Kenneth Lonergan Quotes
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There's a lot of pressure on a film set that's more immediate than the pressure in the theater where you're nervous about what's going to happen next week.
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I can remember when I was 24, and I broke up with my first serious girlfriend for the first time. She was a very nice person, but she had a little bit of a tendency toward melodrama... Her response was to take the key to my apartment off of her key chain and hand it back to me.
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I've just always been interested in alter-naturalism and seeing if you can make real life interesting enough to be dramatic without enhancing it. Like, could you make a movie or write a play in which there's no compression of time, there's no enhanced event, it's just real life?
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Many movies about people recovering, moving on, and redeeming themselves are really wonderful and inspiring. But I think the more sentimental ones that are less good make me feel isolated - like, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the guys in the movies, there is something wrong with you. That's a shame.
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A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.
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I grew up going to the movies, not watching them on television, so I'm still a bit resistant to TV as a medium.
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Actors are very demanding because they have nowhere to hide. If I write a scene, it doesn't turn out very well, I don't ever have to show it to anyone; when you turn the camera on, or when you walk on stage, they have to feel like what's happening is real.
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'Margaret' as a creative entity is something that I'm very happy and proud of. But 'Margaret' as a professional experience was a nightmare until it was rescued by critics and people who liked it.
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I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.
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The really funny comedies to me are always the ones that are played the straightest or given the most emotional content. And when people start making faces and setting things up and commenting and winking at you, I don't find that to be very funny.
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Adolescents show off. That's another way of wanting to connect with people. It's not an aspect of human behavior that we generally consider to be very admirable, but it is, in some way, a means of connecting with someone else and not being alone.
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Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.
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The creative process on 'Margaret' was incredibly satisfying. I loved the cast; I had a great time writing the script. I liked making the movie. Believe it or not, I actually like editing the movie. It was all the rest of it that was such a nightmare.
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There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.
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You can shoot a film in New York without seeing the Empire State Building. Or Starbucks... although the latter is much less realistic.
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I remember yelling at my mother one time, horribly. I was in tenth grade or something like that, and I hadn't done something, and she misunderstood because my stepfather told her something that was wrong that I hadn't done.
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When I walk onto a film set, I become frightened and nervous. There's all this equipment, all these people, and most of them do things you don't know how to do. I didn't come from a film background.
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Sometimes films have no rehearsals - you don't have real rehearsals on the set because the day is so dominated by the schedule.
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Very often what will happen between actors is that they'll develop kind of a ghost relationship in real life that reflects their relationship on screen or in the play that they're doing. In fact, I'd say that happens almost every time. I don't know why that happens, but it seems very common.
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It's not a character flaw to become an adult.
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You discover two things when you're a teenager. One, that your parents are not the idols that you thought they were when you were growing up, if you had nice parents. And two, that you have power over them, and you can upset them and confront them and attack them.
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I personally don't need to see a story about a person that starts up miserable and ends up worse.
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My personal pride is not strong enough to make me brave. But I don't know why I equate being brave with fighting.
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There are some situations in life that are simply not funny, and there's nothing funny about them, but they're rare, and they don't last all that long.