg, is a big money pot. Huge amounts of money circulate there, sometimes on the borderline of legality. And the two main characters: the father and son, are extremely rich. They live in two rich cities, of Geneva and Kioto. Luxembourg was chosen as a location only for tax reasons. Tax exemptions here saved about 20 percent of our budget.
Q: But isn't shooting here a bit difficult?
PG: Difficult, yes. They say in Luxembourg there is only one of everything. There is only one person that does one particuar job. We have a man here who looks after pig. There is only one man in Luxembourg, who knows the art of looking after pig.
WO: After all, moving to Luxembourg for tax reasons is not inconsistent with the script. The real rich Swiss bankers do the same thing.
PG: But Geneva was just the right place for this film. The house of the bankers, the Emmenthal mansion, is modelled on a real building I know very well over the lake in Geneva. We had to copy it here, and we also shot the exterior scenes in a beautiful chateau in France, chateau La Grange, so we made a composite of these two places.
Q: When you write your script, do you always have a clear imagination of particular scenes?
PG: I am, and I have always been, a pictorist. That doesn't mean that I leave dialogues a long way behind, it just means that the dialogue must work very closely with picture. I have to visualise everything before the dialogue is being written on a page. In my imagination, everything happened in a house over a lake in Geneva. Of course, I had to be pragmatic and modify some things.
WO: In the script there is a scene of a "domino effect" made by a line of coins to the panchinko gambling machine. Wilbert van Dorp told us today, that suddenly this turned out to be impossible, because panchinko machines use balls, not coins.
PG: Well, we've found equivalents. We made a scene of thousands of panchinko balls falling down the staircase of the chateau. It is always like that, no film is actually completely shot according to the script.
Q: And what about the earthquakes? Was it difficult to arrange them?
PG: There are four earthquakes. And this is very autobiographical. Every time I go to Japan, and I've been there many many times, there is an earthquake. They are usually small, too small to fit on the Richter scale, but when we were working on the "Pillow Book", there happened a disaster, quite close to us, just about 20 kilometers. Addiction to gambling, the panchinko parlours, is important in this film as well. God controls the chance, and a gambler tries to take his part. An ultimate gambler controls not only the panchinko machine, but also an earthquake. One of my characters controls a panchinko parlour. He's a gambler, he plays games all the time, and he also tries to gamble with earthquakes. The fourth one, that surprise! surprise! happens in Geneva and not in Japan, finally kills him. It's a happy ending. Both male characters die in a happy way. The father dies while he's copulating with a woman he loves, and the son dies in an earthquake, his biggest passion. It's not hard to shoot an earthquake. There's a whole list of little things to do. From bicycles falling over an empty street, taps turning on mysteriously, to earth eruptions. Some special effects will be added on post-production.
Q: Do you prefer shooting or post-production?
PG: What I enjoy most of all, is two people sitting in a beautiful set, talking to one another about how the film should look like. No action, no movement, absolutely static. But I can't go on this way forever.
WO: What will the actual movie look like? "Pillow Book" was full of formal experiments, like all those little windows opening on a screen just like on Apple Macintosh. Will "Eight And A Half Women" be more conservative?
PG: If you remember "Drawning By Numbers", it will be more like that. It's a sort of step backwards to that sequential, chronological set of events. But the actual shots, as you probably realized watching them here, are very very formal. They are based on painting ideas, such as symmetry. Everything is very formal, very artificial.
WO: The "Eight And A Half Women" is being presented in public relations releases as your first comedy. I have always found your previous films quite humorous.
PG: Yes, of course. All the films I've made are comedies. The "Drowning By Numbers" was a comedy, the "Cook and Thief" was a comedy... They were deeply ironic, ludic, not exactly necessarily satirical, but they sideways look all the time at the bizarre, stupid behaviour of my characters in their environment. Maybe now there will be more obvious jokes in the dialogue than ever before. I hope people will laugh, but I hope they will feel disturbed as well.
WO: Especially men.
PG: I think men, too, despite the fact that they are obsessed by their sexuality. The English have a peculiar attitude to sex, which maybe is not exactly the same as the Polish, certainly not the same as the French. I think the dialogue is characteristic to the English. The dialogue is, I think quite... not necessarily shocking, but foul. It often talks about sexual maters with openess rarely seen in cinema.
Q: You say, that your films are quite artificial...
PG: Not "quite" artificial, very artificial.
Q: But they are often close to naturalism, when you picture, for example, human excrements.
PG: I often get into trouble because of it. I'm not doing it for giggle, it is always for some serious purpose, such as building and opposition of good and bad, the downside and the upside, life and decay, the whole cycle of life.
Q: Do you wish to make a political statement, picturing "politically incorrect" fantasies?
PG: No, if you think my films are political, then you enter into the same sort of naivety as seeing a political statement in wearing a black shirt. My cinema is a long, long away from Mike Leigh. It is not a socialist propaganda or advocating any particular way of life. I don't intend to change political opinions. Maybe the only political film I ever made was "The Cook And Thief", which started as a kind of diatribe against Thatcherite Britain, but my interest is asthetics, not politics. Some French philosophers would say now, that ethics is close to aesthetics, and politics is close to ethics, but it's not my point of view.
WO: As a kind of proof to support French philosophers I could say, that in Poland right-wing journalists assasinated your "Baby of Macon" for blasphemy.
PG: Well, somewhere else it was assasinated also by the left, so it does not prove anything.
WO: Maybe it's because your vision of human sexuality is so pesimistic?
PG: It's a great life force, yes. Sexuality is vigorous and exciting. It is celebrated in this film. I often picture it from a bizarre point of view, but I don't condemn anything. So I don't think my vision is pesimistic.
WO: Just when you have a simple story like Harry mets Sally, if you know that they are both Greenaway characters, you can bet they will be dead before the film is over.
PG: In this film, among ten characters there is only one really tragic death, which is rare in my films. One woman commits a rather beautiful suicide. Both male characters die happily...
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