Lenny Abrahamson Quotes
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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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I am an unusual Irishman. I'm probably Ireland's third most famous Jewish son.
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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 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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As a small kid, I had this huge desire to be thought of as really clever.
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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 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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Most of my work has been independent movies outside the mainstream system.
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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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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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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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After 'Adam and Paul,' I had offers from American agents, but I think I would have been swallowed up.
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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 wanted to make films that were culturally relevant in my own country, that challenged people, and that people talked about.
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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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Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.
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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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When I'm shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday - lunch and wrap.
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I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.
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Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.
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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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The style of direction in 'Room,' maybe a little bit like 'Spotlight,' tries to be hidden.
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Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.
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I'm Irish; I grew up in Ireland, and it's impossible to separate my background from who I am as a filmmaker.