“The studio got cold feet when we couldn’t cast A-List talent quickly over the course of the summer of 2009. They liked the script which I wrote with Guillermo del Toro and they couldn’t see why Hollywood’s top actresses weren’t signing up. They decided it was me.” – Director Larry Fessenden on why he’s no longer directing The Orphanage remake

“Normally you’d have to go to the studio and then have to get their head casting people through. Then you need to [go to] all the junior executives to approve. Then the co-president, who has to go to the chairman. It’s just fucking amazing how many assholes it takes to get a single decision made.” – Skyline co-director Colin Strause on why they chose to make the film independently

“At first I was very skeptical. But they asked me to just look at what was being done, and I visited the post-production house…that ended up doing it. And interestingly enough they had done ‘Clash of the Titans’, which I’d read a lot about how bad it was. And I saw it there in their projection room and it looked really quite fantastic.” – Director Wes Craven on his reaction to the studio wanting to do a 3-D post-conversion on My Soul to Take

“I refrain from…defending my movie. So if you think that the movie is, for example, misogynistic, good for you. You feel it is pro-male? Pro-female?…I would never stand to defend it. Let other people defend it.” – Original I Spit on Your Grave director Meir Zarchi on the film’s controversial nature

“It’s funny, because when you start to make a film people say, ‘Why is your film different? We’re not gonna give you money unless you tell us why it’s different.’ So you make something different, and at the end of making the film they say, ‘Oh my god, what have you done? You’ve made something different. How can we sell this?’” – Monsters director Gareth Edwards

“There are a lot of jump scares in this, which some people may not like…But tough shit.” – John Carpenter, talking about his latest film The Ward

“Wait a second, guys! I don’t like this framing, man. This is like…this is neither this nor that. Cut! I don’t like this lens…you said he was gonna be a cowboy!” – Michael Biehn, overheard while directing The Victim

“The only real hard part that I was not looking forward to was when I had to pretend I was eating Aki’s poo. That was maybe the grossest thing that I could just NOT deal with!” – Ashley C. Williams, the “middle piece” in The Human Centipede

“‘Part 2’ will be ‘My Little Pony’ compared to ‘Part 1’.” – The Human Centipede director Tom Six on the sequel

“When you really get into 3D, you find out guys who love 3D, they HATE that ‘Comin’ at ya’ bullshit. The crap where they make shit come at you, it’s gimmicky and it’s bad 3D.” – Dark Country director Thomas Jane

“I think it was wise to convert our film into 3D. The studio and [director] Louis [Leterrier] set the bar high for the tests. If it wasn’t going to look great they weren’t going to pull the trigger. In many ways, I think it’s perfect for a movie like ‘Clash’.” – Clash of the Titans screenwriter Phil Hay

“What really made a lasting impression on me was that I could go around the corner from one of our 42nd Street cinemas in New York City’s Times Square and receive fellatio from Gladys, who was known as the foremost transsexual hooker on the grindhouse circuit. Around 1970, it only cost $15.00 for a 42nd Street hooker to come back to my home.” – Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, remembering the 42nd Street cinema scene in the 1970s

“You never earn a platinum card in this business. You have to always convince people and do the pitches and all of that, and I’m no good at that.” – Director George A. Romero on still having to prove himself after all these years

“Every day we’d shoot all day and, at midnight, David would have to get on the phone and defend shooting the next day’s work.” – Sigourney Weaver, reflecting on David Fincher’s clashes with the studio while filming Alien 3

“I never intended [for] it to be a cult film. I wanted to make a serious movie.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen

“With a very little amount of money, for little resources, I think we’ve gone very far with those eagles and vultures. I can say that from a distance, those eagles and vultures look pretty shocking and terrifying, but realistic. It looks like it was done Hollywood-style from a distance. But when you do that movie close-up, you know, that Hollywood movie close-up or even an indie movie close-up, hey, it’s something unique, it’s something different. It’s something you’ve never seen before. Hey, maybe it’s art.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on the film’s special effects

“Whitney’s gifted, in many ways. But especially in the acting part of it. When I saw her, she did one or two takes, [and] I say, ‘Whitney’s it. She’s it.’” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on casting lead actress Whitney Moore

“He came and slept with us and we thought we had gotten past that years ago. He said that he had a few nightmares,” said Dolph Rau, an upset father. “gain, all that I would like to see come out of this is that it’s not going to happen again.” – Massachusetts father Dolph Rau about the trauma suffered by his young son after Saw 3-D was accidentally played in place of Megamind

