I have a theory, which has not let me down so far, that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Because the more money and technology that is available to [create] a work, the less imagination there will be in it. My favorite films are those that were made on a shoestring. And they weren’t adaptations of some other work, they were original pieces of cinema. All right, La Belle Et La Bête is an adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast”—but it was made into something very different. And I mean, John Waters, his early films, they’re terrific! Because he was making them with some friends of his from Baltimore, with whatever cheap film stock he could borrow or steal. George Romero, in Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, all the rest of them, he ingeniously used the fact that he had almost no budget to his advantage—claustrophobic sets, everyone’s trapped in the cellar and the zombies are trying to dig their way in. Very inexpensive, incredibly powerful. That is where cinema really works for me.

If you give me a typewriter and I’m having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry—that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn’t cost much to do that. But if you said, “Astonish the audience,” and you gave me a quarter of a million—well, my auntie could astonish an audience if she got that much money! Real art and the things that actually change our culture tend to happen on the margins. They don’t happen in the middle of a big marquee.

—Alan Moore, to MTV

from Alan Moore on imagination and money