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
Peter Greenaway quotes about
arrogant film
I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
maps three where-you-are
I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.
mistake mean black
You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
things-in-life two together
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 bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
expression needs painting
Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.
historian good-writers
Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.
friday men years
I was born on the 5th April 1942. On Good Friday. Round about crucifixion time. Archbishop Ussher, a man for dates, who calculated that the world began on September 27th 4004 BC, says the crucifixion took place at three o'clock in the afternoon on Good Friday in the year 33 AD. I was right on time.
cinema narrative metaphor
Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
where-you-come kind addict
What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...
friday art school
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.
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!
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.