... there are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
I have often wished that actors were not necessary. I don't particularly like what actors are traditionally supposed to be for. But their essential figuration and their sense of performance and their sense of representing human experiences in ways that we can understand is absolutely a part of contemporary cinema. I do not think I can successfully exchange actors for diagrams.
A painting has a uniqueness that never exists in film making. There's also a way in which time is inimicable to the film-making process because time destroys celluloid to its great disadvantage -- time may curiously and in a strange way be sometimes useful and advantageous to paintings. The appearance of crackle, the notion of white paint aging, the settling in of colour are items of interest in themselves.
If you go and look at a Mondrian close to, it can be surprising. There is a presumption -- experienced no doubt by antiseptic reproduction -- that the works are pristine and impersonal. But here is a hair from the brush and there is a thumbprint and overall there is extensive discolouring and much collapse of the original paint surface.
They chose to show The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. I hadn't seen the film myself for several years on a big screen. I was surprised. I had forgotten how beautiful some of those camera movements were, and how amazing the Sacha Vierny photography is, most especially the richness of the colour, and the drama of Michael Nyman's music. I thought everyone's contribution was great -- save strangely my own -- which seemed coarse and hesitant. And too self-conscious. I was proud of all the contributions of the collaborators and somehow embarrassed by what I recognised as my contribution.
I have come to the conclusion that curiously I don't think film is a very good narrative medium. If I was to ask you to tell me the full story of Casablanca, or La Dolce Vita, I bet you couldn't do it. Because I don't think people do remember close narrative or close story-telling in the cinema. They remember ambience, they remember event, they remember incidents, performance, atmosphere, a line of dialogue, a sense of genius loci, but I really doubt whether they truly remember narrative. I would argue that if you want to write narratives, be an author, be a novelist, don't be a film maker. Because I believe film making is so much more exciting in areas which aren't primarily to do with narrative.
I'm sure that all children are potentially visually capable of great expressive possibilities, but our education system does not regard visual communication as so very important. It is very subtly discouraged, so that most people's visual potential within themselves is jettisoned.
My father's obsession was bird watching. I often think it was his excuse to walk wild landscape -- preferably marshes and beaches. So almost by osmosis a mass of natural history and landscape information came into my background and memory without me particularly realising it. As an early adolescent I was always surprised that most people didn't know the difference between a skylark and a chaffinch. Most children seemed to know the difference between a Daimler-Benz and a Porsche. I doubt that I could tell with certainty. Then or now.
So by the time I was fifteen I could say, at least to myself, I really do want to be a painter. And I pursued the idea. My parents thought it was the most crazy and stupid idea. I bypassed a university education and insisted that I went to art school, which was the beginning of the break with everything my family stood for. And there was no true reconciliation ever again. My disappointed family believed I was doing something worthless, and that I could do it in the evenings and at weekends, and on holidays, like those Southwold painters.
We have I think three times now exhibited the entire worked-over 207 script pages of Drowning by Numbers. The ten-week film was shot all over East Anglia, so it's got grass stains, rain marks and bird shit on the pages. They have been ripped and torn, and they have fallen in the water and the ink has run, and there are many different writings on the pages with many different pens in the course of those ten weeks. Apart from extra and self-conscious additions, the script records the passage of the making of the film.
My father died. His ornithological knowledge, never collected or collated in anything like a comprehensible book -- it was five suitcases and two trunks of scattered notes -- died with him. A loss of knowledge. I made a film in small part reparation.
On the making of A Walk Through H
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.
I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.
From an interview on salon.com
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.
From an interview on indieWIRE.com
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.
From an interview on indieWIRE.com
Interviewer: "Let me ask you about the body and nudity ..."
PG: "Aha, the classic American question!"
From an interview on salon.com
I remember seeing [David] Lynch's "Blue Velvet," which I thought was a magnificent film, some years ago now, of course. I pay it the highest compliment by saying I wish I'd made it myself.
From an interview on salon.com
In a sense I think it's already too late: Cinema is an old technology. I think we've seen an incredibly moribund cinema in the last 30 years. In a sense Godard destroyed everything -- a great, great director, but in a sense he rang the death knell, because he broke cinema all apart, fragmented it, made it very, very self-conscious. Like all the aesthetic movements, it's basically lasted about 100 years, with the three generations: the grandfather who organized everything, the father who basically consolidated it and the young guy who chucks it all away. It's just a human pattern.
From an interview on salon.com
I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.
From an interview on salon.com
I suppose I am basically a clerk, a cataloguer. I like the reductiveness of that, I like the stripping down, the basic form of organization.
From an interview on salon.com
Tulse Luper is a sort of alter ego I created many many years ago -- Tulse to rhyme with pulse, and Luper is the Latin for wolf. So he's the wolf on your pulse.
From an interview on salon.com
I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.
From an interview by Sheila Johnston
We suddenly sparked off an enormous amount of vituperative antagonism, though that's not unfamiliar. Such that, when a film of mine has been cheered, I begin to think 'Good Lord, what have I done wrong?'
From an interview by Sheila Johnston
For example, two compositions are absolutely integral to the film and center around the signing of the sexual contract. They are based on a painting by Georges de la Tour which, in fact, includes the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, so that the visual metamorphosis is one in which women have been changed from their religious counterparts to completely lay (if you will) equivalents.
From an interview about The Draughtsman's Contract
Interviewer: "So who did kill the master of the house?"
PG: "I could be enigmatic and throw the question back, but for me, everybody was responsible, because everybody has reason to gain from the death of Mr Herbert. So, like the murder on the Orient Express, everybody is guilty."
