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Peter Greenaway
272 quotes
“I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
“My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
“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 (born 1942) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Cineaste, 1991
“Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Cineaste, 1991
“To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Cineaste, 1991
“One [film] is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child -- The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Film Quarterly, Winter 1991-92
“It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... [I] would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Sight and Sound, Summer 1987
“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 (born 1942) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Sight and Sound, Summer 1987
“It's a movie that bewilders some viewers and mesmerizes others. A man I met while we were exercising our dogs told me it was the greatest film he had ever seen, and one of my editors claims it's the closest any movie has ever come to photographing the inside of his mind.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It can hardly be said that Greenaway is unaware of his demoniac cleverness, but he unearths the nuggets buried in his work in a spirit of generosity. They are not so much possessions to be admired as gifts to be shared.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , in an interview with Greenaway in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
“... [f]launting their erudition and relishing overt staginess, Peter Greenaway's films divide audiences. There are those who are prepared to entertain his conceits and play the game, and others for whom a Greenaway film is about as exciting as a guided tour through an ancient museum where the catalogue has been lost.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , Sight and Sound, May 1991
“I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gonzalo threw many books into the bottom of the leaky vessel that took Prospero out on to the sea away from Italy and Europe into exile. Shakespeare does not, of course, elaborate what these volumes were. Prospero's Books speculates. There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Prospero wears a large, heavy, dark-blue cloak or gown that enfolds him like a quilted blanket... it is darkly embroidered with small wine-coloured beads and swirls of black vegetation... it has long strings and ornate tassels that trail to the ground... it is a garment that has often been worn... a little frayed and scuffed. Later it will be seen to be capable of changing colour... in seven stages comparable to the power of Prospero's magic... black, brown, dark blue, light blue, purple, dark red and fiery red... and to have a vivid lining embroidered with dazzling stars -- a lining that is only revealed in flashes as when a dark butterfly momentarily uncovers coloured underwings.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I made, for a London television company a programme called 26 Bathrooms … which was about the ways in which people behaved in their bathrooms. It was about where people put the soap on one level, or the colour of the bathroom curtains, the acoustics, about whether you sang in the bath, and it was structured very simply on the alphabet. We had a man and a woman who arrived one by bus, one by bike, to come and demonstrate for me, in front of the camera, how a jacuzzi operated. I asked both of them to take their clothes off because obviously you don't get into a bath with your clothes on. They hesitate, but eventually their dressing gowns came off and they got into the bath. They had never met one another before. Six weeks later I got an invitation from these people that I had brought together so peculiarly in this jacuzzi -- they were planning to get married! I understand that now they have three children.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source