Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway, CBEis a British film director, screenwriter, and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his film are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth5 April 1942
mean views intellectual
As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.
italian imagination cinema
I acknowledge Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. They are prostlytizers of English socialism preaching to the converted and telling us what we already know. Cinema is best served away from documentary neo-realism. I come from a tradition of post-post-Italian neo-realism in England, where we've produced the best television in the world. But to paraphrase Truffaut, the English have no visual imagination.
world moments hours
I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.
cinema rich mediums
Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
eye blind blind-eyes
Blind eyes cannot read.
empathy manipulation cinema
It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
mistake men years
I made a very bad mistake; I miscounted these scraps of information on the record as 92, and in continual homage to this man who had been so influential to me, I began creating or constructing my own films on this so-called "magic" number of 92 ... but when I eventually made a film about John Cage and met him, I explained this to him, and he found it very amusing because there are only 90 stories on the two sides of the record, and I'd based three years of my filmic career on this mathematical error!
guy want trouble
I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.
war book hero
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.
nice musical uptight
I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
editors keys doubt
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.
miserable shut-up easy
It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.
writing majority internet
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
gay pessimist used
A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.