“Did many ideas come from personal experience?

Oh, yes — all the time; one of our writers, Warren Foster, heard a child in a park say, ‘Mommy, Mommy, I taut I taw a twirl!’ He brought this back to the studio and the ‘twirl’ became a ‘puddy tat’ so we could get a cat-versus-canary thing going. Friz [Freleng] developed it into the Sylvester-Tweety Pie series.”

— Chuck Jones, interviewed in 1971 by Peter Bogdanovich for his book Who the Devil Made It

Poster for The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

“Moral influence can’t be measured. The artist does contribute to the moral climate of his time. . . . Did a film like The Grapes of Wrath play any part in arousing a social conscience in America? Or was it the result of the social awareness arising out of New Deal politics? Which is the cause and which is the effect? We are a part of history and we also make history.”

— Lindsay Anderson, as quoted in The Film Director as Superstar (1970)

“If you do have a disagreement with Ford, it becomes an all-out fight. No half measures.

I’ve had my share of them, too. Total disagreements. One I particularly remember was, again, on The Fugitive. It was over the way to do a scene and Ford finally said: ‘Okay, we’ll shoot it both ways. Your way and my way!’ I felt almost triumphant. So first we shot it his way. With that he walked away from the whole thing and I never did get to do it my way!”

— Henry Fonda, speaking about director John Ford, in an interview for Radio Times (1972)

Promotional painting for Robin Hood (1922)

“Were you concerned with historical accuracy on Robin Hood?

Well, we were accurate as far as the period of the story is concerned, the costuming and so on. We had experts come in and work on that. And the story of Prince John’s perfidy was true — the Sheriff of Nottingham was in cahoots with him. And there may have been a Robin Hood — nobody knows. If there was, he was probably ‘a flat-footed Englishman walking through the woods’ as Doug said. Certainly there was no band — we took complete liberties with the spirit of Robin Hood and his crowd, and naturally the love-story was more or less invented. But Doug was always insistent on historical accuracy, though I doubt there was ever a castle as big as ours.”

— Allan Dwan, interviewed in 1968-1969 by Peter Bogdanovich for his book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer

“I think sound came at about the time silent pictures needed something stimulating. They were beginning to lose the audiences. People would rather stay home and listen to the radio than spend money to go to the pictures. So talkies did stimulate the book office. It was one of the new gimmicks that brought people back, and they went along with that for quite a long time until television came along. And they’ve had to look for other gimmicks — color and wide-screen. But they’ve never regained their big adult audience.”

— Allan Dwan, interviewed in 1968-1969 by Peter Bogdanovich for his book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer

Poster for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

“I did insist on having Peter Lorre. He had just done M with Fritz Lang and this was his first British role. He had a very sharp sense of humor. They called him ‘the walking overcoat’ because he went around in a long coat that came down to his feet.”

— Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed in 1962 by Françoise Truffaut

“He was the greatest director in the motion picture industry. He was also very easy to work with as he always played a scene first and just by watching him you knew exactly what to do. The Lubitsch touch was something no other director had and the nice thing about being in one of his pictures was that you knew while you were making it that it just couldn’t be bad.”

— Jack Benny writing about Ernst Lubitsch, as quoted in the The Lubitsch Touch by Herman G. Weinberg