SEX and death are common obsessions for film-makers. Sex, death and lists, on the other hand, are a pre-occupation of just one: Peter Greenaway, British cinema's last true maverick and, the night before we speak, recipient of a BAFTA Life In Pictures award which recognises the fact. It's this honour which has brought him to London from his home in Amsterdam, where he has lived for the last 20 years.

It isn't just lists that drive Greenaway, either, though he does love them. All manner of symmetries, patterns, numerical protocols and textual conceits can be found in the films the Welsh-born director has made over the course of his 50 year career.

You find it in early short works such as the quirky H Is For House, a list of things beginning with H, or Windows, which gives short biographies of people who have died as a result of defenestration. You find it in his high water period of the 1980s, when he collaborated with composer Michael Nyman on films like The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed And Two Noughts, Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. And you find it in his latest film, Eisenstein In Guanajuato which, like virtually everything else he has made, is stagey, gorgeously-composed, unashamedly highbrow, consistently rude and occasionally profane.

Now back to the sex and the death. “Of the seven billion people in the world, you included, two facts stand out,” he tells me gleefully. “Two people f***** to make you and I'm very, very sorry but you're going to die … These are the ubiquitous subject matters, they continually fascinate us. They come in so many variations and varieties. They're endless. You can talk about them forever.”

Everything else, he adds, is “ephemeral”. “But this beginning and this end are universal. So all my cinema is about that in one way or another - sometimes very flippantly, sometimes, I hope, with some kind of pregnant profundity. And it was obviously a concern of Mr Eisenstein.”

It certainly was. Eisenstein In Guanajuato stars Finnish actor Elmer Back as feted Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, director of Battleship Potemkin, and delves into what he may have got up to during a 10 day visit to Mexico in 1931. In Greenaway's version, this includes a torrid homosexual affair involving a Mexican hotel manager and, in the film's most graphic sex scene, copious amounts of olive oil and a small Soviet flag. On a stick.

In a review of Eisenstein In Guanajuata after its Berlin Film Festival screening last year, Variety wrote that it could be decades before the film is fully appreciated. It might take the Russians a little longer: although backed by plenty of documentary evidence in the form of letters and erotic drawings, Greenaway's portrayal of Eisenstein as gay hasn't gone down well in that notoriously homophobic country. Neither has his decision to cast a Finnish actor, or to concentrate on the period when Eistenstein was outside Russia and choose his filming locations accordingly. “I'm a criminal three times over,” he laughs.

As well as a biopic of sorts, the film also functions as an ideas-laden meditation on film-making, both in its script (“I am a boxer for the freedom of cinematic expression,” says Eisenstein at one point) and in a structure which has the first scene mirroring the last, the second the penultimate and so on.

The mid-point is interesting too. “If you took out your stopwatch and timed it, you'd find the red flag up the anus is exactly half way through the film,” says Greenaway proudly. “So I'm playing with all those formalistic games and tropes and paradigms which I've always enjoyed.”

The film is also littered with what the director calls “quotations” from film history. He reels them off: a scene near the start in which Eisenstein jumps on a bed references Jean Renoir doing the same in his 1939 film La Règle De Jeu. A drinking scene nods to Francois Truffaut's French New Wave classic, Jules Et Jim. A scene in which Eisenstein talks to his penis “parodies Scorsese's Raging Bull”.

Greenaway's use of split screen, meanwhile, references the same technique in Abel Gance's 1927 silent masterpiece Napoleon as well as the triptychs of Gothic religious painting. And there are references throughout to Soviet films of all periods.

“The whole film is very much based on Apollonian and Dionysian opposites,” says Greenaway, as if that clears things up any. “And I suppose it is for me a palimpsest of what I enjoy doing: you know, list-making. Umberto Eco said the beginning of literature starts with list-making. How many sheep exist in a Sumerian temple, for example: fat sheep, thin sheep, woolly sheep, black sheep.”

Already I'm swamped by the torrent of words, ideas and references which pour out of the 74-year-old. To watch his films is to feel the same force, only on screen they're served up in images, carefully-arranged tableaux and artfully-contrived dialogue. As a result, he admits his films are “sometimes a little difficult. I'm often accused of elitism and all sorts of self-indulgences, so I cannot command big commercial audiences.”

In part because they appeal and in part because they reflect his own view of himself within the wider film industry, Greenaway is increasingly drawn to portraits of outsiders. Trained as a painter, he's a defiantly visual film-maker and in recent years has made works about Rembrandt (2007's Nightwatching) and 16th century Dutch printer and purveyor of erotica Hendrik Goltzius (Goltzius And The Pelican Company, from 2012).

He's currently shooting a film about modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncu?i and planning another on Austrian poet and artist Oskar Kokoschka, who once commissioned a life size female doll to replace a lost lover and was condemned as a degenerate by the Nazis.

Beyond cinema, Greenaway's restless imagination has seen him undertake video installations and multi-media performances in nightclubs, galleries and churches, and compose a series of libretti based on common themes in the deaths of 10 composers. Typically, eight of these composers were fictitious. The two that weren't? Anton Webern and John Lennon.

This is all classic Greenaway territory. Then again, he says, the function of art is to put an alternative point of view. “It's necessarily provocative. It goes against the grain. It's out to irritate and disturb and make people think from a different perspective, and I think these are the characteristics of the people I make films about.”

Getting a word in is difficult, far less a question. But here's one that makes it through and is answered. Sort of, anyway. You said aged 70 that you would kill yourself when you reached 80: is that still your plan?

“Does anyone do anything valuable after 80? You have to really be pragmatic,” he says. “Albert Einstein, for example, had virtually done everything by the time he was 35. The best poetry in English is leaning more towards Keats, who's dead by 25, than it is to Tennyson and Wordsworth, who lingered on into their 80s, writing more and more unsatisfactory poetry. The world belongs to the young, so it's selfish to hang around. You're in the way. You're using resources which could be much better used by people with young and exciting imaginations.”

Older than Greenaway by half a century is cinema itself. But where he views his own demise as final and inevitable, whether at 80 or not, he sees film as a medium capable of rebirth – if only it would divest itself of its relationship to what he calls “dreary” narrative.

“You have never seen a film which didn't start life as a text,” he states. “I really believe that cinema's primacy should be as an image-based medium and it isn't, it's a text-based medium. All we have seen is 120 years of illustrated texts.”

He makes a good case, arguing that it was only when painting distanced itself from the figurative in the hands of artists such as Picasso, Mondrian and Kandinsky that it was set free. Cinema needs to do the same.

“Cinema can begin now,” he thunders. “We can throw away the bookshop, cut the umbilical cord between the notion of image and text, and really get on with the business of making cinema”.

Peter Greenaway may not be around when that revolution starts. But his films will.

Eisenstein In Guanajuato is released on DVD on June 6 (Axiom Films)