SOURCE: Greenaway, Peter, and Don Ranvaud. “The Belly of an Architect.” Sight & Sound 56, no. 2 (summer 1987): 193–96.

[In the following interview, Greenaway discusses The Belly of an Architect and the importance of the characters and the setting in the film.]

Peter Greenaway's new film [The Belly of an Architect], which opens in London in the autumn, relates the confrontation in Rome of two architects, one of whom is a historical figure, the other a fictional character. The historical figure is Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728–99), a visionary French architect whose latent influence can be detected in the neo-classical monumentality of the twentieth century Fascist style; and the fictional character is Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), a middle-aged American who, like Boullée, has received few commissions and who has come to Rome to organise a large-scale exhibition of his predecessor's work. As the film unfolds, Kracklite finds even this project slipping away from him, in part because of the machinations of his ruthlessly ambitious Italian collaborator Caspasian Speckler (Lambert Wilson), whom he suspects of having seduced his wife (Chloe Webb), in part because of an increasingly neurotic obsession with his physical condition and his fear that he might have been poisoned.

[Ranvaud:] In a timely development for you, a new sense of the status of architects has developed in Britain since you started working on The Belly of an Architect, with debates in the press, lavish exhibitions at the Royal Academy on Foster, Rogers and Stirling. Why did you choose this subject?

[Greenaway:] It is a truism of this century that it's easily possible to avoid looking at painting or even reading literature, but it is extremely difficult to avoid dealing in some way with architecture. I like to think, if I may be so arrogant, that it's possible to compare the work of a filmmaker with that of an architect. We both have to be accountable to our backers and to the man in the street, but we also need to satisfy ourselves and our idea of culture. It would be too close to the bone, obviously, to make a film about a filmmaker, so at the back of my mind I have been searching for some time to find an appropriate parallel.

It was said about The Draughtsman's Contract that the filmmaker must have been trained as an architect. Completely untrue, but I was very interested in all that country house architectural side, which of course involves a certain amount of snobbism in the English approach to the country. I was fascinated with the business of photographing architecture, with the logistical problems of parallax, verticals and horizontals; and given that all my film-making is based on grids, there had to be a connection somewhere.

A mixture of personal and aesthetic considerations, then. Which is more important?

They have equal status, although there is a lot that is very personal about this film, more so than the others, I think. But these two main reasons—a semi-autobiographical comment on the relation between the architect/artist and the audience; the wish to use architecture and continue to play with what it's all about—lead me to the third key reason. I have long been attracted to that period between the end of the baroque and what may be described as the modern cultural revivalism of the nineteenth century: that transient period between the end of the Counter Reformation and the beginning of the French Revolution. Our contemporary world seems to reproduce those basic conflicts. Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo; then the second period around the French Revolution in the paintings of Poussin, and the third which is the shadow of Picasso on the one hand and Le Corbusier on the other. This is the groundwork, as it were, and one figure in this context—Boullée, hardly known outside architectural circles—seems to straddle them all.

I was particularly fascinated by the fact that Boullée drew and designed a lot, but got nothing built. That seemed to be so symptomatic of film-making. So many films exist only on paper. I have 15–20 scripts in various stages of development and have no doubt that most of them will not be made; if you multiply that by all the active filmmakers around the world, you would probably end with an enormous Tower of Babel or words, of babble. I cannot help thinking that if Boullée's extraordinary drawings had been realised—the size and bulk of his conceptions would fit perfectly well in the twentieth century metropolis—they would have had a great impact on the history of architecture. What would have been phenomenally expensive to build at the time would have generated an atmosphere of daring and enterprise. Of course, the French Revolution produced great turmoil politically and socially but very few cultural artifacts. David's ‘Marat’ is perhaps the only really strong cultural artifact from the period that everybody remembers.

Boullée's times may represent upheavals in Europe, but Britain was relatively stable then, and although you are making films abroad now, you have been defined as the quintessentially English (not British) filmmaker.

At the same time that Boullée is designing buildings, Jane Austen is writing novels: one is looking backward while the other is looking forward. I don't put the two together, for it wouldn't work, but I was sufficiently intrigued by this to write a short essay as though written by Jane Austen on the occasion of a visit to an exhibition of Boullée's work, describing it in her own language to try to define it for her contemporaries. There is a sense in which the past is reconsidered in all my movies. The Draughtsman's Contract is a prime example. I am interested in discovering how we approach history, both in terms of how we think people lived at a particular moment in time, and what were the cultural and aesthetic imperatives in the textures of society. Also, more simply, what is and what isn't true. What happens next, where is culture being pushed toward at any moment, and what are the consequences. I suppose this is more of an eighteenth century attitude than anything else.

