Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and The Cook, the Thief

<p>Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife &amp; Her Lover, decided there was nothing after death when he was 13. Seventy-one years later, sitting in front of the Swiss Alps, he talks sex, death, ageing, his daughter&#39;s verdict on him and the films he will never get to make.</p><p>Recorded at the St. Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF), where Greenaway was Guest of Honour, this special edition of Martin Deeson Unloaded sits down with one of British cinema&#39;s great provocateurs at 84.</p><p>Trained as a painter, Greenaway broke through with The Draughtsman&#39;s Contract (1982), then made the run of films that defined arthouse cinema for a generation: A Zed &amp; Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect with Brian Dennehy, Drowning by Numbers with Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife &amp; Her Lover, with Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Tim Roth, Jean Paul Gaultier costumes and a Michael Nyman score. Later came Prospero&#39;s Books with John Gielgud and The Pillow Book with Ewan McGregor.</p><p>Martin saw The Cook, the Thief exactly once, at the Renoir cinema in Bloomsbury in 1989, and has never shaken it off. Thirty-seven years later he gets to ask the man who made it what he was up to.</p><p>In this episode:</p><ul><li>Why he stopped believing in any afterlife at 13, and why he still isn&#39;t afraid of dying</li><li>Sex and death: omnipresent in all of us, &quot;even if you&#39;re a nun or a sex maniac&quot;</li><li>The Cook, the Thief as a portrait of Evil with a capital E, and whether the Thatcherite greed it satirised has won</li><li>The sequel nobody knew existed: what happens to Helen Mirren&#39;s murderess after the final shot?</li><li>Why every Greenaway film is designed to remind you that you&#39;re watching a Greenaway film</li><li>The Greenaway Alphabet, Saskia Boddeke&#39;s film in which he is interviewed, and categorised, by his teenage daughter Pip</li><li>Why he feels &quot;equivocal&quot; about AI, and why The Cook, the Thief belongs on a big screen, not a phone</li><li>His new film, shot in Lucca with Dustin Hoffman and Helen Hunt</li><li>Howard Marks, and the Palma restaurant that looked exactly like The Cook, the Thief</li><li>The unmade films of Peter Greenaway, and what he&#39;d do if he lived to 300</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Unloaded Podcast:</p><ul><li>Apple: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674">https://podcasts.a