Kenneth Lonergan

“A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.”

“I personally don't need to see a story about a person that starts up miserable and ends up worse.”

“You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.”

“I've just always been interested in alter-naturalism and seeing if you can make real life interesting enough to be dramatic without enhancing it. Like, could you make a movie or write a play in which there's no compression of time, there's no enhanced event, it's just real life?”

“There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.”

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

“I do a lot of improvising when I'm writing, and I work very hard on the scripts... they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.”

“I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to.”

“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've done a lot of assignment work in my life, and the only way you can do it is to make it your own as quickly as possible, and then you give it back.”

“Truthfully, and I don't mean to sound naive, but I don't know that much about the film business.”

“The really funny comedies to me are always the ones that are played the straightest or given the most emotional content. And when people start making faces and setting things up and commenting and winking at you, I don't find that to be very funny.”

“I remember yelling at my mother one time, horribly. I was in tenth grade or something like that, and I hadn't done something, and she misunderstood because my stepfather told her something that was wrong that I hadn't done.”

“Sometimes films have no rehearsals - you don't have real rehearsals on the set because the day is so dominated by the schedule.”

“There are some situations in life that are simply not funny, and there's nothing funny about them, but they're rare, and they don't last all that long.”

“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 think I have never seen a humorless movie that was any good to me.”

“There are so many details in a movie that it's amazing how much work you'll do to change what adds up to not that much material.”

“I remember the kind of teenager I was, the kind of teenager I wanted to be, and then the kind of teenagers that were all around me. Life is lived on such a big scale in those years - and such an embarrassing one as well.”

“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.”