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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
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More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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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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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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American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
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Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.
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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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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.
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Investigation is never complete.
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
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I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
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I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.
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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.
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I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
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Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
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I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
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I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
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