Rian Johnson Quotes

The only advice I can really give to the young filmmakers is to be persistent, don't give up, and keep watching and making as many movies as you possibly can.

It's so much work to make a movie, and for me it has to get me off my butt. To get me actually writing you have to strike something inside, you have to hit a power main to get the energy. You have to strike something you care about.

In almost the same way you know what your grandmother looks and sounds like, you know what Bruce Willis looks and sounds like.

Well, you know, we all grew up as 'Star Wars' fans.

Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love, like 'Primer' or '12 Monkeys,' 'Looper' is not about time travel. It's about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively, the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.

The fanboy community can smell in an instant, like smelling fear, when something was tailor-made in order to reach them as a demographic.

You never want to make a 'message movie', but you always want to be talking about something that you care about.

All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.

That's part of the appeal of time-travel movies: The notion of going back and fixing something.

The critical reaction to 'Bloom' has been similar to 'Brick.' There are people on board with it and people who are not.

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.

I'm definitely a big believer in the notion that a heightened style can get you closer to an authentic human experience than so-called realism on film. There are films I love that have kind of a muted or realistic style, but for me on any given day I have more moments during the course of a day that feel like a Fellini movie than I do a Cassavettes movie.

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.

I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You're working on them, even if you don't know you're working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing.

Writing is not fun.

Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.

I just don't think CGI is up to manipulating the human face yet. I feel like you can get away with it with aliens or monsters or something that's intentionally foreign, but I have yet to see anything digital to do with the human face that doesn't just look ridiculous.

Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!

With 'Brick' there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with 'Brothers Bloom' there was a really strong Fellini influence - both those movies wore that on their sleeve.

I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes.

Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life.

Even if I had $200 million, I'm very wary of overusing CGI. I think it's a great tool and it can be used really effectively, but I feel like it does tend to be overused and especially in sci-fi stuff.

You come out of each movie just thinking, "God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right."

There's something about the sci-fi genre that gets an audience interested in it, so maybe you can take some risks that you couldn't, if you were just doing a drama. It lets you maybe reach a little further and surprise people a little bit more because there's still that little safety base of working on that genre that everybody loves.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet.

The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

When I see a news story on a site, about a movie that I'm interested in, it's like the mouse going for the pleasure button and I click it. But then, when I see the movie, it's like, "Oh, I would have enjoyed the movie that much more, if I hadn't known that."

Back before 'Brick,' I wrote a short film that I never ended up shooting: hit men in the present who work for a mob in the future who send their victims back in time. A guy is sent his future self, he lets him run, and the whole short was them chasing each other across the city. That sat in a drawer for 10 years until after I made 'Brothers Bloom.

Hopefully with each thing that you do you're learning something, you're growing, and you're pushing yourself a little harder in some way or another. So I think you'd be in real trouble if each new thing that you create didn't feel like 'Oh, wow. I feel like I'm doing something a little different this time.'