Lenny Abrahamson is currently writing a script. I ask him how he copes with the incessant sound of poorly-played rock songs from the band busking outside. “With these,” he tells me defiantly, holding aloft his noise-cancelling headphones.

From his office, you can hear O’Connell Street and see the grand facade of the GPO. You can feel the heartbeat of historic central Dublin permeate through the large window.

However, given he was born and raised in Dublin and for twenty years has, on the big and small screen, told some of Ireland’s most important stories of understanding and introspection, Abrahamson needn’t take his headphones off. He already has his finger on the pulse of this city.

When we speak about Dublin, he avoids referring to it as an entity. Rather he speaks of its people. Just a few months ago, there were riots on the streets below his office. Personally, Abrahamson is politically passionate. He says he would not avoid tackling Dublin’s fractured political situation in future work. However, it is not sweeping social issues that he seeks to interrogate in his work, but people and presenting his audiences with a different way of perceiving themselves.

“Part of the pleasure of a good film is its power to disorientate. When you’re disorientated, then things which you might see all the time that normally pass you by, suddenly can really strike you.” Many of Abrahamson’s works have examined Irish people and their self-awareness.

 “Fantasy isn’t a part of what I do,” he tells me. In fact, his works are the opposite of fantasy. His works tend to leave his audiences questioning how realistic their perceptions are of themselves and the communities in which they live.

“Part of the pleasure of a good film is its power to disorientate.”

So how does Abrahamson make his audiences resonate with a pair of drug addicts, a man who lives his life wearing a papier-mâché head, and a nervous polyamorist?

According to him, it is because his works depict genuine encounters with human beings. Especially in his works set in Ireland, we get to know characters we recognise but few people attempt to understand in day-to-day life.  

From his office, we are a short walk from his alma mater, Trinity College, where he directed a number of scenes for his popular TV adaptions of Sally Rooney’s novels, Normal People (2020) and Conversations with Friends (2022).

We are also not far from where he shot scenes around corners and up alleyways for Adam & Paul (2004), a film - his first feature - that has left an indelible impression on Irish cinema and a generation of Irish filmmakers.

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of its release, why did a film as discernibly Beckettian as it is slapstick about two heroin addicts drifting around Dublin in search of their next fix, have such a profound impact on people?

Although he concedes that Adam and Paul are initially conveyed as a “pair of puppets,” they are also “full of pathos.” By the second half of the film, however, he emphasises that he no longer looks at the characters through a ‘proscenium arch’ lens, and that his style becomes more textured and naturalistic.

“Most of us don’t really know what we’re doing [or] why we’re doing it.”

Across his work, you will notice that he seldom indulges in subplots. As a result, after an hour and a half of watching an Abrahamson film, you cannot help but have understood, and maybe even shared, his characters’ suffering.

Despite acknowledging that his Dublin identity differs greatly from those of Adam and Paul, it does not take a leap for him to empathise with the plight of the two vagrant addicts.

“In one sense I’m nothing like Adam and Paul, but in another, I do identify with that sense of the circuit, the treadmill of need, and the temporary satisfaction of that need, and the feeling of being overwhelmed by a world that is dangerous, complicated, and impenetrable.”

Abrahamson hopes that, with all of his characters, “you feel you’ve really been with them, that you’ve spent time with them, and felt what they feel.”

For example, his filming style in the pub in Garage (2007) makes the audience feel like they are sitting at the end of the bar, somehow complicit in the bullying of Josie, the good-natured, simple-minded garage worker, played by Pat Shortt.

Introverted, entrapped and alienated, many of his characters are defined by their emotional confinement, shackled by their inability to communicate and articulate. Despite the subject of his works varying drastically, it is this emotional sense of being lost but not knowing how to ask for directions that links the character of Connell, played by Paul Mescal, in Normal People to Adam and Paul, Josie, and even Frank, the titular character of his 2014 film.

He tells me that if you look under the surface of most people “you’ll discover a very uncertain, terribly childlike core.” I am asking the questions, but I seem to be being therapised by his answers. He has this effect because as he talks about his films, the concepts of his characters and his audience quickly conflate.

“I’m a great fan of uncertainty and a lack of confidence.” He insists that “people who aren’t a hundred percent sure are much more likely to make better big decisions than people who are hyper-confident.”

“Most of us don’t really know what we’re doing [or] why we’re doing it, we all have many things that are terrifying and we try to ignore.” As much as he is talking about Adam and Paul, he is talking about me, himself, and the human condition.

Abrahamson’s films are about empathising not moralising. Talking about the character of Richard in What Richard Did, who accidentally kills an old teammate in a fight and refuses to confess to the crime, he says “some people hate him, but I don’t. I feel for him.”

