A Quote by Alison Owen

The greatest filmmakers are not the ones who put everything in; they're the ones who can figure things to leave out, and in doing so, invite your participation. — © Alison Owen
The greatest filmmakers are not the ones who put everything in; they're the ones who can figure things to leave out, and in doing so, invite your participation.
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.
Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
A cocktail party is what you call it when you invite everyone you know to come over to your house at six p.m., put cigarettes out on your rug, and leave at eight to go somewhere more interesting for dinner without inviting you.
Invite your friend to a feast, but leave your enemy alone; and especially invite the one who lives near you.
I mean it’s purposeful, even if we don’t realize it. The desire to put things in our path, to figure out how to finally leave the behind….
No one goes on a direct path, even though it sometimes feels like your peers might be racing ahead. Everyone's trying to figure it out. But if you just put yourself out there, step out of your comfort zone, establish yourself in terms of skills, mentorship, but leave space for your passions, then you're going to turn out pretty well.
My advice for climbers or photographers is to really tune into your own passions and not just what other people are doing or aren't doing. Figure out what works for you, what turns you on, what gives you the greatest amount of energy and feeling of satisfaction.
Knowing you don't have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out-more like, they figure themselves out-and everything gets real clear.
I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.
I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.
It is exciting to kind of figure things out in yourself and then use other people to help you figure things out so you can really reach your potential.
If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.
Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
Everybody has a responsibility for what they put out into the world. Rather than trying to figure out what other people should be doing, work on your own interactions in the world and whatever influence they have. All of it has an effect.
I'm sure you feel differently about writing than you did when you first started. When you get older and your brain changes, you have to figure out how your job fits into your life as it changes, you know what I mean? I guess everybody goes through that stuff, and I'm no exception, always trying to figure out what I'm doing with music.
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