Lenny Abrahamson Quotes
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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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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 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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In something like 'Frank,' which is a comedy, albeit a strange and emotional one, you can absolutely put in deleted scenes, and we did because they were just funny and great, but they weren't necessary in the overall structure.
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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.'
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You can throw away your script more easily than you can throw away your film.
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There are more ways to make 'Room' badly than well.
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I'm not setting out to adapt books and work with books, but when really amazing stories come to you in that form, it's really hard to turn away from that.
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When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.
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Trying to make something as tricky as 'Room' really believable is extremely hard, and it largely rests with that relationship between the actors and the director, and the director and the crew.
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The thing about America - it's different everywhere, but visually, it's amazing to shoot in the desert in the New Mexico light. It's really hard to shoot in that desert and make anything look not amazing.
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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.
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I always felt there was a kind of humanistic impulse in my thinking about film as well as a real interest in its formal and aesthetic properties - just this idea that it can bring you into a very intimate encounter with people.
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Ireland is a good place to start out as a filmmaker. If what you do is good, even at a very small scale, it will get recognized.
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I usually shower the night before, lay out all my clothes on the floor, so then I just fall into them, clean my teeth, stumble out the door, get into my car and go wherever it is that we're shooting. You have breakfast on set.
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As far as the international industry is concerned, I don't think people care at all where you are from - if the work interests them.
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Established actors will challenge you if they don't agree with the way you are taking it, and you have to argue it. But with a younger cast, they are more likely to wonder whether what they are doing is okay instead of trying to second guess the director. That helps push you.
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I'm a bit of a pessimist, oh yeah, and I always think the film I'm about to make is going to be a disaster.
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As a filmmaker, I've sat on the other side, and I've watched when people I know have a film, and it's doing really well, and people are talking about it in all the trades, and everybody is excited about it, and I've always thought, 'Hmm, what would that be like?'
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Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.
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I think, as directors, they may recognize, more than the rest of the body of filmmakers, exactly what you do as a director, because I think sometimes the conception is if the camera isn't swinging around, and it's not pyrotechnic or worthily melodramatic, then the direction is uninvolved.
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Good filmmakers make bad films; it happens.
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I'm a bit of a late developer, generally. But the good thing about being a filmmaker is you still count as young all the way through your 40s.
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There was a golden era in film-making in Hollywood back in the 1970s, and although there is some great independent film-making in America, it's actually very hard to get independent films made in the United States. It's much more feasible from Europe.