Peter Greenaway Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Peter Greenaway quote about:
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“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 -
“I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“Works of art are never finished, just stopped.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“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 -
“Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“Many quite popular films are filled with violence. I think the difference between those and my films is that I show the cause and effect of violent activity. It's not a Donald Duck situation where he get a brick in the back of the head and gets up and walks away in the next frame. Mine have violence which keeps Donald Duck in the hospital for six months and creates a trauma which he will remember for the rest of his life.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“We have to move away from the concept of screening in cinemas. This can be achieved with the new technologies. I enjoy my films and the fact that I can include you in them as well. Cinema is only a small part of a much greater phenomenon. We transcend the barriers of culture. DVDs' image quality and longevity provide us with new prospects. They are a powerful medium. I think they were invented especially for me.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“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.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history -- not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment . It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“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.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.”
-- Peter Greenaway -
“I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.”
-- Peter Greenaway
