T H E   S A L O N   I N T E R V I E W   P E T E R   G R E E N A W A Y

The director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"

talks about sensationalism, nudity, the death of cinema, his passion for lists, his new film,

"The Pillow Book," and his big plans for the Internet.

BY CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE

director Peter Greenaway thinks most movies are empty and sentimental -- and that includes art-house pictures, which Greenaway treats with as much disdain as mainstream Hollywood products. Since the success of his 1982 feature "The Draughtsman's Contract," Greenaway has crafted a string of visually extravagant movies, rich to the point of gluttony, and usually quite dark. They're also unapologetically experimental and erudite, not always the healthiest combination at the box office. Nevertheless, he's won himself an ardent cult audience, and achieved at least one succès de scandale. Greenaway's best known film, "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" (1989) mixed a savage critique of Thatcherite excess with generous helpings of sex and nudity -- all of it ending in an infamous cannibalism scene. Along with Philip Kaufman's "Henry and June" and Pedro Almodovar's "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down," "Cook, Thief" wound up saddled with the notorious, newly-minted NC-17 rating, which led to long lines of sensation-hungry filmgoers at the few urban theaters willing to screen the movie. (Don't look for it at your neighborhood Blockbuster, though.) His other films include "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1985), "Belly of an Architect" (1986), "Drowning by Numbers" (1998) and an adaptation of "The Tempest" called "Prospero's Books" (1991). His 1993 movie "The Baby of Macon," extreme even by Greenaway's standards, was never released commercially in America and remains unseen even by many of his most dedicated fans. He may have taken some lessons from that film's demise. If the early reaction is any indication, Greenaway's latest movie, "The Pillow Book," is likely to be his most popular ever and just might win over some of his detractors. It's an adaptation of an erotic 10th century Japanese literary classic called "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon," which Greenaway sets in contemporary Japan and Hong Kong. In the film, a model and aspiring writer named Nagiko (Vivian Wu) attempts to win over her publisher by sending to his offices a series of men whose bodies she has covered from head to toe with exquisite calligraphy -- a kind of sexually-charged, high-concept book proposal. The male lead, played by Ewan McGregor ("Trainspotting"), is a bisexual translator named Jerome who spends most of the film with his uncircumcised penis flapping in the wind. Despite occasional flashes of morbidity, "Pillow Book" is Greenaway's warmest film. It uses a lush and remarkably innovative visual style, which the director says he partly cribbed from television. In person, Greenaway is an intellectual dynamo: energetic and opinionated, with a flair for the contrary. Salon caught up with him in San Francisco, where he'd come to promote "The Pillow Book" and an upcoming retrospective of his films.

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