“Context, context, context!” As declared by a certain famous Dutch Master in Nightwatching, that line cuts to the heart of any discussion of Peter Greenaway. A British director whose rep rests on such elegant and profane arthouse staples as The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Greenaway loves nothing more than juxtaposing images culled from the history of visual art with arcane ideas derived from the annals of science, philosophy and literature.

An unrepentantly brainy filmmaker who infamously proclaimed that “cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers,” Greenaway frequently ran the risk of disappearing up his own arse. And that, unfortunately, is mostly where he’s been for the last decade as far as his movie career is concerned.

Now — or rather back in late 2007, when Nightwatching first played TIFF — two men helped lead him out. The first is Nightwatching’s subject, Rembrandt van Rijn, presented here as he paints The Night Watch, the 1642 masterpiece that officially depicts the Amsterdam VIPs who commissioned it but — as Greenaway purports both in this feature and his subsequent documentary Rembrandt’s J’Accuse — may hide details of a secret murder plot. The other man is Martin Freeman, the actor and former Office star whose lusty performance as the artist gives Greenaway’s bold, complex if sometimes infuriating new movie a vibrantly human core.

As for the matter of context, Nightwatching contains an awful lot, exploring the social, political, economic and even sexual minutiae of Rembrandt’s life. “You do end up with the accusation that you tried to pack too much in and the film becomes an art-history lesson,” admits Greenaway, who was interviewed alongside Freeman. “That’s a problem to solve. But I hope we were able to steer our way through the worst excesses.”

The film renders Rembrandt as a brilliant but stubborn man who becomes the painter of choice among Amsterdam’s elite but ultimately can’t stomach the venality and hypocrisy of his clients. The Night Watch is his opportunity to vent his spleen, much to their displeasure.

“I like the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to do a boring painting,” says Freeman. “He couldn’t knuckle down and do it. Of course, how much of this is Peter’s conceit and how much of it is fact? I’m still not really sure of it. But I like the version that we are telling anyway.”

Unusual for films about artists, Nightwatching does not portray its subject of some wan, solitary soul but a man of his time who’s very willing to swim with the sharks. Freeman notes that Greenaway wanted Rembrandt “something that was 3-D and not projected onto a pedestal.”

“This was done in a Dutch context, too,” says the director, who’s lived in Amsterdam since the ’90s. “[They] have proverbs like ‘To be ordinary is extraordinary enough.’ They keep their feet really on the ground. I would like to think we made Rembrandt look like a good craftsman. He’s certainly a businessman, too.”

Emphasizing that hard-nosed sensibility, Freeman delivers his best performance to date. (It’s his nakedest, too.) The director was pleased that the actor and the painter were so well-matched. For one thing, the two had a plausible physical resemblance. The director was also impressed that Freeman could handle the sometimes unwieldy material placed in front of him.

“Like everybody else in the world, I’d seen him on The Office,” says Greenaway, “He’s got this almost intuitive way of handling dialogue and that magnificent timing. He’s got this amazing ability to take a piece of dialogue which could look quite stiff on the page but make it really work in context.”

As for what the opportunity meant to him, Freeman is frank. “These things don’t come my way very often,” he says, “but to be honest, they don’t come anybody’s way. I have to say not many people make films like [Greenaway] does. And he doesn’t make a film a year, so this is all quite rare. I thought he and I would be an interesting combination, and I thought he and Rembrandt were an interesting combination.

“What I also really liked was that I knew it was going to be fucking hard,” he adds. “I knew it would be really hard from an acting part of view and a logistical point of view. I wondered if I could do this without killing somebody and having a nervous breakdown.”

In the end, no such unpleasantness was necessary. And though Rembrandt’s painting doesn’t quite produce a cinematic masterpiece in Nightwatching, the film’s intellectual ambition, formal audacity and own bloody-mindedness do the dead Dutchman proud.