Peter Greenaway Quotes

I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.

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.

We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.

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.

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

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.

Cinema is dead, long live cinema.

The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.

I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.

The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it
and I do
and subtle
beige, pink, white, tan, taup ...

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.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

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.

American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?

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.

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.

On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women
you know
long-suffering, dutiful
but all right in the end
a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.

If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?

Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right - music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.

I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.

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.

There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film
certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.

All religions have always hated females.

I think it is really important to be in some way provocative
either intellectually or viscerally
in the films one makes.

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.

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.

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.

I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?

Blind eyes cannot read.

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.

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.

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.

What are you
some kind of addict? Is this where you come to ...

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.

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.

It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

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.

Too many proofs spoil the truth.

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.

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

I loved Latin
the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history
but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin
a subject I loved
really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.

It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic
I'll shut up.

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

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.

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It's the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we're more honest, we'd be far more relaxed about them.

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.

If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

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.

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements
Air, Fire, Water
but at least we can depend on the fourth.

In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.

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.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

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.

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.

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.

Investigation is never complete.

I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.

I like a lot of glasses about
it highers the tone.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

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.

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

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.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

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?'

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!

We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.

Tulse Luper, who without too many confessions, in a sense, is a fictive version of me. I have to say he has far more exciting adventures, and certainly a lot of them sexual, than ever I've experienced. But in a sense, what you do with an alter ego, you give them all sorts of permissions and licences which you know you'll never be able to embrace in your real life.

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

My audience is comprised of three categories. The first category contains the people who decide after the first five minutes that they've made a mistake and leave. The second category is the people who give the film a chance and leave annoyed after 40 minutes. The third category includes the people that watch the whole film and return to see it again. If I'm able to persuade 33% of the audience to stay, then I can say that I've succeeded.

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.

I have always had severe problems with Austrians ... Musical, churchy, uptight ... nice legs ... hypocritical ... authoritarian ... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.' ...

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?

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.

I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 - even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to register the effects of violence - marked and dated as an indictment.

That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.

What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life?

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options ...

I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.