Lenny Abrahamson Quotes
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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.
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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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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 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 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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A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.
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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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'Room' was a particularly cohesive group, crew and cast.
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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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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.
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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 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 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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Hollywood is probably the most active centre of film-making in the world, but it's also a very difficult place in which to find your voice... It was also a far more civilised industry in Ireland.
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The style of direction in 'Room,' maybe a little bit like 'Spotlight,' tries to be hidden.
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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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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'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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Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.