SOURCE: Greenaway, Peter, and Marcia Pally. “Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Cineaste 18, no. 3 (1991): 6–11, 45.

In the following interview, Greenaway discusses the critical response to his films and his approach to filmmaking.

Born in England in 1942, Peter Greenaway attended what he calls “a minor English public school that preserves the worst traditions—fagging, burning the pubic hair of new boys, that sort of Godawful activity.” After completing the Forest Public School, Greenaway resisted his parents' plan to send him to university and went instead to the Walthamstow School of Art in east London. He exhibited for the first time at Lord's Gallery in 1964. In 1965, he became a film editor with the government's Central Office of Information where he cut educational documentaries for a decade.

Greenaway made his first films, Train and Tree, in 1966. By the time he earned, in the late Seventies, his first...