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.
Lenny Abrahamson
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Room' was a particularly cohesive group, crew and cast.
As a small kid, I had this huge desire to be thought of as really clever.
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.
I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that.
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.
I'm interested in discontinuities and interruptions, people having to rewrite the narrative of their lives because of sudden changes.
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.
A big part of filmmaking is gathering a group of people you can work with.
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 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 came from a classic, literate, intellectual Jewish family.
When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.
After 'Adam and Paul,' I had offers from American agents, but I think I would have been swallowed up.
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.
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.
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 a bit of a pessimist, oh yeah, and I always think the film I'm about to make is going to be a disaster.
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.
There are more ways to make 'Room' badly than well.
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.
The process of shooting - of choosing shots - is intuitive for me, and I just feel my way towards what seems right.
I don't think of myself as doing good works. It's not, 'Oh, I must give these poor people a voice.'
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.
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.
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.
As soon as you make some films that people like, you'll be sent material, and that can come from anywhere.
You can throw away your script more easily than you can throw away your film.
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.
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.
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 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.
Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell.
I remember a Q&A I did in Wales where there were five people in the auditorium.
Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.
I'm Irish; I grew up in Ireland, and it's impossible to separate my background from who I am as a filmmaker.
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.
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've never worked in the U.K. television industry, but my guess it that it's a tough world for directors.
Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.
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.
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?'
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.
Delusion is not good; better to be realistic and then surprise yourself if you're lucky.
Good filmmakers make bad films; it happens.