Boullée is very much the kind of character you might have invented had he not existed in reality. I must confess I thought at first you had invented him, until I remembered a passing tribute to him in the building of the disco hall at the end of Bertolucci's Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man.

He is indeed the ideal man for Kracklite to invent.

Are you not Kracklite, then?

I'm sure a thesis could be organised to demonstrate a correlation. It might fall down on closer examination, but the frustrations of a man dedicated to setting up an enormous project and those of a filmmaker cannot be entirely separated. Neither can the idea of the mafia circles around the art world taking it over be completely foreign to movies … there is always a fear that the film or the exhibition might be taken away from you, be used by other people for other ends, leaving you only a footnote in a catalogue. There are also all the domestic problems that accumulate while these situations are being played out.

But the excuse, at least in the film, is that Kracklite is sick.

That, I am happy to say, is not my problem as of this moment. But, well, I don't know how personal I ought to be about it … both my parents died from stomach cancer, my mother recently, my father some time ago. All my films are about loss in some way—A Zed & Two Noughts about a very serious loss, obviously—and although I do not feel extraordinarily emotional about it, somewhere in the back of my mind I want to explore the consideration society gives to cancer as a disease; what we do about it, what it means in our lives. The theme of loss goes right back to A Walk through H, a film made just after the death of my father. So much information gets lost when somebody dies. Whether that information is valuable or not is another matter; it was valuable to me because I learned a lot from my father's phenomenal knowledge of ornithology and ecology. A personal aspect, if you will, lies deep within the film somewhere.

The character of Boullée, as interpreted by Kracklite, gradually recedes in the film. That has a curious and maybe slightly disturbing relation to what you just said. Is Boullée ultimately only a McGuffin?

As always, the man that was conceived in the script isn't perhaps quite the same man that ended up in the film. I think that to begin with it was much more of an ensemble piece, where the other characters like Kracklite's wife and her lover—the Italian side of the exhibition—were much more vigorous. Brian Dennehy turned in such an extraordinary performance that the film has become more like a true biography. He is in almost every frame. The other factor which helped to shape it in this way was having to cut the film down to a reasonable length.

Boullée made some very foolish mistakes and his judgment was generally poor: his obsessions destroyed his common sense, and you feel he is a victim of his own stupidity/obsession. While we seem to allow people obsessions, I suppose we don't allow them stupidity; but there is a correlation there somewhere. He turns out to be a sad fall guy, in both his private and his public life. I am still very close to the film and it's difficult to be completely lucid about this. Boullée and Kracklite are riddled with the same contradictions: both are aiming for perfection, and like Boullée, Kracklite is unable to realise his projects. It's important that Kracklite should have chosen someone like Boullée to celebrate in the manner he has envisaged.

Boullée did extraordinary drawings, but if the buildings don't exist, have not suffered from the effects of weather or changes in fashion, are not subject to criticism for being well or badly constructed, then a final judgment cannot be made. There is nothing finite to criticise, which is a useful position for someone who doesn't want to commit himself too much. Basing one's life on visionary drawings rather than on actual buildings could perhaps be seen as a flaw in character, a fear of laying ideas open to public inspection. This, again, might contain an autobiographical element somewhere …

I was struck by your use of the buildings in Rome, especially the fascist architecture of Piazza Venezia.

The seven buildings, the seven stages of Roman architecture I chose for the film, are all tombs—memorials to the dead, reminders to the bereaved of what went on before. Slam bang in the middle of Rome is this enormous building for which I have always had great affection and which the Romans variously call the ‘Wedding Cake’ or the ‘Typewriter.’ It's a rather vulgar building, more typical of French high beaux arts than Italian: gleaming white marble that doesn't seem to fit in at all with its surroundings. It's really extraordinarily ostentatious and grotesque when you think that during the First World War it was adapted as a memorial to the unknown soldier and widows were encouraged to take their gold wedding rings there as donations to the war effort. Behind it, shadowing it almost, we find the cradle of western civilisation: the Roman Forum.

Frankly, when I wrote the script, I never thought we would be allowed to shoot inside the ‘Typewriter,’ an emblem of architecture at its worst and most curious. But through the good offices of the architect Constantino Dardi and our art director, we managed to get in there. Then, as always happens, some remarkable associations came right out of the blue. For instance, the man who built it, Zucconi (we used his bust in lead in the film. incidentally), was a rather sad man who got into a lot of trouble for importing the marble from his home town. He was a typical local boy who ‘makes good in Rome,’ but like Kracklite, he committed suicide. I think someone was playing me along, but they said he did it by jumping off that very building.

