Lenny Abrahamson Quotes

I don’t think of myself as doing good works. It’s not, ‘Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.’

I was a bachelor for a long time, and I got into all these really lazy habits work-wise. I’d just work as long as I wanted into the night. There was no structure.

Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.

There are more ways to make ‘Room’ badly than well.

I’m Irish; I grew up in Ireland, and it’s impossible to separate my background from who I am as a filmmaker.

I know that it’s axiomatic in the film industry that you’re not supposed to let the novelist develop their own story. Well, first of all, that’s kind of up to the novelist – because they don’t have to sell it. But also, I don’t believe it. It’s about trust.

I wanted to make films that were culturally relevant in my own country, that challenged people, and that people talked about.

As a small kid, I had this huge desire to be thought of as really clever.

I remember as a kid being asked if I was Jewish or Irish. I said, like the glib little 15-year-old I was, ‘You can be both.’ Feeling very pleased with myself. Before they smacked me.

Good filmmakers make bad films; it happens.

I remember a Q&A I did in Wales where there were five people in the auditorium.

The title, the name Frank, comes from this extraordinary British character Frank Friedbottom. He was very big in Britain in the ’80s, but I, as an Irish kid, saw him on ‘Top of the Charts.’

When I read ‘Room,’ I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

I went to Poland for the Warsaw Film Festival, and it was quite an intense experience. I didn’t think it would be, but it did feel quite emotional to go back to this place I’d heard so much about.

Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.

I’m interested in discontinuities and interruptions, people having to rewrite the narrative of their lives because of sudden changes.

Ireland is a good place to start out as a filmmaker. If what you do is good, even at a very small scale, it will get recognized.

I can think back to being four or five and not wanting to sit at the kids’ table because I thought it was demeaning. I was this ridiculous little kid.

On your first film, you think these are going to be your closest friends for the rest of your life. You form a bond, but then you go back to the rest of your life.

There’s a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.

Established actors will challenge you if they don’t agree with the way you are taking it, and you have to argue it. But with a younger cast, they are more likely to wonder whether what they are doing is okay instead of trying to second guess the director. That helps push you.

I did go to cheder and was a bar mitzvah. We were members of an Orthodox synagogue, although we were not religious. My grandfather was Polish. He came to Ireland in the ’30s.

Shooting ‘Adam & Paul’ was very tough. There was barely enough time, and the budget was tiny. On top of that, we shot in dangerous locations where we had little or no control or security.

I’m a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.

A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.

There’s so much pressure on kids to perform and to be the best they can be, and particularly with boys: boys who are the gifted ones get loaded with an awful lot of expectation and self-expectation, and that’s really hard for an 18 year old.

When we say ‘cinematic’, we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

I think digital is getting so much better. It’s harder and harder to make the argument now for film. All things being equal, though, I still prefer to capture on film.

I always felt there was a kind of humanistic impulse in my thinking about film as well as a real interest in its formal and aesthetic properties – just this idea that it can bring you into a very intimate encounter with people.

I’m a bit of a pessimist, oh yeah, and I always think the film I’m about to make is going to be a disaster.

Delusion is not good; better to be realistic and then surprise yourself if you’re lucky.

Having started in sciences, I then turned around and said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do sciences. I want to do philosophy.’ And to their credit my parents said, ‘if that’s what you want to do, then go for it’. Then I got the scholarship to Stanford, which was very nice for the parents to talk to their friends about.

You can throw away your script more easily than you can throw away your film.

The most conventional romantic trope of all is that you put lovers under extreme pressure, where they have to make decisions that illuminate aspects of that bond.

For me, I always think of the image of sweeping out my footprints as I walk through a scene.