Lenny Abrahamson Quotes
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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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After 'Adam and Paul,' I had offers from American agents, but I think I would have been swallowed up.
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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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Delusion is not good; better to be realistic and then surprise yourself if you're lucky.
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Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.
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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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As a small kid, I had this huge desire to be thought of as really clever.
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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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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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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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I wanted to make films that were culturally relevant in my own country, that challenged people, and that people talked about.
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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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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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If you're in Hollywood, with no track record, it's pretty odds-on that you can get swamped and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all; particularly with the intense commercial push that you feel there.
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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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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 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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Most of my work has been independent movies outside the mainstream system.
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Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.
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When I'm shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday - lunch and wrap.
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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.
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A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.
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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.'