- Stewart Lee: This place just felt really wrong. Sort of where anything could happen. But you knew that someone involved in the process really cared about what they put on. And so it was almost like the building itself had recommended these films to you.
- John Waters: The Scala had magic. It was like joining a club - a very secret club, like a biker gang or something... It's like they were a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high... which is a good way to see movies.
- Peter Strickland: At the beginning of February, I saw Eraserhead was now on, at this place called the Scala. Where it was made zero difference to me. I came in completely unwitting. And then, I saw the cinema. The whole experience was as much about the cinema as the film - that's what caught me by surprise. The film, I was expecting it to be something powerful, but not the place where I saw it. It was just another world.
- John Waters: The Scala was where you got the audiences that were the most hardcore, and I mean that in the best way. I was only in the audience in the Scala for one of my films once, and I remember being shocked, and I had been all over the country to midnight movie audiences everywhere. So this was the most insane, vocal, partying, great audience I ever saw.
- Paul Putner: You'd never forget a night out at the Scala. I mean basically, you could sit with your back to the screen and see something just as enjoyable. Because of all the eccentrics. And the freaks. And the cats. And all the mayhem that would sometimes happen in there.
- Ralph Brown: It was like a kind of fertilising ground for the youth of London, who were artistic in some way and who wanted to make a living in the arts. Who were just feeding off all of this stuff that was in there, and off each other. And I can't think of any other cinema that did that.
- Cathi Unsworth: You know what it is, it's that song, the Green Door. That's what I always think of, an eyeball peeping through a smoky cloud behind the green door. You can hear the piano tinkling and you want to get in and at the Scala you could get in, you could get behind the green door and you could spend an amazing night and perhaps you can't remember it properly now but perhaps that's the whole point.
- Adam Buxton: It's these marble floors and it's this quite grand building that looks a bit like an embassy that's fallen out of use. Maybe there's been a disaster in the world. You know, look around King's Cross in 1985, it's a little bit what it seemed like, and out of the ashes of civilization these guys have decided to set up a cinema. 'Let's set up a cinema in the old abandoned embassy from before times, and the survivors, and the mutants and the others can all gather together to watch entertainments from the old world.'
- Vic Roberts: I think of the Scala not as a building or something that's inanimate, I think of it as a sister and everybody in it were my family. I was brought up by the people there. I really knew nothing when I came to the Scala but the content of the films and the staff that were working there helped me figure out life - also figure out my place, that it was acceptable to be queer, that it was acceptable to struggle with my own gender, and my own gender identity. Because it was never questioned, whatever I was or whatever clothes I turned up in or whatever mood I was in, it was okay. So it became a holding place. And I think for a lot of queers and a lot of weirdos generally this cinema was somewhere to go where we were with our own people.