Lav once described me as "intellectually superior, and therefore behaviourally indifferent." Which means that, for all my intelligence, little affects me emotionally, since I can distance myself from most things. How true that summation is I'm not quite sure, especially these days, but I find it amusing that I connect deeply with the twins in Peter Greenaway's masterpiece A Zed and Two Noughts, who, at one point in the film, admit that they have endless troubles "distinguishing between pleasure and grief". And indeed, for years now, I have gone along with Sartre's notion that he never had a sad day in his life - even when he was crying, it was in some way a kind of distorted euphoria.

The protagonist of Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract is described as "at once arrogant and naive". That too is something to which I relate; arrogance is never ignorant - though people can often be both - for arrogance, in the way I understand it to mean, is a self-conscious trait, and naivety is therefore a natural if not dangerous compliment to it.

Greenaway's films have been criticised at times, underneath praise for their individualistic flamboyance, for having no soul, for being emotionally empty or lacking in weight. And though I can see where people might find such shallowness, I must disagree. For, even with the layers of intense lighting, studio artificiality, and a showy, decorative tendency for the vulgar, for the baroque, for the grotesque, I almost cried the other night at a scene The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, an absolute masterpiece if ever I've seen one.

I see in Greenaway's films much appeal for me personally: allegorical use of mise-en-scene; endless self-reflexivity; a deep, overbearing self-consciousness and -awareness, which dwarfs any would-be accusation of self-importance and/or pretentiousness; an unashamed attempt at sophisticated, intellectual art; an assumption and faith in the sophistication of the audience; a disciplined control of camera which commands attention; a constant, knowingly artificial style.

And themes with which I connect: the finality of death, dismemberment, landscape, high-brow vulgarities, individuals against the state, institutionalised societies, lists, the repeated visual and verbal motifs executed through witty rhetoric.

And an aesthetic exploration of: the verticality and horizontality of the frame; compositional symmetry; exaggerated, artificial colour; extreme and varied lighting; unconventional narrative; an imagistic cinema (as opposed to a writer's cinema); illustrated text; a new filmic grammar.

His is a highly creative, always imaginative and deeply personal and determined mind, who can make one film out of three films (ZOO) or one film out of nothing (Windows, H is for House). I'd liken him to a cinematic Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges.