Why is it important for a Film Director such as yourself to be at a digital arts festival?

"In general terms all mediums have to reinvent themselves and I'm sure all artists always, always, always use the technology of their time otherwise you end up being a fossil. There is obviously a great ground swell of change now, that is related to all sorts of formatting and technology. Basically I suppose the whole revolution of celluloid moving into tape – which of course has been a televisual medium for at least 30 years but finally, finally, the very slow and laborious medium called cinema in catching up."

	Stills from The Moab Story

You're obviously a very thoughtful filmmaker, why is it important that the digital techniques are very visible throughout the Tulse Luper Trilogy?

"All my filmmaking has been very self-conscious, and very artificial and a thousand light years from Mike Leigh. I'm not very interested in illusionism for it's own sake but I'm very interested in process as well as final product. And since the cinema is such an artificial medium – there's no way of getting away from it – I always like, and I think it's almost an ethical problem, to be honest about the medium. When you see one of my films, it's not a slice of life, it's not a window of the world, it's just a film, it's a film, it's a film!

I was trained as a painter and I suppose the major characteristic of 20thC painting is this knowledge of self-reference. I'm sure it a characteristic of all the art forms of the 20thC but it's particularly very strong in painting and I think it ought to be very strong in cinema too."

Greenaway gets animated about cinema

I've been interviewing audiences about the trilogy and had a lot of mixed reactions, from really embracing, to perhaps a kind of fear with the whole idea of film going into another dimension. Do you think we're only just developing the ability to be able to view film that's a bit more layered? Is it going to take us a while?

"There's always the shock of the new and it's inevitably an educational process but if I could give you some examples, when Star Wars came on, about 14 years ago, everybody said, wow, too fast, too much information, how on earth are we going to cope with this?? If you've seen Star Wars in the last 6 months it looks slow, it's easily comprehensible. What do they say; they say the human brain is 2/3's unused. The captaincy for our learning processes and our imaginations to catch up are remarkably quick and we should be very optimistic about this.

One of my heroes would be John Cage, he suggested that if you introduce more than 20% of novelty into any artwork, watch out because you're going to loose about 80% of your audience, but they'll catch up. And it will probably be 15 years before they catch up, but they'll catch up. Now that might be too optimistic, 15 years. If you think about the common public appreciation of 19thC/20thC painting, most people have caught up with impressionism now, but they still haven't jumped the hurdle of cubism, and that's not 15 years ago, that's 150 years ago!

I think its got as much to do with the responsibility of the art as it has with the public because, and we might not like it, art is elitist, you do have to have knowledge, like with spending so long learning a language then using it in a sophisticated way. As children we are feed the alphabet, they we put words together, and as adults we never finish, it's a long training process. My attitudes with regards to cinema are this - just because you've got eyes, doesn't mean you can see - very few of us, either are privileged or interested enough to have the same intensity of the learning possibilities with the image, as we self evidently have with text. So I feel inevitably there needs to be more education, more education, more education.

	Stills from - From Sark To Finish

As I was trained as a painter I'm very concerned about visual imagery, composition and representation. We look at the cinema through a rectangle, it's an artificial space, 3 dimensions in 2 dimensions, you have to be aware of the edges and the notion of were the camera is and all those concerns about colour composition and colour coding, dramatic use of perspective, all the things that a painter would look at, and I think should be part and parcel of the vocabulary of cinema. For most people, that's not even on the table to discuss, but I'm a filmmaker who's very interested in form and language, so of course the contents is important, but then you also have to remember that French philosophers have said in the last 60 years that there's no such thing as content anymore, only language and the language has becomes the content.

It's a difficult concept for those not even versed remotely in the business of professionally looking, and that wouldn't even engage in it. Most people feel that if it's not broke, don't fix it. But for me it is broken, I think cinema now, at the end of the 20thC, beginning of 21stC is an old fashioned, archaic medium, and I think it's everyone's responsibility, not only the makers, but also the viewers to continually be aware that if the mediums going to stay alive, you have to continually reinvent it. You have to keep pushing the boundaries, because in musical terms we'd still be listening to Mozart. The big trickle down effect always starts from an elitist position, as with all good liberal socialists who really feel everyone should be part of this experience, I'm afraid egalitarian art, the opportunity of elitism, is nether Hollywood or Soviet Realism, and I don't think either of those things has an awful lot to offer."

Mike Hudson "The use of layering, the way he breaks the picture up, I find quite amazing – using that to bring in the different stories. You can't follow it intellectually, you just have to sit back and let it wash over you and try and make some sense of it afterwards. He's got such an imagination. It's a lot more complex both in a narrative sense and a visual sense than his earlier work; I wish I'd seen the first part. It's a pity Lovebytes is so compressed, if it was spread out you'd have more chance then of seeing more!"