Alison Owen Quotes

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.

On occasion, a well-constructed drama can do what no reality or news program can do, what Shakespeare does brilliantly, is it can show both sides' opinions.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

I love the intimacy and the passion and the danger that go into independent filmmaking. Because it comes out of a creative necessity. It comes from people who really want to make a movie and want to make a difference and want to grab an audience by the gullet and show them something different.

I like to create an atmosphere where actors feel safe enough to take risks.

We need more extreme movies in Sweden. Personal projects that are necessarily made for a bigger audience. I think it creates a creative lock-up to have the audience as a goal.

I write about what interests me. It's very dangerous when you try to satisfy an audience.

I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

The trouble is that in south cinema, after you become successful at the box office, market realities dictate your choice of films, and it becomes difficult to experiment.

Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

I gravitate towards anything that feels challenging to me, that feels like it's gonna be saying something a bit different and new to the audience, and anything that moves me. I do movies that I would want to see, so I don't necessarily gravitate towards any genre in particular. I just try and do the best work I can and also try to keep the audience guessing.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

We're just gonna keep making things and challenging ourselves to make them more cheaply and more renegade and more interesting. That's the only thing we might challenge ourselves to do in the age of so many movies and so many TV shows. We're aware that we're asking time of people to watch stuff, and that there's so much stuff to watch, so we're gonna try to offer you something unique. And it may not always succeed, but it will definitely be different.

Doing a film and saying, I've done a really dark film and now I have to do a comedy... That's not me. If a script comes along and it's dark I'll absolutely do it and take the consequences. I'm not fussed about the image that goes along with it.

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

I like to think of music as an emotional science.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

The most important element in a picture cannot be defined.

I'm really an artist of feeling. I like creating things when it feels right.

I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

You cannot play for safety and make art.