Quotes from Lenny Abrahamson

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'm not an academic type in term of personality. I had my share of madness as a teenager.

When you're shooting, there's terrible pressure, and you never switch off. Every day is like the day before an exam; it's relentless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.