Lenny Abrahamson Quotes
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'Room' is a very subtly-made film, and directing awards tend to go to the flashier stuff, but it's the Director's section of the academy that make the decision, so I'm very proud they can see something in what I directed and wanted to reward it.
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Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.
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The process of shooting - of choosing shots - is intuitive for me, and I just feel my way towards what seems right.
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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.
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I think people like to have their categories clear. They want to know if it's fiction or fact, biopic or not.
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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.
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I don't think of myself as doing good works. It's not, 'Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.'
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A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.
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Although I was really interested in physics, I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was really hard. I did theoretical physics.
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'Room' was a particularly cohesive group, crew and cast.
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As a small kid, I had this huge desire to be thought of as really clever.
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Delusion is not good; better to be realistic and then surprise yourself if you're lucky.
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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.
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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.
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Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.
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I've never worked in the U.K. television industry, but my guess it that it's a tough world for directors.
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Most of my work has been independent movies outside the mainstream system.
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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.
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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.
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The style of direction in 'Room,' maybe a little bit like 'Spotlight,' tries to be hidden.
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You can throw away your script more easily than you can throw away your film.
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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.
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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.
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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.