OCTOBER 2007

"In the early 1950s and 1960s the whole family would go to the cinema every week of the year.

"Now you're hard-pressed to find someone who goes once a year."

He blamed film's reliance on literary adaptations, dismissing the recent box office hits The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring and Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone as "cynical exercises in making a quick buck".

Films should be more than adjuncts to bookshops, he said.

The artform must "reinvent itself and produce original work that stretched the imagination", he said, rather than churn out formulaic pictures that were like thousands of others.

The director plans to make a trilogy of 120-minute feature films covering the life of Tulse Luper, a "professional prisoner" whose crimes include espionage, embezzlement and murder.

Mr Greenaway said he wants to use the films to break away from older cinematic forms.

"I want to create a huge project that says 'goodbye cinema, hello new language'," he said.

BBC INTERVIEW 12TH SEPTEMBER, 2007


You're here in Cambridge for the UK premiere of The Tulse Luper Suitcases - can you tell us all about it?
Well I think, without wishing to be blasphemous to those people who are still nostalgic about European arts cinema, in a way, the film's only an excuse to promote the website.

Now that does sound heretical, because, up until now, the ancillaries were always regarded to support the feature, but I hold some pretty blasphemous ideas about the notion of cinema anyway, because I sincerely believe that cinema is dead. It's not really a radical experimental area for activity anymore. To paraphrase the old French notion about royalty, the cinema is dead, long live the cinema.

So, I think that it's imperative that film makers, film practitioners, film journalists, should really seriously grab the nettle and find new ways to reinvent this extraordinary medium that once upon a time used to be called cinema. The technological revolutions are pretty obvious. Celluloid cinema is essentially dead, no self respecting film maker really films on celluloid anymore.

There are new audiences, certainly there are audiences related to, I suppose 14-30, who have essentially grown up with a computer, that strange marriage of a typewriter and a television screen. Which means interactivity, which means choice, which means not going to those strange architectural places like this [Arts Picturehouse] called cinemas anymore, so these places are entirely redundant.

So there are many, many, many, many political and social things we have to do, but we also, of course, have to make product for it and I'm beginning to want to make a multi media project, which isn't just related to cinema screens, but I suggest that films really are an investment for everything else. I don't want to give up the old audiences, that would be stupid. But I need to make an embrace to those who have grown up essentially with a lap top. Circumstances, audiences, attitudes, perspectives have moved on and if we really want the notion of the moving image to live, then we've got to move with it too.

This project is not just a series of films, I hope it will be deeply fascinating and intriguing. And hopefully profound as well. But it's also a manifesto, it's a social and political manifesto about the future of cinema.

Tulse Luper, the main guy in your movie, is your alter-ego?
When I was about 14 or 15, I'd have been far too shy to talk to you through a microphone in a situation like this. And so I think, maybe of children much younger, in order to express yourself, you would invent some alter ego. Somebody who has a license like a Court Jester to say things that you never dare to say in public yourself.

Well, I've learnt now how to conduct myself in public, so things are a little better. But I still like this particular concept and idea because I think that all culture probably does this is some strange way. If you go back to the most simplistic version of it, when you were a small child at the breakfast table and you knock over the milk and you'd say 'oh I didn't do it, my friend did it'. And if the parents are very wise, they enter into the conspiracy too, because that's how things get done. There was also a way that Tulse Luper peopled a lot of my early films. Along with his mistress's and his wife's and his associates and his academic enemies. So I have resurrected them all, plus a lot more, in order to revitalize a personal mythology and hopefully make it an entertaining public mythology.

What's your next project? Where could you possibly go from here?
Well, we've just finished film one, it's being premiered, I suppose in about five screens in Festivals all over Europe - we started with Cannes and we've just come back from Moscow.

It hasn't yet been seen by a so-called distribution public audience, I think that happens all over Europe in September and October. We've shot most of the second film and we're now editing it. We're about to shoot a lot of the third film, and maybe more.

We are a huge co-production organization which involves Hungary, Russia, Spain and Italy, the Benelux countries and Japan. There are going to be versions of the film for all these different countries, because if you've seen the film you'll know that it's about language and it's about text and it's about what is narrative and how does everybody perceive the notions of different sorts of narrative.

One of the main metaphors of the production is that there's no such thing as history, there's only historians. So I want to be able to tell you my story many, many different ways. And there are, in the very least, 92 stories in every accordance in every event. So you can image 92 X 92 becomes one of the methodologies that we need to be able to work with.

And again if you have seen the film, you will know that there are 92 suitcases. Every suitcase contains 92 ideas or objects which or phenomenon. Philip Glass is already working on an opera based upon the contents of suitcase 32, we have a Tokyo soap television series on the contents of suitcase 49, and we've just had a play on in Frankfurt about the contents of suitcase 46...so every single suitcase itself will spawn another project...

THE TULSE LUPER SUITCASES
"[Greenaway] is a brilliant theoretician and collagist."  -The New York Times
Highly inventive...a wondrous and acidly satiric dream-voyage through 20th Century history and fantasy."  -Chicago Tribune

"I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing." -Peter Greenaway

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a sweeping trilogy/epic about the life and times of Tulse Luper, a man bigger than the world itself. The film covers some sixty years of recent history from 1928 when the existence of a substance called Uranium was discovered, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

PART I: THE MOAB STORY
Introduced by Director Peter Greenaway

As Luper's reputation as a writer and project-maker grows in Europe and America, so his person becomes more fictional. A large "Luper" Symposium and Exhibition is held in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Many Luper lecturers offer their theories and propositions on the various stages of Luper's life. The central exhibit of the conference and exhibition is a collection of 92 suitcases - 92 appropriately being the atomic number of Uranium - suitcases that Luper had supposedly been associated with in his travels and prisons. Over the years, the suitcases come to light all over the world. On the last evening of the 'Luper' New York Conference, a long awaited Luper suitcase - suitcase 92 - is opened... Directed by Peter Greenaway, UK/Spain/Italy/Luxembourg/
Netherlands/Russia/Hungary/Germany, 2003, 35mm, 127 mins. In English, German, Dutch, French and Spanish with English subtitles.

Peter Greenaway will be present for a Q&A following the screening.

Showtime:Wed., Nov. 10 at 7 p.m.at Facets Cinémathèque

PART II: VAUX TO THE SEA


With the Second World War started, Tulse Luper continues to be a prisoner shunted around Northern Europe. He becomes a communicator in code in the grand house and gardens of Vaux in France that has been earmarked as a German Birth Clinic, he is forced to be an usher in the Arc-en-Ciel cinema in Strasbourg, and he is persuaded into female clothing to pose as a sempstress in the bourgeois household of an obsessive anatomist and a professional Ingres-lover at Dinard on the French coast. Directed by Peter Greenaway, The Netherlands/UK, 2004, 35mm, 120 mins. In English.

Showtime:Thurs., Nov. 11 at 7 p.m.at Facets Cinémathèque


PART III: FROM SARK TO FINISH

The third installment of screenwriter Peter Greenaway's anticipated 16-episode story finds Tulse Luper, the protagonist, whittling away his time in jail. (In the previous episode, Tulse had been arrested in a bathroom just prior to the German invasion of Belgium in 1940.) Without the company of either of his two lovers, Tulse's favorite activity is posting fictional accounts on his wall in hopes of foretelling his own future, thus cementing his status around prison as a top storyteller. Unfortunately for Tulse, his jailers are less concerned with his innocence than they are with using him for their own nefarious purposes, and do their best to fabricate evidence that Tulse is, in fact, a fascist sympathizer. Directed by Peter Greenaway, UK/The Netherlands, 35mm, 108 mins.