Culture That Made Me: Conversations With Friends director Lenny Abrahamson reveals his influences
Lenny Abrahamson, director of Conversations With Friends.
Lenny Abrahamson, 55, grew up in Rathfarnham, Dublin. He is married with two children. In 2004, he directed Adam & Paul, the first of several acclaimed films, including Garage, Frank and Room, the latter of which saw him Oscar-nominated for best director. In 2020, Abrahamson adapted Sally Rooney’s Normal People novel for a hugely-popular 12-part television series. The first episode of his adaptation of her Conversations with Friends begins on RTÉ One, on Wednesday, May 18. Abrahamson will also be one of the guests at Fastnet Film Festival in Schull, Co Cork, May 25-29.
I have strong memories from aged nine or 10 being taken by a babysitter to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. I remember being aware of a sense of not understanding what was happening, but being completely compelled by it. I've always loved that feeling. It’s a bit like life – you have these highly charged memories, from childhood or with your family, and yet what was happening was kind of ordinary. I've never been interested in those reductive “how to write a screenplay” books – where you're supposed to know exactly what every character is thinking, what they want, what their obstacle is – because it's the bits that uncertain or in-between that are the things I find interesting.
I remember [actor and screenwriter] Mark O’Halloran and I watching Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West endlessly before we did Adam & Paul. Laurel and Hardy captured the quintessential act of adults playing children. One of the reason kids like them so much is they recognise themselves in the two characters. They never quite know what's happening. They're always in a cloudy, vaguely confused state where the world is very big and they're very small. The gags are so good. It doesn't have the violence of other classic comedy of its era. There's such pathos and sweetness in it. They were masters.
Ingmar Bergman films are dark, this feeling of hard-to-define anxiety, which rang true for me – in my teens, I had a wobble where I felt uncertain about myself, a normal thing for that age. In my case, it never fully went away. His films examine the way the subconscious permeates like smoke through the waking life. If you’re that way inclined, you can sink down from the bright world of certainties and the reassuring daylight world into deeper dramas – not the dramas of “I have an enemy who’s going to kill me” or “I’ve run out of money”, the usual engines of mainstream cinema storytelling. The existential pulse that runs through his films, nobody else has done it better.
Watching Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky blew my mind. He has the most effortless mastery of the filmmaking medium. People think watching his movies are like academic pleasures – like where you might scratch your chin in front of a classical painting, admiring the brushwork. Actually, I find watching them exhilarating. It isn’t a bloodless pleasure for me.
I probably watch [Stanley Kubrick's film] Barry Lyndon once every year or so. Every frame is beautiful. He was filming in 1970s Ireland. With all the tricks we have digitally now – if there's a telegraph pole on the horizon, we can paint it out; if the sky is crap, we can do some work on it after. The fact he was prepared to wait and wait until the sky was white. He had to find locations which were “in camera” perfect. He has battle scenes, made the old-fashioned way. He made no compromises. If you pulled up the rug, you wouldn’t find he’d swept dust underneath. It’s built by an artisan of the highest quality.
Ruben Östlund’s films look at the manners and norms of our society. They’re comedies in that they skewer people’s hubris and self-regard, but they’re done in a particular way. They’re immaculate in how they’re shot. He will only shoot one scene in a day and do it again and again until it’s perfect. There’s a scene in The Square where an artist does a performance in front of wealthy people at a fancy gala dinner. Dominic West is in it. He plays another artist. It is so brilliantly done. If you watch every single reaction of every person in that room, it feels right. The choreography is perfect. As a filmmaker, I know how hard that is.
I'm not a musical fan. It’s not my bag, but Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was amazing. There are few people ever who've been as good at moving actors and cameras together. His visual choreography is unparalleled.
Raymond Carver’s short stories are brilliant. They have this quality where you're going along in a certain way, then in a couple of sentences a piece of dialogue turns the story: in a moment the whole relationship that you've been looking at falls apart. Or you get an insight into the actual state of a character or the loneliness or the disfunction of a situation. I'm drawn to that style – that you build towards something which is a moment of falling or re-conception where you’re energised by a different understanding.
The writing in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky is extraordinary. The story is a page-turner. It's looking at somebody, Raskolnikov, with a very strong sense of who he is and how valuable he is, and how he stands above the usual moral rules. And then it's about that character realising he is no such thing – the collapse of his own self-regard.
I've always been interested in stories where a character has a strong sense of themselves which is pulled from them. My film What Richard Did, for example, is about a person who thinks he’s a certain kind of person, but learns that he’s not. In Garage, Josie’s idea of himself is as a good and valuable member of the community; when he’s no longer able to see himself that way, he can’t survive the change. It’s the opposite of the Hollywood version where you discover who you are, it’s wonderful and you accept it. Those stories where somebody’s identity is broken up – that can be an opportunity for transformation, or it can be deeply destructive.
I started reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time thinking it would be very difficult, but it’s not. It’s very long, but it’s great – the quality of the writing; his understanding of how memory works; how moving it was; the insight into the broader circle of characters within which the protagonist operates. I found it incredibly seductive. Every page, there’s a sentence you have to read again.
