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
emotional thinking doctors
I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.
thinking profound want
I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
thinking age done
I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
thinking self purpose
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?
hate men thinking
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.
art thinking space
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.
distance emotional thinking
I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.
thinking years cinema
I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.
thinking feet dying
I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
art thinking use
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.
thinking important way
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
sex men thinking
If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
art thinking purpose
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.
fall thinking encyclopedia
I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.