Alison Owen

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. ”

Audiences like to be made to feel that there is a world where things go right: where big emotions can happen and yet feel safe. This is why there is a constant tension in Hollywood between studios who want happy endings and writers who want to explore the human condition. There is a time and a place for both! ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

In a recession, people want to be told for two hours that everything is going to be OK. They want to escape from their humdrum or painful reality into a feel-good drama, or a love story that transcends their daily life. ”

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

If I'm at home, I get up around 7:30. If I have time, I like to do some exercise. My current favourite is 'hot' yoga. If I'm filming, I will go to the office or set, and then take meetings. ”

The Internet is a container, not a substance. ”

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. ”