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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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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
Film
Doe
Self
Reflexive
Right
Cinema
Way
Films
Always
Question
Think
Quite
Thinking
Purpose

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
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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.
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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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Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.
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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
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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.
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If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
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Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
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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.
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My heroes among filmmakers would be people like Buñuel and Pasolini, who were of very high cinematic intelligence, but tread on a lot of toes.
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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.
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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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English culture is highly literary-based.
Peter Greenaway
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Continuity is boring.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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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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There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.
Peter Greenaway
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I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.
Peter Greenaway