Rian Johnson Quotes

#1. 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.

Rian Johnson

#2. 'Game of Thrones' is just incredible, what they pull off every week.

Rian Johnson

#3. 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.

Rian Johnson

#4. 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.

Rian Johnson

#5. 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.

Rian Johnson

#6. When you're writing is when the "god should I just drop this" feeling can hit. When you're editing is when the "god this is awful and I've wasted everyone's time and money and will be revealed as a fraud" feeling can hit.

Rian Johnson

#7. 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.

Rian Johnson

#8. 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.

Rian Johnson

#9. It's best if I stay out of future plans and let time go on.

Rian Johnson

#10. 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.

Rian Johnson

#11. I mean, the first 'Back to the Future' is kind of a perfect script, I think, in terms of handling time travel the best. It depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story.

Rian Johnson

#12. 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."

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#14. 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."

Rian Johnson

#15. I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.

Rian Johnson

#16. I saw a mom who would die for her son, a man who would kill for his wife, and a boy angry and alone, the bad path laid out in front of him. I saw it, and the path was a circle, round and round. So I changed it.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#19. 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.

Rian Johnson

#20. My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.

Rian Johnson

#21. 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.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#23. Storytelling wise, you've gotta take it as far as you can possibly take it with each individual movie. If you're holding out something for a sequel or some cliff-hanger, that's not how I think of a satisfying story.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#27. Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

Rian Johnson

#28. All of us have that feeling of some deficiency from our childhood. I think that's a universal thing.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#30. I think what I love about science fiction and what sci-fi can be really good at is obviously you're working with outlandish concepts that have very little to do with the real world, like time travel for instance.

Rian Johnson

#31. 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.

Rian Johnson

#32. With 'Brick,' the style with language and the way it was shot was to create a world obviously elevated from the very first frame above a typical high school.

Rian Johnson

#33. Showing your movie to an audience ... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.'

Rian Johnson

#34. Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that's unique and for me incredibly influential.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#36. Memory is a form of time travel. That's something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#39. 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.

Rian Johnson

#40. Writing is not fun.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson

#42. 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.

Rian Johnson

#43. Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open.

Rian Johnson

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

Rian Johnson