Kenneth Lonergan Quotes

Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to. And often seem to write about situations that are too big for the characters.

I think the more dangerous and dire the political circumstances seem, the more you attach value to anything that shows you why a human being is a human being or human experience or view of the world in that way.

I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.

I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.

I like to let the actors work the way they want to.

I trust my judgment when I think it's boring, dull, tepid and not interesting. That's important to listen to. And the same on the set. That's a little easier because you can see it in front of you and you can just see how great they are and you know you have something wonderful when they do something wonderful.

I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.

When you're a man, you're often in situations where you have to decide how far you're going to go in an argument. How big is the other guy? All this stuff that girls don't have to worry about as much, because that's not part of the equation.

The world doesn't grieve when you're grieving. The world goes on about its business. You're having a good day and I'm having a bad one and vice versa. And they could be very good and very bad at the same time. You multiply that by seven billion and you have one element of human experience.

When you have people like Casey [Affleck] and Michelle Williams and they want to do more takes you don't say, "Sorry, that's it." And I also don't like to say, "It's fine, it's great." Unless it's clearly there.

Little kids grow up discovering the world that's shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.

I grew up going to the movies, not watching them on television, so I'm still a bit resistant to TV as a medium.

It's not a character flaw to become an adult.

I wanted to be a director first to protect my writing. I'm a playwright and you don't need to protect your writing when you're in the theater because everyone's there to protect the writing. When I had an idea for a film that I really cared about as my own, I wanted to direct it, and then I immediately became interested in directing in and of itself because it's such a deep art. You suddenly have all these tools at your disposal to tell the story.

You can shoot a film in New York without seeing the Empire State Building. Or Starbucks...although the latter is much less realistic.

There's something about the impact of a big screen that means something to me, even though I realize almost every film is fated to be seen for a year in theaters, and then forever after on television.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

The world is really heading in a very dangerous direction, it becomes that much more valuable and important to go to the movies and see human beings that are human beings.

I would love to take control of the entire universe and for five years you give every movie the same widespread distribution no matter what movie and see if there's a real discrepancy between people coming to see science-fiction films or superhero films. I seriously bet there would be no discernible difference.

I don't think fast enough on my feet in terms of the writing to change the script too much when I'm shooting it. I like to have it set and done and know that I feel good about it and I might add a few lines here and there while we're shooting, if I think of a new joke, I might toss it in, but for the most part, I try to stick to the written script and have all the latitude exist within that.

[With theater] you draw the audience into the room as best you can, and in film, you can draw them into the room, you can draw them outside into the desert, you can take them out into the ocean, you can do all these amazing things.

I've reached a new level of closeness with a new friend when I can make a joke at their expense. That's one of the great joys of life for me.

I take it as a sign of intimacy and friendship when you feel comfortable enough with someone to have a little rough and tumble.