Frank Oz: 'There are actors I've worked with who hate my guts. Uh, three. As a matter of fact. One who's passed away, sadly: Brando. The other two are Cher and Wilford Brimley.'

Eli Roth: 'Let's do that psychology. Let's see these guys in their home lives. And how does the bidding work? And what happens when they get there? Let's go through the minutiae.'

Mike White: 'It's the blend of comedy and pathos or protagonists who can be both sympathetic and then transgressive and have a complicated relationship with the audience.'

I think it's hard to have a good, healthy image about yourself, sexually...I'd love to see more things out there that are empowering to women.

Ioan Gruffudd: 'You can justify anything in times of war. And I think we see that happening today certainly.'

She not only kept coded diaries; she invented the code the code they were written in, which had to be broken and wasn't broken until something like twenty years ago or so.

Guillermo del Toro: 'I see the world like a room where a toddler, a baby, has been surrounded by the most expensive glassware. And those are laws and morality. And then you let him walk.'

Derek Luke on Glory Road: "I had to retrack every step that Bobby took. And it was almost like I was playing against him."

Nick Cassavetes: 'I was diligent in trying not to glamorize these kids. I think that they are portrayed as pretenders...But, you know, with money comes beautiful girls and ennui.'

Aghdashloo: 'The minute I realized that the two women are so similar to one another, I just simply asked Grandma to take me to Elizabeth. And I said it out loud. I said, "Grandma, please take me to Elizabeth." And she did.'

Yes, I think there is--we took that idea quite serious: that there is an artist in a very difficult, let's say, in kind of an exaggerated obsessive mode.

[Guest:] 'I could tell, her head was exploding. And I said, "What's going on?" She said, "Everyone wants a wig."'

Children are amazingly adaptable. I remember the barbed-wire fence. That was a part of the landscape I grew up in. I remember the sentry towers and machine guns pointed at us...as I said, 'With liberty and justice for all...' I didn't relate the two.

My grandma was ninety-three, and she had a heart attack and they tried to resuscitate her three times. They broke her ribs; they shoved pipes down her throat...It's just--it's butchery. So I think you can go too far.

Eric Schlosser: 'Rick and I both really structure our works before we sit down to write them. So it was actually a really easy and natural collaboration.'

Rupert Grint: 'Suddenly the car starts to roll. Roll towards the crew. And I had to dive in there and pull the handbrake. It was quite close, actually.'

Todd Field on Eyes Wide Shut: 'Probably the polite thing I would say is "no comment," but the truth is...you've never seen two actors more completely subservient, and prostate themselves at the feet of a director.'

Augusten Burroughs: 'We didn't have sex because we had to find a way to show each other how much we loved each other. We had sex as a way to operate with each other, and that just warped me, you know, for years.'

Tim Robbins, Phillip Noyce, and Shawn and Robyn Slovo: [Robbins:] 'That Afrikaaner policeman...was made out to be the bad guy when in fact the people that set the policy wound up in mansions with very large pensions.'

Forest Whitaker: 'I'm always talking about it in such a technical way, but I have to be honest: it's really much more of a spiritual experience for me...working as an actor.'

John Cameron Mitchell: 'Why not just use all the connections that sex has? You know, sex is certainly the spinal cord that connects to all these different organs in our life...'

Alex Pettyfer: 'He's a normal guy, you know? An average Joe who has capabilities that are just far out like a little mini--not mini-Bond, but a mini-Jason Bourne, shall we say.'

Jet Li: 'If you play a cop, or the tough guy, Mafia, whatever, you need to think first. You need to understand the character, the personality. Then you put a different move for the character.'

Motion-picture dysfunctionalism trumps development every time. I would be insane to think that any original screenplay that I'm commissioned to write would ever end up as a movie.

Tony Jaa: 'You can either change your movements from being a trunk grabbing a person's leg or arms, you can always change it to make it into the elephant's tusk, you know?'

Steve Lemme and Erik Stolhanske: [Lemme:] I'll issue this challenge now. I am the best Robotron player...on the planet. I dare anybody to come and beat me at Robotron. That's a game from like 1952.'

Neil Burger: 'He gets arrested at the end of the short story...for blurring the distinction between art and reality...it's an abstract, intellectual idea and not kind of emotional or impactful enough to hang the climax of a movie on...'

Armistead Maupin & Patrick Stettner: '[Maupin:] I'm aware that my best material comes from the truth of my own life, so I try to use it as much as possible. And I have confidence in those emotions.'

Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris: '[Dayton:] We took all the actors out to lunch and asked that they stay in character.'

Elisha Cuthbert: 'And here I am playing a seventeen-year-old. Not just physically, but mentally getting into that place. It was really difficult. And I don't know if I could ever do it again.'

Jamie Babbit: 'You know, I've had so many battles with the MPAA...I think young people will definitely find the film...[and] I think it got the rating that it deserved.'

Larry Clark: 'Jonathan and Kiko, one day, didn't go to school...And I said, "Why aren't you going to school?" and they said, "We don't feel like fighting today."'

I like to play and make believe, you know, like Johnny Depp is in his pirate movie. So I'm not digging in deep.

It's not obvious to have a male character in this kind of story, I think, because very often the films with men are about action and not interiority...

Garry Marshall: 'Jack Klugman always said, "Oh, Felix and I make up too easy. Make it harder, make it difficult. Make him really not let [me] in." And that's what we did in Keeping Up With the Steins.'

Lily Tomlin: 'I had this dream several times once...I was playing on the stage, and it was like--there was a medieval audience...And they were doing everything--talking, drinking, fornicating, everything--in the audience...'

Andy Garcia: 'I think it's the nature of exile: you have this profound nostalgia for where you come from.'

Deepa Mehta: 'I said to myself that I would definitely make Water, but that I would make it when I stopped being angry. And that anger took about four years to dissipate.'

Paul Weitz: 'The fact that it's a comedy allows people kind of a pressure release, and they're actually glad to be laughing at the things that they're stressing out about most of the time.'

William H. Macy and Stuart Gordon: '[Macy:] I don't know if I find him a repulsive character. As a matter of fact, I don't....all the little pieces I find to be logical and true, true to the human experience.'

Noel Neill on Bryan Singer: 'He's good on his feet. And I think he's--well, naturally, hope he's going to do well, because it's a tough thing for him. But he's an awfully nice person.'

Jason Reitman: 'We kind of went away for a few minutes, and he came back and said, "I got it." "Oh, what is it?" "The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese." Brilliant.'

[Routh:] 'There was always a door open for change, for new creations to happen on the day.'

Paul Walker & Wayne Kramer: 'I loved the mobsters, man. I mean growing up as a kid it was cowboys and Indians and it was mobsters. I mean, that's an American childhood, you know?'

J.J. Abrams: 'One of the most fun aspects of the TV show, as a kid always loving it, was this team...in many ways that show was sort of the C.S.I. of its time.'

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 'He looks around at the world and sees it as a corrupt, petty, no-good affair.'