“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

“Orson Welles is an animal made for the screen and the stage. When he steps before a camera, it is as if the rest of the world ceases to exist. He is a citizen of the screen.”

— Jean Renoir, from the book Orson Welles by Joseph McBride

Production photo from Rashomon (1950)

“Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the symbolic background atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa “In a Grove” story, which goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark complexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow.”

— Akira Kurosawa, as quoted in Something Like an Autobiography

“Interviewer (asking about Way Down East): Did you never use doubles in those days?

Lillian Gish: Never. I wasn’t sportsmanlike. And besides, we felt we moved in a certain way and that the audience could catch a double, they would walk differently, move differently and spoil the film. Or make them think something was wrong. And I think to this day they have that feeling when it’s not the same person.”

— Lillian Gish, interviewed for BBC-2 Late-Night Line Up (reprinted in Films & Filming, January 1970)

Production photo from Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

“One of the best scenes in Boudu Saved from Drowning, the suicide attempt from the Pont des Arts, was made in total defiance of the logic of the scene. The crowd of unpaid extras gathered on the bridge and the river banks was not there to witness a tragedy. They came to watch a movie being made, and they were in good humor. Far from asking them to feign the emotion which verisimilitude would demand, Renoir seems to have encouraged them in their light-hearted curiosity. . . .

“For Renoir, what is important is not the dramatic value of a scene. Drama, action — in the theatrical or novelistic sense of the terms — are for him only pretexts for the essential, and the essential is everywhere in what is visible, everywhere in the very substance of the cinema.”

— André Bazin, from his book Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

— Attributed to Jean Renoir