As the British-turned-Dutch director Peter Greenaway sees it, filmmaking represented a wrong turn in his life.

"I made a terrible mistake moving into cinema," says the director of Nightwatching, the quirky film about a murder mystery that's tied into Rembrandt's most famous painting, The Night Watch.

"My first love is the business of putting things down into the visual medium that is described as painting. My career started with the desire to make images, but I was also sidetracked by an interest in text and music. So film was a sideways compromise.

"But you have 8,000 years of painting and only 112 of cinema, so there's no comparison in terms of the richness of tradition."

Nightwatching -- which, with its labyrinthean conspiracy-making, is reminiscent of a smarter DaVinci Code -- posits a reading of one of the most famous paintings in the world that includes an accusation of murder against a member of the Amsterdam Civil Guard. It also paints a less-than-iconic cinematic picture of Rembrandt van Rijn (played by British comic actor Martin Freeman) as a chubby, randy, and alternately comic and sardonic character.

In both cases, the approach represents a love letter to Holland, which he has called home for a decade since marrying a Dutch woman.

"There's always been a sub-genre of films about painters -- Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Modigliani, Michelangelo. But they have a tendency to genuflect in the direction of the divine artist and we didn't want to do that. The Dutch are very practical, pragmatic people. They have these sayings like 'Ordinary is extraordinary enough.' Or 'Don't put your head above the parapet because it'll get shot off.'

"They like their heroes raunchy and difficult, not bland. But they don't want anybody who believes he's above his station. Which is why I cast Martin (a crony of Sacha Baron Cohen and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright). When you put a wig on him, he looks surprisingly like Rembrandt. He's not an Adonis, he's got a little pudgy nose, he's got a pot belly and he's not very tall." We note that Rembrandt often included images of himself in his paintings. "But he never paints himself as a hero," Greenaway notes. "He's always a snubby-nosed sort of wry presence."

As for the conspiracy plot -- a member of the Guard is killed over homosexual jealousy, and there's a coverup of a child brothel -- Greenaway admits he's likely to run afoul of art-history sticklers.

"I know writers who've written 15 books on Rembrandt, so when I throw this sort of scenario at them it's going to upset them.

"But I always argue there's no such thing as history, there's only interest. So whether you are Ridley Scott making Gladiator or are given The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, you have a stake, you manoeuvre things. I have always been interested in the interpretation of images. You remember Antonioni's Blow-Up, a murder mystery in blown-up photographs. Or the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination, which people have examined frame-by-frame to look for murder and conspiracy."

But whatever the reason, Greenaway says he's convinced The Night Watch presaged Rembrandt's "commercial downfall. That is a big mystery to me. How was this sort of Mick Jagger figure, very rich, very fashionable, people wanted to have dirinks with him all the time, and suddenly in 1642, he paints this painting. And all of a sudden his career goes heading downhill. Within a few years his creditors have taken his house away from him, they've accused him of moral turpitude, his commission disappears and he's lost everything.

"All his family died before he did. He lived to the ripe old age then of 69, and he lost his three consorts, his wife and his two mistresses. So he really died an impoverished, sad old man."

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