29 Quotes by John Carney

You're more constrained when you're wealthy. Or when you're making a bigger film and people complain about no budgets; but having a small amount of money to make a film means you're at your absolute freest to express yourself as an artist.

Americans like optimism, and 'Once' walks a tightrope: you feel uplifted at the end even if you're crying.

It's been a tough year for us. You can always make excuses, but I don't like to. We've just got a lot of freshmen that had never played the game before, and they did everything I asked them to do. And next year they will know the how much extra work in the batting cage and in the field that we need to do in order to get better.

It's very hard to tell an actor, 'Stop acting.' It's easy to tell a non-actor, because they're embarrassed when they act. They get ashamed when they do something cliche, whereas an actor is happy.

I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.

I know there's a lot of people around the country, especially the Gulf south area, that are pretty excited right now,

I like 'Guys and Dolls,' 'Singin' in the Rain' and 'A Star Is Born.' When it works, a musical is an amazing thing. But it rarely works.

I plan on spending my life here. It's everything to me.

I dropped out of school at 17 and joined the Irish band The Frames, getting my first glimpse into the world of professional film making while shooting of a number of rock videos.