Peter Greenaway
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.Collection: Moving
I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.Collection: World
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.Collection: Empathy
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!Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Running
Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.Collection: Whispering
I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.Collection: Daughter
I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.Collection: Thinking
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.Collection: Writing
My heroes among filmmakers would be people like Buñuel and Pasolini, who were of very high cinematic intelligence, but tread on a lot of toes.Collection: Hero
Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Sight
Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Emotional
My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet was a masterpiece.Collection: Strong
American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?Collection: Different
We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.Collection: Population
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.Collection: Art
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?Collection: 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?Collection: Sex
There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.Collection: Potters
If you never lived out your sexuality - it's a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Successful
Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Paris
Blind eyes cannot read.Collection: Eye
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?Collection: Christian
That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.Collection: People
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Humble
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.Collection: Real
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 enjoy them both equally.Collection: Things In Life
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.Collection: Stress
Continuity is boring.Collection: Boring
There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.Collection: Past
I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Moving
There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.Collection: Believe
Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Work Out
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.Collection: Sex
I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Ivory Tower
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.Collection: Glasses
I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.Collection: Distance