Rian Johnson

“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.”

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

“It was never in the plan for me to direct 'Episode IX,' so I don't know what's going to happen with it.”

“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.”

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

“It was so emotional to step onto the Millennium Falcon set because that was the play set we all had when we were kids. Suddenly, you were standing in the real thing. There's this rush of unreality about it.”

“As to whether Luke is the 'Last Jedi,' they say in 'The Force Awakens' he's going to find the last Jedi temple and Luke is the last Jedi.”

“Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.”

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

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

“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.”

“It took a while before I could sit across the table with Mark and not, every three seconds, think, 'I'm talking to Luke Skywalker.'”

“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.”

“I'm just randomly wandering around the Walt Disney studios making pew-pew sounds, trying to direct people, and nobody listens to me anymore. I'm turning into a Force ghost. It's a strange feeling.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The overwhelming reaction on set was everybody loved the porgs. And I love 'em, so you know what? I get it if people are a little wary of cuteness in the 'Star Wars' universe, but I personally love them, and I think they have their place in the movie.”

“Luke Skywalker, right now, is the last Jedi. There's always wiggle room in these movies - everything is from a certain point of view - but coming into our story, he is the actual last of the Jedi.”