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Park City • The Sundance Film Festival can be a surreal experience. For 11 days in January, the charming mountain town of Park City is overrun with actors and movie executives from New York and Los Angeles, plus filmmakers and film fans from all over the world.

With scores of screenings each day and countless parties, receptions and gifting suites, this quiet resort area becomes a bustling hub of the movie business and major destination for hangers-on.

Here's what the stars had to say about the festival, now celebrating its 30th year:

"The Sundance experience is getting lost in the ski resort that has over 4,000 rooms. You don't know what floor you're on because all of the rooms look the same and the carpeting looks the same. You don't know where the bar is."

Actor Sam Shepard

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"And then once you find the bar, you for sure don't know where you're going."

Actor Don Johnson

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"What I really cherish about it is like the first Sundance that I was here [in 1997] and the romance of that. It was all on Main Street. Ben Affleck was here with 'Chasing Amy' and Parker Posey had three films. … I met this young girl, very sweet blond girl, and she had never done a movie. And it was Reese Witherspoon."

Actor Sam Rockwell

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"My husband, who is so sweet, got me a Sundance present. And he got me these amazing faux-fur earmuffs and I love them so much. So that's my new essential. Gosh, things that are warm, but wear layers as well, and then just anything that's emulsifying or hydrating is crucial. Beer is not emulsifying or hydrating, but I managed to have that yesterday. So you do what you can."

Actor Anne Hathaway

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"This is my first time. I've never been here until now and it's dizzying and wonderful. I didn't plan it right. I would have loved to have skied. But there's no chance. You can't even see a movie. It's crazy. It's just too much. We just do [interviews] or we're scarfing down food or we're getting drunk at some incredibly crowded party or we're sleeping. That's about it."

Actor John Lithgow

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"My tradition for Sundance has pretty much been: Don't see the movie before Sundance. See it for the first time here. That's worked out well for me. The movies that I've done that with have done pretty well here. It's not superstitious. It's just a great place to see it. It's a great audience to watch a movie with."

Actor Mark Ruffalo

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"My thing that I would like to do at Sundance while I'm here that probably won't happen is get to meet Robert Redford."

Actor Marisa Tomei

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"It's nice to be at a screening and see Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and be like, 'Yo Goldie, yo Kurt, how you doing?' "

Journalist/producer Katie Couric

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"Damien was on the half-pipe until 3 a.m. just shredding the powder pretty hard. It's really hard to get him off the half-pipe to talk about this film."

Actor Miles Teller, joking about "Whiplash" writer-director Damien Chazelle

Associated Press writers Sandy Cohen and Jessica Herndon contributed to this report.