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I protested about the recurring, perhaps inescapable tug of storytelling in the cinema. Did Greenaway see getting around it as absolutely necessary?
"I think it is," he replied. "Just as melody disappeared from music in the 20th century, I think it's about time we dumped narrative. Narrative is the curse, I suppose introduced by Griffith many, many years ago. It's become part of the ritual of cinema-making, and it needs to be questioned very seriously. It's like the introduction of virgin birth to Christian mythology -- completely unnecessary, but if you're a good Catholic now you have to believe in it.
"So I use many devices deliberately to reduce the power of narrative: number counting [Drowning by Numbers], color [The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover], the alphabet [A Zed and Two Noughts]. I think that we do these things at our peril. I don't want to condescend or patronize, but I also don't want to end up in the wilderness. I want to make mainstream cinema, I don't want to be an underground movie-maker, I don't want to exist in an ivory tower. I suppose the arrogant position is that I want the largest possible audience for my experiments.
