Just a Minute With: artist and director Peter Greenaway

By Gilles Castonguay

MILAN (Reuters) - Film director and artist Peter Greenaway is never short of a polemic.

The 66-year-old maker of the 1989 movie "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" has declared the film medium to be as good as dead, and has embarked on a series of installations to interpret great works of art in a new way.

In 2006, he created a multimedia installation on Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, using lights, music, voices and sound effects to commemorate the painter's 400th birthday.

The work was a hit and Greenaway made a film about Rembrandt, which he entered in last year's Venice Film Festival. He has since begun work on installations for other masterpieces, including Picasso's Guernica and Monet's Water Lilies.

His latest involves da Vinci's "Last Supper" in Milan and he spoke to Reuters after its opening last month.

Q: How did you get the started on this project?

A: The Rijksmuseum suggested ... that I should consider the possibility of making a manifestation in association with probably the most famous Dutch painting of all time.

I make my ... films in Holland so I brought (together) all the people I knew from the cinema world ... and we considered to go for those parameters for which Rembrandt is most remembered, which is his ability to organise light.