It is his great skill that in all his works, as his characters come to terms with a shift in their understanding of themselves, he manages to compel the same introspection of his audience. It is Abrahamson’s hope that “if I can show it really well, maybe it’s harder for somebody to walk past drug addicts or dismiss them.”

“I’m not satisfied with what I’ve done.”

Abrahamson has been a titan of Irish film for the last twenty years, but it was his move to television that brought recognition from a new generation. His adaptations of Sally Rooney’s best-selling novels showed that slow, quiet and undramatic television could still enthral and deeply move a mass audience.

What defined the response to Normal People, which was released on the dawn of lockdown in 2020, was that it did not only engage the young adults of Rooney’s generation. Abrahamson tells me that “it really amazed me that Normal People struck with older generations.”

He understands that the different generations of audiences might take different things out of the show. His take, as a man in his fifties, is that the show forces his generation to look back a few decades through “a bittersweet filter.”

Someone of his generation cannot help but view Connell and Marianne’s romance with some degree of fondness. However, he emphasises that reliving one’s first relationships is also “tinged with nostalgia and elements of regret.”

Abrahamson claims to be optimistic. But his perception of optimism is less obvious to me than others. When he talks to me, a twenty-something who can empathise with Connell’s story, he says, in a sanguine tone: “What makes those first relationships so extraordinary is that they come to an end, is the fact that they fail, is the fact that they are ultimately impossible.” To me, and to a character like Connell, this does not engender much hope.

“When you’re older,” he assures me, “you sort of realise that you understand how valuable and amazing and unique those experiences were.”

He talks of his student days with compassion. “It’s a time in one’s life when you’re trying to work out what film you’re in.” For Abrahamson, it took time. He says he felt isolated at first. Barely seventeen when he arrived, his first years at college were a far cry from the Rooneian romance with which he would later depict Trinity.

However, he was able to cast his experience of Trinity onto his characters in the Rooney adaptations. He too as a young adult was compelled to “adopt various conversational and social styles” in search of himself. If he had any regrets, he confesses, it is that he was not able to discover his own story earlier.

Though not initially clear, I soon understand his optimism. For him, it seems, being optimistic and self-critical are not mutually exclusive.

It is not just his young adulthood that he looks back at through a bittersweet filter. He talks about his career in the same way.

“We are in danger of losing a generation of talent.”

Abrahamson is arguably Ireland’s greatest living filmmaker. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of Room (2015). Two of his films were in the top four of The Irish Independent’s recent list of the best Irish films of all time. However, he tells me with a noticeable surge of vitality “I don’t think I’ve done the best work I could have done. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve done. I know I’m capable of more, deeper work."

When asked about the value of his Oscar nomination, he concedes that “it certainly helps.” Although critics might say it is the apotheosis of his career, he is determined that his best is still to come. “I would love to think that there is still a breakthrough to be made.”

His desire for the future is that he can avoid taking “too conservative an approach.” “Writing more,” he stresses, “is a big thing for me.” Actors and directors talk about doing ‘a film for them’ or ‘a film for me.’ None of Abrahamson’s work can be accused of being ‘for them.’ However, more so than ever, he believes that the script he is currently writing about his family “has the potential to be very important for me.”  

Despite the success on the small screen with the recent Rooney adaptations, film and the cinema is where his passions truly lie. In film “there is something about the concentrated impact of a single story told in one complete thought.” And as a filmmaker, “there is nothing like getting people into a cinema,” however difficult it may be.

In 2020, Abrahamson became President of the United Arts Club, succeeding Thomas Ryan PRHA (1990-2020). Given the current socio-economic landscape, making a living in the arts in Ireland has never been so difficult. He fears that “we are in danger of losing a generation of talent.” It is for this reason that he believes the club needs to be “central to the life of the arts in the city.”

In order to achieve this he says the club needs to broaden its appeal to younger artists and “become a truer representation of what’s happening in the arts in Ireland.” This ambition, he says, “should be uncontroversial.”

When I ask what he would like to see the club look like, he says he wants to see it as “a place which if you went into at any time during the day or evening, you would find people talking, drinking coffee, exchanging ideas, using it as a place to work and create. I’d love to see more exhibitions, more events, more concerts.”

He emphasises that the club is blessed by the fact that it does not have a commercial imperative. “Quite the opposite, it’s a charitable institution” he says, “and that gives the club a moral clarity as to what it’s trying to do.”

“It’s there to be maintained and developed for the benefit of the arts.” As a gem in Georgian Dublin, hidden in plain sight, he hopes that what the club can achieve in 2024 is to make the most vital elements of the artistic community aware of the club, and, ultimately, for it to become a social hub for artists young and old, emerging and eminent.

For Abrahamson and the United Arts Club, knowing that the best is still to come will be music to Dublin’s ears. Only for Lenny, it will be coming through noise-cancelling headphones.