Peter Greenaway: Time to bid the fondest farewell to the art of cinema

We were all born in the early 1940s which makes us now in our 60s. It's been a very long stretch of time and there's been a gradual closing down of cinema language. There is basically one model for films now, which is the Hollywood model. The 1960s model was the Nouvelle Vague and middle-period Italian cinema, from La Dolce Vita through to Bertolucci, which showed us that there were many, many different ways of making movies. The most inspiring things were going on in France and in Italy in those halcyon days which lasted some 15 years. We didn't need to look to Hollywood for format movies.

Much pop music and film-making activity came out of art school. I was at art school with Ian Drury and another school down the road was attended by the early members of The Pink Floyd. Ostensibly, people went to art school to paint, draw and design, but they also spent a great deal of time going to film clubs and making music. They were people who looked at many different art-forms for inspiration, to the Bauhaus, or American Abstract Expressionism, or New York's underground cinema from the late 1950s. There was a great deal of cross-over activity then – painters like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg also made films. All of this gave us a fantastic push that showed us what could be possible. We weren't limited by the idea of an Oscar-nominated movie.

I believe the brightest ideas in film will always come from people with great visual curiosity – a quality encouraged at art school. For me, the visual aspect is of the upmost importance. It's just not happening in the sit-in-the dark, looking-in-one-direction medium of single-screen cinema anymore. The exciting activity is happening elsewhere – on the laptop, in website-related activities and new emerging media forms. That is where we have got to look. Let's forget about Cinema with a big C, let's let it go. It's had a good innings – 115 years is not bad for a single entertainment technology.

Peter Greenaway talked to Arifa Akbar. His latest film, 'Nightwatching', is currently showing at cinemas across Britain