This script by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942) follows Russian director Eisenstein to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1930, where he worked for ten days on a never-completed film called "Que Viva Mexico."

In these twenty-one interviews, filmmaker Peter Greenaway expresses his film aesthetic and discusses his combat with the dominant Hollywood style of filmmaking. His films have run unmistakably against the main current of present cinematic practice, from the short film Windows in the mid-seventies, to his more popular but nonetheless challenging films such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Pillow Book in the nineties.

In this collection the ever-controversial Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema. For him such films tell stories or they translate literature with its linear narrative onto a medium that he feels should be preeminently visual. He finds that, instead of foregrounding the image and the composition of visual elements as in the long history of painting, Hollywood-style directors seem mesmerized by the "and then and then" narrative.

In these provocative interviews Greenaway tells of his ambition to make cinema a medium based more on image than on narrative. He explains his painterly approach in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, defends his use of total nudity of both sexes, and declares that traditional literary-based cinema is dead. He believes that the most creative imaginations, the most innovative technologies, and the greatest financial resources are being devoted to television and the Internet and that Hollywood moviemaking is no longer in the vanguard.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

Peter Greenaway's "Goltzius" is the second installment in his "Dutch Masters" series. Its story runs thus: sometime during the winter of 1590, the Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius holds an interview with Margrave of Alsace, in the grand library at his castle on the Rhine. Goltzius needs money in order to build a printing press to print erotic illustrated books, and he entices Margrave of Alsace into paying for an extraordinary book of pictures of Old Testament Biblical stories, by dramatizing the erotic stories of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah and John the Baptist and Salome--stories in which themes of incest, adultery, female entrapment and necrophilia abound. Margrave's court is completely seduced by Goltzius' titillating storytelling, and swiftly sinks into a pit of lechery and religious politics, until the court is forced to buy its way out, and Goltzius can begin his ambitious endeavor.
Peter Greenaway was born in Wales in 1942. His films include "The Falls," "The Belly of an Architect," "Drowning By Numbers," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover," "Prospero's Books," "The Pillow Book, " "Nightwatching" and others.

Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls and beckoning skies: these are the images British film-maker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in "Flying out of This World", the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts. As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings 91 masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion and interpretation, illuminates the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight. A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology and meteorology, "Flying out of This World" is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.