Quote collection
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"I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book."
"I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter."
"Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?"
"For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy."
"Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line."
"My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end."
"Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales."
"The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into."
"Initially with The Butcher Boy, there was this kid growing up in this strange, weird environment that I remember from when I was a kid. And Patrick's vision was so complete there."
"Never make a promise - you may have to keep it."
"I don't think we have enough imaginary creatures in cinema. It seems like we're stuck with zombies, vampires, and werewolves. We should have everything. We should have minotaurs. We should have elves. We should have mermen in popular culture. But instead we've stuck with vampires."
"For example, the character of Claire in In Dreams wasn't imagined enough by me. Annette Bening is a great actress, and she gave a great performance, but because I hadn't fully written it essentially the character wasn't finished."
"In Dreams...well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it."
"It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing."
"It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days."
"But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened."
"I do enjoy working with writers."
"You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are."
"I took two years away from making films to write a novel."
"I mean I grew up in Ireland, so one would have to be consciously blinkered not to have reflected on the issue of political violence because that was the story since I was 19 years old or 20."