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
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.
thinking cinema film
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.
culture
English culture is highly literary-based.
thinking white skins
The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it -- and I do -- and subtle -- beige, pink, white, tan, taup...
dark emotional cinema
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.
art wish cinema
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.
different actors
American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
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.
christian rocks names
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?
believe technology order
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.
sex way fans
If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
art giving profound
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?
cinema stories form
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
stress latin moments
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.