Peter Greenaway: Excess baggage

Peter Greenaway is the only British director competing for the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year. He tells Geoffrey Macnab about his bizarre new project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which involves 92 actors, 92 DVDs, a TV series...

Who exactly is Tulse Luper? British film-maker Peter Greenaway describes the shadowy, recurring character in Greenaway's early shorts and in his first feature, The Falls, as his "alter ego". Now Luper is to have three new films devoted to him, the first of which, The Moab Story: The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part One, receives its premiere in Cannes later this month, to be accompanied by a TV series, a website, a book, exhibitions, a play in Frankfurt, academic conferences and a selection of DVDs.

"He's a polymath figure who will say all the things in public that maybe I would feel a little dubious about saying," says Greenaway. "He's an extravagant exhibitionist, a mouthpiece for myself, I suppose. I could pour into him all sorts of fantasies that maybe I couldn't associate with my own persona. He's a shop-front for myself."

Greenaway has invented an incredibly elaborate "mythology" around Luper: part-Buckminster Fuller, part-Marcel Duchamp and a lot of Jorge Luis Borges, Luper first surfaced in the late 1960s, inspired Drowning by Numbers – which was about his wife (or three versions of her) – and gave Greenaway the idea for the London hoodlum played by Michael Gambon in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Luper was then put in cold storage for several years while German academics and rogue websites (including one in Calcutta) obsessed over his identity.

Greenaway and Luper certainly don't sound like doubles of one another. The director's own image is that of an aloof, professorial auteur, a Prospero-like figure who lives in exile in Amsterdam and who is often accused of pretentiousness by British critics and fellow film-makers while but remaining revered on the Continent. He claims the The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which has a grand total of 92 cast members, is his most ambitious work yet. "It's the magnum opus, a way to bring all these fascinations and activities together in one place," he says.

The project sounds demented, but actors, as ever, have clamoured to work on it. JJ Feild (who played the younger version of the Michael Caine character in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders) is Luper. Debbie Harry, of Blondie fame, plays a character called Fastidieux. The director has just finished scenes in Spain with Isabella Rossellini. Madonna may also appear, if her schedule permit. Greenaway has met her several times and gets on famously with her. "I was surprised to find she knew so much about my films and liked them so much," he says. "And we're both interested in contemporary art. I started out as a painter, she's a collector." Unfortunately, she was so busy making Swept Away with Guy Ritchie that she had to pull out of the first film ("we know the fallout and what happened after that"), but he's still optimistic that she may join in the roadshow somewhere further down the line. Young Italian star Valentina Cervi (who plays Cissie Colpitts, the love of Luper's life) denies that the director is cold and detached. "I've never felt as free as in this," she says of her stint on the picture. "Peter is very curious and very open and wants you to do whatever you feel. He's a very passionate man."

Although Greenaway is the only British film-maker with a feature in the main competition in Cannes, he is wary about festivals and about movies in general. He long ago claimed that cinema was a dying art. "The head of Kodak says they'll only be manufacturing celluloid for another 10 years... I don't think there are really any interesting film-makers left any more. All the best people and the best minds have now gone somewhere else, thank you very much." So why is he still busy with his camera? Greenaway began his career as a painter but was drawn to film-making because he was interested in "text and music". That's why he perseveres.

The patronage of the British Film Institute and Channel 4 enabled him to start making movies. It's highly unlikely that work as experimental and eccentric as his would be supported today. In the 1980s, Alan Parker famously claimed that if Greenaway made another film, he would go abroad. Ironically, while Parker is now ensconced as chairman of the UK Film Council and very much part of the establishment, it's Greenaway who has been forced into exile. He describes himself as an "honorary Dutchman", his producer Kees Kasander (in charge of the logistical nightmare of putting Tulse Luper together) is Dutch, and most of his work, as a film-maker and opera director is done in Holland. He has no immediate plans to return to England.

The Tulse Luper project, meanwhile, is being made on the run. Shot all over Europe as well as in the Utah desert, it chronicles the adventures of Luper as he becomes "caught up in a life of prisons all over the world from the South of Wales to Moab in Utah, Antwerp, Budapest, Moscow, Shangai, Kyoto and even Kubla Khan's palace of Xanadu in Manchuria". The use of prisons is a metaphysical metaphor, but various "real" captives played by actors cross Luper's path. In the course of his epic journey across the 20th century, Luper meets Italian author and concentration camp survivor, Primo Levi, who committed suicide in 1987, and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who helped Jews escape from Nazi persecution in Budapest but was then arrested by the Russians. "I was fascinated by the mythology of Wallenberg," Greenaway explains. "The idea that he was this extraordinarily saintly man who took enormous personal risks to save 600,000 Jews, and his punishment for this saintliness seemed to be imprisonment hereafter... the good are never rewarded, the bad are seldom punished and the innocent are always abused."

Greenaway claims to have first-hand experience of being incarcerated and insists that chunks of the three films are autobiographical. In the early 1990s, when filming in the Utah desert, he was apprehended by the police for trespassing and spent six hours behind bars. He also claims to have been arrested while taking part in anti-Vietnam war protests in Grovesnor Square in London, but it's not clear whether this is a self-aggrandising Tulse Luper-style yarn. An incident from his childhood in Newport, South Wales, when his father locked him in the coal shed to stop him marauding through the neighbours' gardens, is recreated at the beginning of the trilogy.

The merchandising possibilities for this immense project are endless. "You've seen the film, now buy the T-shirt," he jokes of the many activities surrounding the three feature films. Tulse Luper's Suitcases comes billed as "a gathering together of a lifetime's interests in all sorts of cultural activities". The movies themselves aren't what interests him most; he encourages real devotees to get hold of the 92 DVDs (one to be released for each of Luper's 92 suitcases). Like so much of his work, it looks certain to exasperate and enchant in equal measure. "I would ask – and of course it's a large proposition – but let's think big – that the ideal participants would see the feature films, watch the television series, buy the books, become entertained by the CD-Roms and buy the DVDs," he declares. In other words, at least, no one can accuse him of not making undue demands on his audience.

'The Moab Story: The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part One' receives its official screening in Cannes on 24 May. 'The Early Films of Peter Greenaway', a new set of four DVDs, is released by the BFI in the autumn