Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Lenny Abrahamson

There's so much pressure on kids to perform and to be the best they can be, and particularly with boys: boys who are the gifted ones get loaded with an awful lot of expectation and self-expectation, and that's really hard for an 18 year old.

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.

The most conventional romantic trope of all is that you put lovers under extreme pressure, where they have to make decisions that illuminate aspects of that bond.

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.

Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.

I remember as a kid being asked if I was Jewish or Irish. I said, like the glib little 15-year-old I was, 'You can be both.' Feeling very pleased with myself. Before they smacked me.

Shooting 'Adam & Paul' was very tough. There was barely enough time, and the budget was tiny. On top of that, we shot in dangerous locations where we had little or no control or security.

I don't think of myself as doing good works. It's not, 'Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.'

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.

For me, I always think of the image of sweeping out my footprints as I walk through a scene.

Delusion is not good; better to be realistic and then surprise yourself if you're lucky.

There are more ways to make 'Room' badly than well.

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.

'Room' was a particularly cohesive group, crew and cast.

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.

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.

I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.

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.

'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.

As soon as you make some films that people like, you'll be sent material, and that can come from anywhere.

The process of shooting - of choosing shots - is intuitive for me, and I just feel my way towards what seems right.

When I'm shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday - lunch and wrap.

Frank's really different from everything I've done. Maybe the one thing that's the same, and the thing that I tend to do, is that I think I can create an intimacy with the characters, like a sense of presence with the people in the film, and that's what I tried to do in 'Room' as well.

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.

I've been in rooms where people are discussing films that have yet to come out and saying delightedly, 'Oh, I've heard it's a disaster!' The jealousy is unseemly.

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.

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?'

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.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

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.'

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.

Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.

Most of my work has been independent movies outside the mainstream system.

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.

I'm Irish; I grew up in Ireland, and it's impossible to separate my background from who I am as a filmmaker.

I can just remember being broke, wondering if I had any talent - really wondering whether this was all a fantasy - but I had to get out there and keep trying.

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.

Good filmmakers make bad films; it happens.

It drove me as a kid. I couldn't bear the idea that I wasn't the smartest. Then I got put in a B stream for four years at my school. And that was the making of me in a weird way.

The style of direction in 'Room,' maybe a little bit like 'Spotlight,' tries to be hidden.

I'm interested in discontinuities and interruptions, people having to rewrite the narrative of their lives because of sudden changes.

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.

I'm fascinated by people who have to reinvent themselves. I did it a few times - I was going to be a physicist before I was passionate about philosophy - and I realized that one more change, and I'm going to start looking like a dilettante.

I think that I must be the only person who left California and headed to Dublin in pursuit of a career in film. The arrow is pointing in the other direction in most people's minds.

I started to make some commercials, which was a way for me to finally make a living at last. But it was only really a couple of films in that it looked like a viable career option.

A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.

I've never worked in the U.K. television industry, but my guess it that it's a tough world for directors.

I am an unusual Irishman. I'm probably Ireland's third most famous Jewish son.

Having started in sciences, I then turned around and said, 'Oh, I don't want to do sciences. I want to do philosophy.' And to their credit my parents said, 'if that's what you want to do, then go for it'. Then I got the scholarship to Stanford, which was very nice for the parents to talk to their friends about.

You can throw away your script more easily than you can throw away your film.

When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

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.

Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.

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.

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.

As with any actor and any collaborator, it's about forming a trusting relationship. And that's not that you have to get him to trust you so you can get him to do what you want. Especially with a little kid, it's about making them feel really safe, and getting to know and not treating them as a puppet to be moved around.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

I know that it's axiomatic in the film industry that you're not supposed to let the novelist develop their own story. Well, first of all, that's kind of up to the novelist - because they don't have to sell it. But also, I don't believe it. It's about trust.

I remember a Q&A I did in Wales where there were five people in the auditorium.

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.