Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
"French Cuisine. By Guillaume Rosart. Publisher Henri Simonel. In 1950 it cost me twenty francs -- about 2 pounds -- about 15 pounds now."
The Endgame: "The object of this game is to dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. This is the best game of all because the winner is also the loser and the judge's decision is always final."
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.
A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
It's sort of cathartic -- the naked exposure -- don't you think? You couldn't do it voluntarily -- could you? It's under duress -- so somehow legitimate. Circumstances beyond our control. I think I enjoyed that.
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 bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
"No -- it's not necessary for a bookkeeper to read all the stock."
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.
Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
Two children die. An accident and a suicide amongst so many murders. A chance death and a death of self-recrimination. Smut and the Skipping Girl have been aping their parents and elders -- perhaps they could now teach them a lesson -- all the machinations and game-playing and adjusting for sexual and emotional positioning is not worth the effort.
I married. I became a wife. I acquired a husband. I had a ceremonial wedding in style. Whichever way you say it -- it was bound to end badly.
Take Mitchel here -- no -- on second thoughts -- don't -- because he's a crude little bugger.
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.
The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.
I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.
Four handsome, naked, female dancers separate themselves from the crowd in Prospero's cloak... and they dance. From now on -- they become Prospero's dancers -- they mark out a four-figured symmetrical space around him -- dancing in perfect unison -- a strange, prancing, high-stepping, complicated, frankly sensuous dance -- danced with great firmness and confidence -- their eroticism is aimed only at themselves -- no mincing or quarter given -- their erotic confidence is demonstrative and challenging.
"Money's not interesting -- too easy to get hold of."
"It tells you how to boil water. What expression to wear when you are eating eggs. How to starve. When to eat. What your first meal should be. What your last meal should be. It says more about death than eating and more about living than cooking."
"To a man of honour that is no choice."
"Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman."