25 Quotes by Alison Owen

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

Movies began as a communal experience. Even though we now watch them as DVD's, sometimes alone on our computers, mostly in the history of cinema it has been a communal experience.

Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience.

Human nature stays the same, the one thing that stays constant, like death and taxes. And people still want good stories!

I was a little punk rocker and was pregnant with Sarah when I went to university. I had her in the Christmas holidays of the first term. It was 1979, and UCL was very proud of its reputation as a liberal university, so they were very helpful.

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.

People in third-world countries are less eager to see movies full of angst over existential problems, and who can blame them. They've got other fish to fry. They'd rather see a few great dance routines and the guy end up with the girl.

John Lee Hancock is someone that I had admired from afar. I think he is a wonderful director... in the tradition I would say both of Clint Eastwood and Frank Capra.

When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.