Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...
Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.
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.
"Now you've opened your mouth, do you expect me to lose interest?"
... [f]launting their erudition and relishing overt staginess, Peter Greenaway's films divide audiences. There are those who are prepared to entertain his conceits and play the game, and others for whom a Greenaway film is about as exciting as a guided tour through an ancient museum where the catalogue has been lost.
Dots [...]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?
Jerome never liked me -- preferred my sister who was a little fool excited by modern literature -- all swear-words and scatology -- before it became fashionable.
Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?
It can hardly be said that Greenaway is unaware of his demoniac cleverness, but he unearths the nuggets buried in his work in a spirit of generosity. They are not so much possessions to be admired as gifts to be shared.
It's a movie that bewilders some viewers and mesmerizes others. A man I met while we were exercising our dogs told me it was the greatest film he had ever seen, and one of my editors claims it's the closest any movie has ever come to photographing the inside of his mind.
"No. If you don't read, are you safe?"
My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
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.
Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour -- when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time -- a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.
"What do you mean -- Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday."
How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?
Shoes: gloves for the feet.
The whole of this studio is bonded; that is to say, we are not officially in Japan per se, but rather, in what is considered for these purposes an adjunct of the customs shed at Narita airport. Officially, we are not here because we are pornographic. It's a rather curious situation.