Interview: Peter Greenaway on The Draughtman’s Contract and the Language of Cinema

Peter Greenaway is surely one of the most radically experimental filmmakers to be given commercial distribution in the United States and garner recognition by mainstream critics. Although best known for his narrative films, among them Drowning by Numbers, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and The Pillow Book, he’s no less idiosyncratic now than when he was making fragmentary, conceptual avant-garde works at the beginning of his career, nor has he made any compromises or concessions to popular taste.

Greenaway, who has a background in painting, has long lamented cinema’s failure to live up to its potential as an image-based medium, and, indeed, his visual sensibility—marked by elaborate details, bold lighting, and balanced planimetric compositions—is very much that of a painter. It’s certainly an ethos on display in 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.

The British Film Institute funded the production of the film, which turned out to be a surprise hit. A new 4k restoration opens at Film Forum on December 2, providing an opportunity to look back at an important inflection point in Greenaway’s career, when he was beginning to incorporate more traditional storytelling elements like plot, setting, and dialogue into his work.

Last week, I spoke with Greenaway about the restoration of The Draughtsman’s Contract, his ideas about cinema, the limitations of text-based filmmaking, and more.

What was your involvement in the restoration of The Draughtsman’s Contract?

Well, I was certainly asked to take a look. I think it was the second impression that they made. The first one I rejected because it seemed to me very red in color. But they rapidly made some corrections and I’m well pleased with the results. The original was shot on Super 16, where the soundtrack space is used for picture identification, so I was a little perturbed about blowing up to 4k, but I’m both surprised and pleased by what they’ve done.

Are you ever tempted to make revisions to your films when they’re being restored?

Always. I always have a sense of dissatisfaction. But that would be muddying the waters, because it would end up being—if I was ever allowed to do that—a different sort of film. So it’s probably best to leave it alone and utilize one’s energies to work on something new.

I understand that with this film in particular, there was at one point a much longer cut. Was that the version you’d intended to release, or was it just an early assembly at which you would continue to chip away?

Well, often my scripts are very long and quite wordy. There was a whole concern about the historical period, about the changeover from Catholicism to Protestantism, and there was a concern for politics related to 1694. There’s a lot of business about fruit symbolism, a dissertation, shall we say, about change of styles in English landscape, etcetera. The first cut was probably about four hours long, which was totally unacceptable and made it very difficult to make distribution satisfactory. It was then cut down and cut down, and I think the process of cutting down was much more difficult and much longer than the first preparations for the edit. So there was a lot of material that was never used and I actually did plan to make a sort of sequel. It was going to be called Edge-Cutters. If you remember the film, our hero gets killed, so I didn’t particularly want to resurrect him, but you might remember there was a rather foppish younger assistant, so I used him as the major protagonist in the following film. But I became interested in all sorts of other ideas, so it was never made.

How did you go about creating the drawings for the film, which are meant to be made by a fictional character with his own artistic sensibilities?

Because of disciplines garnered at art school, there was always this consideration about how a draughtsman or a painter should draw or paint what he sees and not what he knows. Do we use our memories or do we use, as it were, the mechanical, retinal excitements of just seeing a phenomenon? Of course, that particular idea is absolutely essential to all the drama and conflict that exists within The Draughtsman’s Contract. There is, I suppose, a way of trying to paint or draw not as myself—because my paintings at that time, and certainly now, aren’t like that at all. There was a demand by the plot to draw in a figurative way. It was quite a chore to do it all like that, so much so that initially we did employ another draughtsman, but I found his drawings unsatisfactory. It became necessary for me to do it myself.

Most of your early films, which experimented with different forms and with the materials of filmmaking, seemed to directly emerge from your practice as a painter. The Draughtsman’s Contract, while uncompromising, was your first commercial film project and has a closer affinity with narrative cinema. Were you consciously making an effort to move into a new venue?

I never had any intention of becoming a filmmaker. When I was a young man who’d just come out of art school, I wanted to be a painter. I think my experiences at art school in the 1960s predicated me to be more interested in the still image and the tradition of European painting, which has an incredibly long history. But it was in art school that I became interested in current preoccupations in European cinema, which in France would be the Nouvelle Vague, and it was an extraordinary period of Italian cinema from La Dolce Vita to The Last Emperor.

