“I love the brilliance and the vast verisimilitude — is that the right word? — of minds that come together to tell a story…. To me, that’s what I love about making movies. What I love about movies? Movies are the closest things we have to dreams.” — Jake Gyllenhaal
“I love the privacy of the experience of watching a movie. When I watch a film it’s just me and the screen, and I love that; the intimacy of that.” — Helen Mirren
“It was sometime in junior school that I first saw First Blood and it kinda put me under a spell. I believed I was Rambo, and I filled my Fisher-Price Houdini Kit up with steak knives and took it into school…. I didn’t hurt anybody, thank God, and I learned my lessons…. But films have such a powerful effect on me. I’ve tried to control that but I don’t think I’ve ever really managed to.” — Ryan Gosling
“I think fundamentally what I love about movies is the parallel reality of them…. They’re a more selective, more attuned and more neatly edited version of life itself. It’s improved life.” — Richard Linklater
“When I think about it, it’s creativity that inspires me. When somebody makes something that I can get lost in…. Making something that I can just fall into. You’re just consumed by it.” — Spike Jonze
“There’s something that happens when you’re in a dark room watching something that has a certain impact on you that reaches a very deep, subconscious part of you. It’s indelible…. It’s a very communal experience, but cinema is isolated, it’s just for you and it affects you on a much deeper level in that sense.” — Philip Seymour Hoffman
“As a filmmaker, you have to use what we call a one-tone pencil, which is a vast crew of people to whom you must communicate and express your ideas and the images in your mind and the way they move and combine. I see it and value it as an extraordinary art form and the best forum for ideas in the larger public realm.” — William Friedkin (illustrated above by Hedof)
“I love shutting off and being somewhere else.” — Carey Mulligan
“It’s an immersion that I think is unique. In the summer of 1975, I was 12 and I saw Jaws. It freaked me out so completely it was almost like a civil claims court: ‘I need to know more about who did this to me.'” — Steven Soderbergh
“Movies for me are therapeutic. I’ve always thought films, like fairy tales, explore concepts such as life and death in a safe way. They help you learn to cope and find your place in the world…. Similarly, making movies is basically an expensive form of therapy.” — Tim Burton
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