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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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Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
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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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English culture is highly literary-based.
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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.
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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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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
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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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I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.
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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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Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
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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 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.
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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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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 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.
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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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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
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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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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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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.
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