Peter Greenaway Is Expert at Creating Film Tempests : Movies: After the uproar over his ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,’ the director mixes technologies to create ‘Prospero’s Books.’

“If Only Film Could Do the Same.”

This is the title that Peter Greenaway chose for a recent London exhibition of his paintings, drawings and multimedia images, but it’s also a wistful motto for the making of his newest, most ambitious film, “Prospero’s Books.”

Greenaway’s radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s last play, “The Tempest,” starring Sir John Gielgud as Prospero, in what is likely the master actor’s last major role, also marks a first: an unprecedented feature-length experiment uniting the latest in film and television technologies. For the British filmmaker-painter-novelist, ever fascinated with paradoxes, “Prospero’s Books” expresses something very old in very new terms.

The 49-year-old director turned to the Quantel graphics “paintbox” at NHK facilities in Tokyo, combining computer technology with high-definition television where he could achieve effects later transferred back to film. Here, Greenaway could layer images on top of images, which he first experimented with on “A TV Dante,” his first collaboration with Gielgud. “I can be a painter and a collager. Using a computerized stylus--which can be programmed as a paintbrush, a pen or charcoal--I make marks on an electronically sensitive pad, and the images appear on the screen. It allows up to 17 million different color hues.”

This film/TV marriage indicates the ambitions behind “Prospero’s Books,” which sticks closely to Shakespeare’s text, but tells it all from inside Prospero’s head. Exiled with his daughter Miranda from his Milanese dukedom to a desert island, Shakespeare’s Prospero turns the island into a fanciful microcosm of the world and uses his magical powers to defeat his political enemies. Greenaway’s Prospero is a Renaissance superman who is writing “The Tempest” and speaking all the roles, until he reconciles with his foes and frees them.

All of this may seem far from Greenaway’s notorious, ferociously dark comedy “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” which made him a cause celebre in America last year, long after he had established himself as one of Europe’s premier filmmakers. “Painting,” he reminds, “has a 2,000-year-old tradition and is still the supremely radical visual medium, while cinema hasn’t even reached its cubist phase.” Working with NHK technicians in Tokyo just learning their way through the paintbox was “a bit like flying the Concorde on steam.”

Born in Newport, Wales, but reared in the London area, Greenaway explored with the ways flights of imagination and ideas can meld. Against his parents’ wishes, Greenaway attended art school. He experienced “a turning point” when he accidentally saw Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”

“Movies, up to then, had been just good, entertaining stories,” he recalls. “But here was a film that not only had a strong narrative, but a great sense of metaphor and metaphysics. It was very happy to play with mythology, with concepts of received history, with grandiose ideas.”

Like Bergman, he has maintained a tight group of collaborators, even though he insists that he’s “not a very good collaborator”: composer Michael Nyman, who is often credited with inventing the term minimalist music and has written a 12-minute choral scene for “Prospero’s Books”; revered cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who has worked with two of Greenaway’s filmmaking heroes, Alain Resnais and Luis Bunuel, and designers Jan Roelfs and Ben Van Os, who turned an Amsterdam hangar into Prospero’s world full of pools, corridors and libraries exploding with paper.

But Greenaway’s key collaborator is his Holland-based producer, Kees Kasander. Where most of his fellow British filmmakers have either vanished in the country’s destitute film industry or escaped to Hollywood, Greenaway has been, by his own admission, “quite fortunate to have always had a funding source for my work.” The British Film Institute supported his films through “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” his first U.S. hit in 1983. Kasander amazes Greenaway with his ability to draw on money worldwide. (“Prospero” money came from no fewer than than 25 sources.)

Says Greenaway: “Keeping budgets low, of course, allows me to maintain control”--the total cost for “Prospero” is roughly $3 million. “And Kees never censors. He’s done all sorts of extraordinary things for me, like finding 25 live zebras. He must have a profound interest in the edges of eccentric filmmaking.”

This eccentricity has proved too much for many of his critics, whose barbs he’s by now memorized.

“Ah yes, ‘Too much Greenaway, not enough Shakespeare.’ Or that I’ve ‘MTVed’ Shakespeare. A lot of people complained that I did not pursue the nature vs. nurture themes of the play. Some thought I underplayed the themes of power and politics. I have demeaned the original by not following all those well-worn trenches of Shakespearean scholarship.”

“I suppose it’s the shock of the new,” Greenaway muses. “This is a peculiarly apt play for things I want to use. It’s non-confrontational, non-psychodrama, basically a soliloquy of one man in an artificial world. Ideas of using the text rather than performance as a fulcrum to play everything on, ideas about knowledge--those are latent within the play.”

Since the late ‘60s, Greenaway has been experimenting with ideas in many forms, with about 36 films ranging in length from a few minutes to three hours to his credit; 19 complete or near-complete novels; four “Tempest”-related books, including the just-published screenplay and the play “Miranda”; 15 exhibitions of his paintings and drawings, plus curated exhibitions, including one upcoming at the Louvre.

Financing, he says, is already arranged for seven future projects, ranging from two operas (“The Death of Webern” and “The Baby of Macon”) to films (“55 Men on Horseback,” “The Tulse Luper Suitcase”), video (a remake of his landmark 1980 “The Falls”) and a 24-hour television spectacle, “The Historians,” involving interactive video and scheduled to air Dec. 31, 1999, on European television.

Where does Greenaway find the time and energy for all this?

“A clue to it is that I often get bored very quickly, and when I do, I need to do something else, if only to let Project A mature a little so I can come back to it again.

“I have a deep-rooted irony about my own activities. I sometimes wonder whether filmmaking has any value whatsoever. There are times when I just don’t take myself very seriously. We’re all struggling blindly, unsatisfactorily, and my films reflect that.”