Peter Greenaway Quotes

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, "I learned so much today," that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.

To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

Whether people are making narrative cinema or experimental cinematic movie experiences, they all want the biggest screen possible and the quietest room and the most attention to every nuance and detail. Obviously, most people will not see the movie that way, but I can still hope for it, and I'd like to think we will be able to pull it off this time.

Going to UCLA, as far as I'm concerned, afforded me two things. One was the advantage of meeting friends and getting to know a group of guys I hung out with, was chummy with. All of us eventually had success with film. Making films, cutting our own little movies together, 3 in the morning going out and shooting stuff, finding gels that people had thrown away, making our own lights. It was like a frat house for film geeks, the Pad O' Guys. That's what being at UCLA afforded me.

Cinema serves as a constant reminder to us of who we are and what we are made of.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

Movies aren't machines. They interact with our brains.

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

I believe that the purpose of cinema is to entertain. The so-called geniuses may have given new meanings to it, but for those who developed cinema, the aim was to entertain.

There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.

I have been passionate about cinema from my childhood.

'Avatar' is staggering. It's seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.

Even if I were to try to imitate Kurosawa I know that it's absolutely impossible. That era of film was just something else, including the actors. Everything about that era was on a completely different level.

I come from the best era of film I believe; when people were taking chances on films. It's time for us to bring more truth to the story and not necessarily carry a torch for every Black person in America; just tell a story, and a good one too.

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

I don't believe in proper cinema; it doesn't have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I'd much rather sit at home.

I love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifitng stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.

I like all kinds of movies, I love movies; and I always wanted to try and make one.

The invention of film has given our generation the dubious advantage of watching our acting heroes deteriorate before our eyes.

I really do think you shoot for that beautiful experience of showing your movie in a crowd or room full of people, or even just one person who happens to go to a matinee screening.