“No matter what you do, somebody is going to come after you. You say ‘The Thing Begins’ and they go, ‘John Carpenter’s is the beginning, asshole. Yours is like ‘The Thing Bullshit’. Why don’t you call it that?’” – Producer Marc Abraham on possible fanboy reactions to a new title for The Thing prequel

“When we first cooked up ‘Saw’ we actually had three ideas…One of them was an idea about two guys stuck in a room, and there’s a dead body lying on the floor…so that eventually became ‘Saw’. A second idea I had was about a guy who goes to bed at night, and wakes up in the morning to find that he has all these scratch marks on his body. And he doesn’t know what happened, and he starts to realize something’s happening to him at night when he sleeps. So he starts setting up all these cameras at night to film himself when he sleeps. Guess what movie that became?” – Director James Wan on how he thought of ‘Paranormal Activity’ before Oren Peli did

“They were very excited about the idea of doing a zombie show until I handed them a zombie script where zombies were actually doing zombie shit…It’s one of those things where the network says, ‘Oh yeah, we want to stretch the envelope’ until they realize that they’re actually looking at a stretched envelope and they go, ‘Woah, no, let’s do ‘CSI’ some more.’” – The Walking Dead director/producer Frank Darabont, talking about when the show was originally being developed at NBC

“Yeah, well I read the script and they said that…when I read it my eye was going to be shot out and I remember on a movie called ‘Season of the Witch’ I wanted them to shoot my eye out with an arrow. And the producers didn’t go for that, so when it was handed to me in this movie that they were going to shoot my eye out with a gun I thought, ‘yeah, I’m going to make that movie.” – Nicolas Cage, on one of his reasons for taking the role in Drive Angry 3-D

“For some reason Robert [Rodriguez] always gives me these sharp objects. I was Navajas in ‘Desperado’, I was Razor Charlie in ‘From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’, I was Cuchillo in this. And then I was Machete.” – Actor Danny Trejo on the set of Predators

“You can see a mark here that has healed up, I hit the steady-cam and I was bleeding. My face was bleeding and I didn’t want to stop, we continued because I had blood all over so we kept filming. It was a really great moment. When I get this moment, ugly motherfucker with a Predator, honestly I would probably choke him in real life. Because I could reach for his neck and it would be over. Predator or human it doesn’t matter.” – Russian actor Oleg Taktarov on the set of Predators

“I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for the horror fans…You know, I fought being a ‘genre’ actress for so many years…and then I kinda went, ‘You know, I actually know this really well, and I really like it’. And the fans are kinda my family, and it’s such a tight-knit community. And I don’t need to be on a TV show. You know, I don’t desire to be on the cover of ‘US Weekly’. I’m here to do a good job, and to work.” – Actress Danielle Harris on being a scream queen

“I don’t want to insult anybody, but I’ve been watching these westerns recently and they don’t have any cojones anymore…[‘Jonah Hex’ is] going to bring back sort of this hybrid of the spaghetti western genre, you know the balls of westerns.” – Josh Brolin on the set of critically-panned summer flop Jonah Hex

“You wanna go see fairy vampire movies and pretty boys, fine – there’s an audience for it…It’s not what I wanna do. I like my vamps snarly and mean…and fucking ugly.” – Stake Land writer/actor Nick Damici, commenting on the Twilight phenomenon

“I look at the old movies and I think the dream sequences aren’t that interesting…I think they feel like bad Broadway musicals or something, like with steam and smoke and they’re not scary, they’re not beautiful, they’re not interesting. I’ve looked at everything from German expressionistic film to Tim Burton movies to all kinds of disparate influences and the one thing this movie is going to have [is] a vision when it comes to the dream sequences. And I think they’re beautiful and macabre and scary.” – Director Samuel Bayer, on why the dream sequences in his Nightmare on Elm Street remake will be better than those in the original series

“One man’s magic is another man’s gluey torture session.” – “New Freddy” Jackie Earle Haley on the arduous makeup process

“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.” – James Cameron, commenting on the post-converted 3-D in Piranha

“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own. It is amazing that in the movie-making process – which is certainly a team sport – that Cameron consistently celebrates himself out as though he is a team of one. His comments are ridiculous, self-serving and insulting to those of us who are not caught up in serving his ego and his rhetoric.” – Piranha 3-D producer Mark Canton, responding to James Cameron’s comments