[My interest in filmmaking] came from looking at other people’s films, especially when I understood that some extraordinary films of great value and probity had been made very simply and with comparatively small budgets. I must have made about 20 films, often self-financed from my employment as a film editor in documentary cutting rooms in London. But I was beginning to feel that I was tending to repeat myself, structures were becoming too familiar.

I think that prompted some of the people who were providing me with modest sums of money to suggest that I should perhaps make films where people talk to one another rather than directly to the audience. I thought I was still pursuing something quite privatized that would have a small audience, and I was really surprised that the film became popular in European and some American circles through film festivals. For an art film like this to be able to earn money and be successful commercially was a great surprise to all of us. I can hardly describe it as mainstream, but it entered into the phenomenon of the European art movie.

The actors are usually quite still, and posed deliberately within the frame, almost like statues at times. Could you discuss your approach to directing the actors’ performances while using them physically as compositional elements?

The whole film is incredibly stylized. Characters use 50 words to say something when 20 would do, the costumes are elaborate, and the dialogue tropes and strategies are very fixed. That has to be part and parcel with the way in which the compositions are controlled. There has to be an acknowledgement of the theatrical performances relevant to the 1690s. It’s a post-Restoration drama, very stagy in that particular effect. That notion of fixity, of formalism, is engendered in all parts of the vocabulary of the film. The Draughtsman’s Contract is very much related to the ideas of cinema, even in its presentation of language. It’s all about framing, both as a metaphor for the notion of the frame-up, but also you’re very conscious that I’m making frames—so much so that we included a rectangular framing device that was used by painters and draughtsmen at the time to make a better representation of what was in front of them.

The film consists mostly of long takes and sparing camera movements, so its pace and rhythm are baked into the actors’ performances. How much did your ideas about the film’s construction change during the editing process?

I made a deliberate attempt not to have huge amounts of cuts, which was very fashionable at that time. I do remember a Hollywood critic saying that there aren’t enough cuts in it. “You are supposed to have at least 300 cuts in a film like this,” which is an absolute absurdity, and sounds like the young man had been subject to American Hollywood procedures. But it was a sort of minimalist concern that I thought relative to making films. I think the film is very economic in that sense. It fulfills the platonic verities of time and place and subject matter being all contained. There’s no rushing around the world, and it’s all taking place in one singular landscape with the same characters. That was a characterization of certain forms of minimalism which were related to the practices of composer Michael Nyman, who was part of that minimalist wave that was happening in New York in the early ’60s and included people like Philip Glass. So all those considerations were part and parcel with the backgrounds of the film.

What is your relationship with minimalism? Obviously, you’ve worked extensively with Michael Nyman, but your late-’70s film Vertical Features Remake seems to be both an homage and a parody of minimalist “process music.”

That was meant to be a sort of love-hate, bittersweet thing. The absurdities of minimalism, the tedium, was in a sense critiqued in Vertical Features Remake. Parts of the film are almost unwatchable, so boring. I think that was often a characteristic not of the major minimalist composers, but all those pupils and semi-pupils who picked up the ideas but didn’t have the imagination or the tenacity of John Cage and the like to continue those sorts of pursuits.

And I did make a series of films both critiquing and exploiting ideas of cinema at that time. I don’t know what other films of mine you’ve seen, but you’ll appreciate that there’s a great ludic concern about the unsatisfactory nature of processes of cinema. We could actually say nobody’s seen any cinema yet; all we’ve seen is about 130 years of illustrated text. Cinema practice need not have been like this, but it’s worked out like this. Producers are basically visually illiterate. It’s very difficult to go to a producer with four paintings, three lithographs, and a couple drawings and say give me the money, because they don’t work that way. They need a text, and is it not true, whether you’re underground cinema or overground cinema, that all cinema curiously needs a text? It’s meant to be a visual medium, not simply transfiguring the notions of text into image. That is one of my dissatisfactions about all cinema since 1895.