Frame from a Pepe Le Pew cartoon

“Were some of the Warners characters based on yourself?

I didn’t have to leave home to find the mistakes the Coyote would make. I mean, give me any tool and I’m in trouble. I have yet to learn the mysteries of a screwdriver. My wife and daughter would go hide when I’d start to hang a painting.

Now, the other side of the picture for me was Pepe Le Pew, the amorous French skunk. There’s the guy I always wanted to be. Every man wants to be so sure of himself with women that he could never even dream he’d offended her.”

— Chuck Jones, interviewed in 1971 by Peter Bogdanovich for his book Who the Devil Made It

“Did many ideas come from personal experience?

Oh, yes — all the time; one of our writers, Warren Foster, heard a child in a park say, ‘Mommy, Mommy, I taut I taw a twirl!’ He brought this back to the studio and the ‘twirl’ became a ‘puddy tat’ so we could get a cat-versus-canary thing going. Friz [Freleng] developed it into the Sylvester-Tweety Pie series.”

— Chuck Jones, interviewed in 1971 by Peter Bogdanovich for his book Who the Devil Made It

Poster for The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

“Moral influence can’t be measured. The artist does contribute to the moral climate of his time. . . . Did a film like The Grapes of Wrath play any part in arousing a social conscience in America? Or was it the result of the social awareness arising out of New Deal politics? Which is the cause and which is the effect? We are a part of history and we also make history.”

— Lindsay Anderson, as quoted in The Film Director as Superstar (1970)

“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)