On Friday, The Guardian reported that British film director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) will use “dramatic lighting, projections, and recordings of actors’ voices” to transform Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” into “something close to a film.”

O.K., but what does that even mean?

“He plans to project on to the refectory walls ‘raw and heavy’ images of Christ’s genitalia and naked crucifixion, taken from Da Vinci’s other works,” the article continues. This is a guy who doesn’t just court controversy — he goes looking for it. The event will be “an act of some significance that some people might regard as blasphemous,” he announced with a sense of triumph at the launch in London on Thursday. More technically speaking, the “cinerama” project will involve projecting images simultaneously from three different sources onto a curved screen.

Peter Greenaway is, according to his bio, “an avant-gardist who earned surprising access to the mainstream.” He has made at least a dozen films, but the only one that had any mass appeal was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which also earned him a bit of controversy when the MPAA gave it an “NC-17″ rating. Greenaway’s latest project is a marriage of his two passions, as he trained as a painter for four years in England when he was younger.

According to the Guardian, this isn’t Greenaway’s first attempt at animating a painting, nor will it be the last, if he has his way. It began two years ago in Amsterdam, when he animated Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch,” and he intends in the future to animate many of the world’s other great paintings, including Picasso’s “Guernica,” Monet’s “Waterlilies” and a Jackson Pollock painting in New York. “He has even asked the Vatican if he can bring the series to a climax by projecting on to Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.” That’ll probably depend on how “raw and heavy” the Last Supper turns out to be.