Alison Owen Quotations

With 'Suffragette,' I felt that a female writer would be good, and considering the subject matter, who would be better to write the script than Abi Morgan? She was the first choice, and she happens to be a woman.

Well, who wouldn't want to work with Tom Hanks?

People didn't suddenly wake up one morning and unanimously say 'I'm fed up with midbudget dramas. I'm only going to see action tent poles from now on!'

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.

If you look back on professions, when they became undervalued and paid less, women tended to do better in them.

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.

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.

YouTube clips get millions, billions of hits. Reality TV programs have their own channels. How can movies attempt to compete with these kinds of numbers? And do we even need to? Are we scaring ourselves by unnecessary comparisons, by not comparing apples with apples?

The most interesting characters keep us hooked. Not likeable ones! Iago, Shylock, Darth Vader - are they likeable? Do you want to invite them to dinner?

Really, I am entirely material driven. If a project appeals to me, I will try to find the right writer and director. And that may be someone I've worked with before, or it may not. It may be a woman, or it may not.