And Piazza della Liberta? No Italian would dare shoot there after Fellini's Roma, and few would take their cameras into the tourist trap of the Pantheon.

You can put that down to the naive Englishman. I mean, can you imagine the reverse—a European director coming to London to set his scenes in Carnaby Street, Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London? It makes you shudder, doesn't it?

More so in that your previous style of filming seems to owe not a little to an almost Pasolinian concept of frontality. Characters are often flattened against the shapes that threaten constantly to devour them. Yet here, thanks to Boullée, and the rotund shape of Kracklite and his obsessions, the conceptual framework of the film is well and truly ‘rounded.’

Just as The Draughtsman's Contract was based on twelve drawings, and A Zed & Two Noughts on the eight Darwinian stages of evolution, The Belly of an Architect is based on the figure seven. The seven hills of Rome, of course, but also … I reckon there were seven clear influences that emanated out of Rome and affected the whole of western civilisation. The film is nevertheless quite seamless now: it's difficult to find the joins, but there are still seven intended correlations being brought into the narrative. That rigidity helped me to structure the script, with Kracklite's emotional and psychological deterioration acting as counterpoint to these ideas. Everything gets gradually tighter and tighter, so that when we come to ‘celebrate’ Mussolinian architecture, we do so in a montage sequence that exists almost entirely on its own. Kracklite goes to the window, and there, triumphant, is this extraordinary Italian fascist apology of a building, reprised by a second section which mobilises the same music in the Foro Italico, thus merging them. reappraising them together.

Do you feel that architecture and philosophy are particularly close to each other?

Yes, the architect needs to have knowledge and a strong awareness of everything around him. One character says as much in the film: he needs to know about literature, art and the price of bread, but on top of all that he must, like Le Corbusier, be aware of the consequences of summing all the ciphers together. Boullée was prone to making grand philosophical statements, and some of these have happily found their way into the film.

Brian Dennehy has the emotional power to sustain a character as the old Hollywood actors used to, and this is something that is perhaps missing in your other, colder films.

You are right, and it's something I have to acknowledge. My concerns reiterate a wish to bring the aesthetics of painting to cinema, and this is not a highly emotional endeavour. I am also a product of the post-Brechtian alienation of the late 60s, not of Kramer vs Kramer. I like to approach the cinema as much through the mind as through any emotional involvement, and that has been the colouring for films like The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed & Two Noughts, where all the actors were essentially signposts to ideas. This is a new departure, and I can see now how I could make it work for me. Since a lot of the ideas I dabble with concern a metaphorical use of cinema—which I still want to use as a language—I know it can be difficult for people to grasp, and this is obviously a device which could turn into a very useful tool.

Having said that, I was very surprised by the performance that Brian Dennehy gave, and I am grateful: if he helps to encourage people to engage with the other parts of the film, then that is great. That sounds manipulative, but I don't mean it to be, and would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am? He identified with so many aspects of the character that he felt he simply had to take it on. With his tough guy image, many people will find his presence in an art film strange. But he comes over, I think, as a guy who forces his personality intellectually as well as physically. Certainly his love for Boullée and all the anxieties he has are intellectual as well as physical. Some of my obsessions are ludic and ephemeral, like the photocopying obsession, and he has made them work.

Why the obsession with photocopying?

I could produce a long thesis, but … a lot of my films have been concerned with reproduction. and I mean both human and artistic. The Belly of an Architect, for those who want to look, has tried to explore all the different means by which art has reproduced the human form. So we have paintings, sculpture, photographs, and ultimately the current cloning idea of reproducing art on a treadmill. But it's all in quotes, as it were. There is a photocopier in every office, like sellotape, a kind of shorthand. Most people photocopy texts, here it's works of art. It's a way of being inquisitive, just running the whole gamut of art on a photocopier.

What about new projects?

A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but there is a certain hedonism about it as well. It is not nihilistic. It's through the pessimism that one might get filled with desire to carry on and try to comprehend things. I'm afraid the scripts that are coming up are full of death and decay as well …

The one I have just been officially commissioned to do, by Tangram in Italy—though the script is virtually finished—is called The Stairs (La Scala), a working title that seems quite useful. Again it's about baroque, showmanship and the theatrical nature of art, which I want to associate with a general consideration of trompe l'oeil in the cinema, in painting, and also in human relations: how we play games with one another. The main character is an English painter of great ability who goes to Rome to paint a vast baroque ceiling. He gets involved with a production company preparing to make a film about an old Monteverdi opera called The Marriage of Aeneas, and becomes their art director. By the time the movie is shot, you discover that a conspiracy has been going on in usual Greenaway fashion. I want to use the story as a vehicle to explore tricks of culture, tricks of the cinema, tricks of painting.