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
mistake giving people
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.
fall thinking encyclopedia
I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.
eye blind blind-eyes
Blind eyes cannot read.
historian good-writers
Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.
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.
eye feet long
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.
moving fire air
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.
liars historian knows
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
firsts cameras directors
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.
names clay creation
If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
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.
past historian knows
There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.
writing majority internet
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
miserable shut-up easy
It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.