Peter Greenaway famous quotes

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Cinema #Stories #Form

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Believe #Should #Sincerely

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Arrogant #Film

There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Opportunity #Emotional #Expectations

We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Sight #Perspective #Suffering

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Ivory Tower #Towers #Want

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Art #Works Of Art

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Art #Thinking #Space

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Ideas #Plot #Cinema

Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Cinema #Stones #Playgrounds

Too many proofs spoil the truth.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Proof #Spoil

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Bills #Viola

There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Sex #Two #Culture

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #Artist #Years

Cinema has reached a dead end.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Cinema #Dead Ends #Ends

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Moving #Opportunity #Light

I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Dream #Struggle #Secret

Many quite popular films are filled with violence. I think the difference between those and my films is that I show the cause and effect of violent activity. It's not a Donald Duck situation where he get a brick in the back of the head and gets up and walks away in the next frame. Mine have violence which keeps Donald Duck in the hospital for six months and creates a trauma which he will remember for the rest of his life.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #Ducks #Differences

An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended.
-- Peter Greenaway

#New York #Two #Three

We have to move away from the concept of screening in cinemas. This can be achieved with the new technologies. I enjoy my films and the fact that I can include you in them as well. Cinema is only a small part of a much greater phenomenon. We transcend the barriers of culture. DVDs' image quality and longevity provide us with new prospects. They are a powerful medium. I think they were invented especially for me.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Powerful #Moving #Technology

If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Names #Clay #Creation

A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Gay #Pessimist #Used

We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Lying #Secret #Statistics

Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Trying #Use #Chaos

What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history -- not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment . It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Art #Drama #Believe

I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Nice #Musical #Legs

All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Running #Journey #Men

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Blessing #Curse

I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Art #Teaching #Apology

I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Hate #Men #Thinking

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #Self #Purpose

In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Dream #Desire #World

I like a lot of glasses about -- it highers the tone.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Glasses #Tone

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Writing #Paper #Pens

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable -- the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Two #Together #Delight

Investigation is never complete.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Investigation

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
-- Peter Greenaway

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Whispering #World

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Firsts #Cameras #Directors

I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Stress #Latin #Moments

There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #Cinema #Film

I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers -- all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences -- it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Dark #Emotional #Sitting

The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it -- and I do -- and subtle -- beige, pink, white, tan, taup...
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #White #Skins

I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Thinking #Important #Way

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Ideas #People #Renoir

My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Interesting #People #Obsession

You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Play #Lacrosse #World

I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Art #Thinking #Use

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Birth #Welsh

The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Successful #Games #Jumping

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Humble #Men #Numbers

If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
-- Peter Greenaway

#Sex #Men #Thinking

Itch to read, scratch to understand.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Scratches

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Moving #Air #Fire

I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women -- you know -- long-suffering, dutiful -- but all right in the end -- a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Eye #Feet #Long

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
-- Peter Greenaway

#War #Book #Hero

I made a very bad mistake; I miscounted these scraps of information on the record as 92, and in continual homage to this man who had been so influential to me, I began creating or constructing my own films on this so-called "magic" number of 92 ... but when I eventually made a film about John Cage and met him, I explained this to him, and he found it very amusing because there are only 90 stories on the two sides of the record, and I'd based three years of my filmic career on this mathematical error!
-- Peter Greenaway

#Mistake #Men #Years

It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Empathy #Manipulation #Cinema

I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.
-- Peter Greenaway

#World #Moments #Hours

That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
-- Peter Greenaway

#People #Massage #Film

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Cinema #Rich #Mediums

You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Mistake #Mean #Black

Blind eyes cannot read.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Eye #Blind

A hand cannot write on itself.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Writing #Hands

Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Work Out #Red #Life Is

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
-- Peter Greenaway

#Book #Chapel #Sistine Chapel