Peter Greenaway: Making

“The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.”

Peter Greenaway

Watching Water

Patience

“Counting makes even hideous events bearable as simply more of the same -- the counting of wedding-rings, spectacles, teeth and bodies disassociates them from their context -- to make the ultimate obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of reaction.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Wedding

“If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.”

Peter Greenaway

From the eighth book, "The Book of the Seducer"
The Pillow Book

Pain , Books , Feeling , Betrayal

“My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bosses to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.”

Peter Greenaway

One of the calligraphers
The Pillow Book

Business

“That's just the sort of remark you would make -- you'd just be intent on whipping it in, whipping it out, and wiping it on your jacket! Look at your jacket! Looks like a pig field! Your nails could do with a clean. Show me your nails! God! Why can't I have some bloody quality in my associates?”

Peter Greenaway

Albert and Mews
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

God

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Positif, Apr. 86
Interviews

Life , Art , Knowledge , Thinking

“Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will always be externally assisted. Alas, the best we can do is fall and believe ourselves flying.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

Flying

“These ideas are present in all sorts of unrelated cultures -- the Easter Islands, Celtic mythology, Plato's Symposium with its notion that we are all originally hermaphrodite. We became too arrogant and so the gods split us down the middle, forcing us to spend our lives chasing our other half. If we start being arrogant all over again, God will come down and split each half in half, and it will take four people to assemble a fifth, making our lives peculiarly, desperately difficult.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
Interviews

God , People , Idea

“Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol. It's full of fat words. The pages cream with subcutaneous fat. New letters are gilded like showy teeth, making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled.”

Peter Greenaway

From the fifth book, "The Book of the Exhibitionist"
The Pillow Book

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

Painting

“Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Tear

“We wait -- it seems for minutes -- looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear… there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

Fear , Silence , Waiting , Heart

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
Interviews

Understanding

“There is a shy client who uses invisible ink on Nagiko's body to hide his obvious talent. The woman attempts to develop the invisible ink by bathing in warm water, by standing as close as she dare to a hot fire, by washing her body in the juice of onion-skins until the onions make her weep and her tears prove to be the necessary solvent to reveal the writing.”

Peter Greenaway

Section J of 26 Facts About Flesh and Ink
The Pillow Book

Tear , Water

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Music , Feeling

“You see how even an illness can be romanticized. Tuberculosis got the treatment: Keats, the Lady of the Camellias, the foggy dew, and so on. We must make romantic literature out of cancer -- can you imagine that?”

Peter Greenaway

Dear Boullée

Imagination , Literature

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

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Way , Thinking

“What quaint English. They make an unpredictable linguistic duo.”

Peter Greenaway

Simato and Philip
8 1/2 Women

“Lincoln: A politician who enjoyed the theatre and died because of its convenient darknesses. A celebrated make of car. A town in Lincolnshire, England. A certain colour green.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Cars