Top 35 Lenny Abrahamson Quotes

It’s very important to have a good relationship with the crew and cast because you want to get the best out of them. They’ll work really hard for you if they like you.

Trying to make something as tricky as ‘Room’ really believable is extremely hard, and it largely rests with that relationship between the actors and the director, and the director and the crew.

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

Frank’s really different from everything I’ve done. Maybe the one thing that’s the same, and the thing that I tend to do, is that I think I can create an intimacy with the characters, like a sense of presence with the people in the film, and that’s what I tried to do in ‘Room’ as well.

I’m looking for an intensity of focus. It’s a bit like tuning a guitar string. You tighten and tighten, and nothing really changes until you hit that tension, and suddenly it’s there: you’ve got a note.

As soon as you make some films that people like, you’ll be sent material, and that can come from anywhere.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think that I must be the only person who left California and headed to Dublin in pursuit of a career in film. The arrow is pointing in the other direction in most people’s minds.

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

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.

After ‘Adam and Paul,’ I had offers from American agents, but I think I would have been swallowed up.

I love the cinema, but I’m not a fascist about it. I’ve had some of my best experiences watching things on TV. But if I were Stalin, I would force everyone to be in the theater.

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.

The thing about America – it’s different everywhere, but visually, it’s amazing to shoot in the desert in the New Mexico light. It’s really hard to shoot in that desert and make anything look not amazing.

When I’m shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday – lunch and wrap.

I’m not an academic type in term of personality. I had my share of madness as a teenager.

People say that soundstage sets never quite look like reality. But actually, they can. They can be as real as you want as long as you pay attention to the kind of detail that is given for free in a real place.

Generally speaking, the misfit’s story is easier to tell.

That’s the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.

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.

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.

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

I’m a bit of a late developer, generally. But the good thing about being a filmmaker is you still count as young all the way through your 40s.

I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that.

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.’

Good filmmakers make bad films; it happens.

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

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

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.

I’ve been in rooms where people are discussing films that have yet to come out and saying delightedly, ‘Oh, I’ve heard it’s a disaster!’ The jealousy is unseemly.

In something like ‘Frank,’ which is a comedy, albeit a strange and emotional one, you can absolutely put in deleted scenes, and we did because they were just funny and great, but they weren’t necessary in the overall structure.