Steven Spielberg: “With Star Wars, George put the butter back into the popcorn.”

Roger Ebert: "Every once in a while I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie. When the ESP people use a phrase like that, they're referring to the sensation of the mind actually leaving the body and spiriting itself off to China or Peoria or a galaxy far, far away. When I use the phrase, I simply mean that my imagination has forgotten it is actually present in a movie theater and thinks it's up there on the screen. In a curious sense, the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them. Star Wars works like that."

James Cameron: "I was living in a Star Wars world in my mind, and all of a sudden I saw this film, and it was like somebody had reached into my hind brain and yanked out a lot of stuff that was in there, and I was seeing it on the screen realized. And not to take anything away from George's creation, because it's obviously a phenomenal milestone, but my reaction to it was not, 'Oh, wow, that's cool. I want to see more.' It was, 'Oh, wow, I better get off my butt because somebody is doing this stuff, you know, and they're beating me to it.'"

Seth Green: "Star Wars is such a phenomenal global supernova that anything that gets said about it becomes kind of fact and gospel, and then taken by the legions of fans who are so excited to have more Star Wars, that they roll off on all sorts of flights of fancy."

Peter Jackson: “Star Wars smashed open the possibilities of what film could actually do. It was like a seismic shift in how people perceived the cinema-going experience. Not only did it have powerful themes and stories that could resonate, but it was executed in a way that was so much more believable and so much more exhilarating than anything that we’d seen before.”

Simon Pegg: “Star Wars had quite a big effect on my life, not just as a child, but by extending its influence beyond that first encounter to so many facets of my adult life. It’s affected my relationships, my education, my intellect, my decisions, and made a significant contribution to making me the person I am today.”

Stephen Colbert: “Star Wars came out and we went to school the next day unable to explain to our friends how everything was different now."

Robert Kirkman: "What makes Star Wars a memorable, time-tested story that will live on for centuries is that you can’t pinpoint one single thing that makes it great. Han Solo and Chewbacca are awesome. Darth Vader is one of the best villains ever created. The lightsaber is one of the coolest weapons ever. The story, the monsters, the spaceships — everything is great! So it’s hard to pinpoint one thing that drew me to Star Wars — but if I had to choose I’d say it was mostly Jawas."

J. J. Abrams: "Star Wars is probably the most influential film of my generation. It's the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents' generations, left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films."

Kevin Smith: "So much of my childhood was spent thinking, dreaming, watching, playing Star Wars."

Christopher Nolan: “Ever since I saw that film, whether I knew it or not, my ambition has been to give the audience that kind of experience. To create a world that they hadn’t expected before and hadn’t seen before and let them lose themselves in it. There’s a huge advantage of jumping into something original that can be anything.”

Ridley Scott: “I basically said to my producer: ‘I don’t know what we’re doing. This guy’s making Star Wars? I’m not even in the same universe. I’m not even in the same century.”