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I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.

Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 5
Actor
Cinematographer
Experimental Artist
Film Director
Film Editor
Painter
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Newport
South Wales
Conventions
Cinema
False
Notion
Reach
Becomes
Deplorable
Believe
Convention
Realism

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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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.
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Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
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It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
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If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
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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.
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway
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American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
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This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
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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.
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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
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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
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Peter Greenaway
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Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway
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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 enjoy them both equally.
Peter Greenaway
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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
Peter Greenaway
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I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.
Peter Greenaway
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We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
Peter Greenaway
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The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
Peter Greenaway
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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
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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