Film-makers on film: Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway talks to John Whitley about Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961)

The one predictable thing about Peter Greenaway, director, painter and acclaimed arthouse maverick, is his unpredictability. So when he says that the movie which has most influenced his career is "the most successful film of all time", it's anybody's guess.

Gone With the Wind?, Ben-Hur? Star Wars?

"You've probably guessed what it is," he booms optimistically. "It's Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad."

Suddenly everything becomes clear. Resnais's third feature, made two years after his breathtaking Hiroshima mon amour and shot obstinately in black and white, generated one of the great movie controversies of the 1960s.

It was created deliberately to counter the received idea of cinema by exploring philosophies of time and memory. Its storyline is one long interior monologue recalling nameless characters playing inconsequential games in a gaunt, elegant château, with the heavily stylised action - or non-action - iterated to the point of hypnosis.

Although a close reading of the script indicates that its basis is a crime passionnel, there is precious little passion and no visible crime. Scenes recur in several guises, choreographed slightly differently like flashes of a dream in which the delectable Delphine Seyrig, in a series of high couture costumes, is wooed and apparently lost by a suave Giorgio Albertazzi.

The links to Greenaway's own work, from the tailored shrubbery and stately halls that mirror The Draughtsman's Contract to the riddles of relationship in A Zed and Two Noughts, are instantly apparent.

"It is indeed a very stylised film," says Greenaway, chuckling. "But then I make incredibly self-conscious, stylised cinema so it's exactly up my flue, thank you.

"I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention. You look at Bicycle Thieves, which is supposed to be realist, or the new British cinema of the middle-period '60s - they just follow the conventions of that time."

Greenaway has his own 35mm copy of the film. "It's become something of a memento mori, I suppose, something I'd put on my domestic altar.

"One circumstance that makes it particularly relevant to me is that its cinematographer was Sacha Vierny, who worked with me continuously, up until his death in 2001, on all the major films that I've made."

The repetitive structure of Resnais's movie makes it almost impossible to focus on specific sequences. "It's one of the most intelligent films that's ever been made but it's not easily deconstructable," he says.

"The cinematography is dry, it makes it very much a black-and-white picture and it uses a lot of day-for-night stock material [night shots filmed in daylight]. There are sequences with a very strong retinal sense, a conscious one, of deliberate slight over-exposure up against a strong dark frame. So it plays with our optical apparatus."

But for all Vierny's luscious tracking shots down endless corridors and gravelled vistas, it's the subtly orchestrated repetitions that give the movie its formal structure.

"There is a continual reprise so that it acts like a piece of music. The way it repeats phrases and scenes breaks open all that orthodox use of narrative which cinema borrows from the 19th-century novel.

"Even though its origins are in a script by [the novelist] Alain Robbe-Grillet, it's still far removed from the sort of anecdotal story-telling that makes up 99.9 percent of all cinema. It's deeply intelligent in the way it organises the picture space, it is satisfying on the intellectual and emotional level, it is superb to look at and it's always offering me something new, something different.

"And it also engages an anti-cinema that's comparable to the revolutions in painting and music - non-figurative art, music without harmony.

It points the way cinema might have gone - I think it's too late now, the most interesting figures have all turned to other things, other routes."

Apart, that is, from Greenaway himself. His latest film, The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story, is yet another take on Marienbad, breaking up narrative, leaving situations unresolved and running for an unprecedented seven hours.

"It's deeply immodest, and I'm now right up on the firing line when I say this, but I think the notions of what James Joyce was doing in Ulysses are what we're trying to do in my new film. It's cinema as an end and not as a means to an end. For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end."

The deliberately disjointed storyline covers the second half of the last century through the exploitation of uranium and its magic number 92. "It follows a picaresque series of journeys, that are both physical and mental, through the life of one man, and he lives for 92 years. So we have 92 actors, 92 suitcases, 92 kinds of event."

Greenaway has planned his marketing on an equally grandiose scale. Though the film itself is broken up into three shorter ones for easier digestion, his main effort will be to sell it on 92 DVDs, directed at what he believes is the audience of tomorrow.

"We have new ways of looking at things and the current way, I'm convinced, has more to do with browsing than with reading, and so we create a different sort of approach. The general argument is a manifesto, I suppose, about the nature of cinema: is it dead, where are the audiences?"

So when this cabinet of curiosities is unleashed on the world at this summer's Venice Film Festival, it will form Greenaway's most substantial tribute to date to Resnais and to Last Year in Marienbad.

"It showed me the way - that we can strip down our phenomenons, we can explain ideas in images rather than text, we can eschew the notion of 19th-century narrative.

"Every film I make is not a direct homage by me to that film but is my attempt to remake it."