Cannes Film Fest 2007–When I was a kid, my family and I used to watch Egyptian movies. This was a fairly common Israeli family practice circa early 1980s. In the late afternoon on Friday‚Äôs we‚Äôd watch with bated breaths the convoluted plots, the impossible loves and the heart-breaking pain of Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama, I‚Äôdel Imam, and the rest of that crew on the one and only TV channel that the country had–Eran Kolirin

I wanted to break the movie 'rules,' dislocate the format. I wasn‚Äôt interested in making a 'statement of purpose.' I simply wanted to poke fun at everything, to express my take on the world, a tragicomedy of the absurd, signifying nothing–Anthony Hopkins

The story touched my life. Like its leading character, Dominic, I was tortured and stumped by my inability to complete an important work. At 66, I was frustrated. I hadn‚Äôt made a film in eight years. My businesses were thriving but my creative life was unfulfilled. Youth Without Youth was like The Twilight Zone–an old man, a professor, becomes young again. He seizes that extra time to continue his research on the origins of language. I wanted to return to personal filmmaking. That meant low budgets–Coppola

Cannes Film Fest 2007–At the beginning he was a heroic figure for me, but he became a repulsive mystery. I love “monsters,” so I wasn‚Äôt going to look a gift horse in the mouth! What thrilled me most was the opportunity through Verg?®s of making a film about contemporary history, about our experience of the last 50 years, about what I too have lived through since the age of 13. So it‚Äôs also a film about my own political history, a look at my own life–Schroeder.

Kelley's script was structurally brilliant. He has this tremendous twist that happens at the end of the film that really catches you by surprise. My work with Kelley was not about trying to create the story, since he'd already done that beautifully. It was a matter of finding rhythm and pace, which is a director's job, and to find the emotional arcs of these stories and whether we were in balance within the story–Gavin Hood