Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

Image
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
Image
We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway
Image
Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
Peter Greenaway
Image
For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
Peter Greenaway
Image
Continuity is boring.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway
Image
This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
Itch to read, scratch to understand.
Peter Greenaway
Image
I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
Peter Greenaway
Image
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Peter Greenaway
Image
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.
Peter Greenaway