Rian Johnson

“I was a musical theater kid in high school.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“For me, I was entirely focused on 'Episode VIII' and having this experience, and now I'm just thinking of putting the movie out there and seeing how audiences respond to it.”

“I do love science fiction, but it's not really a genre unto itself; it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done, I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.”

“'Star Wars' was everything for me. As a little kid, you get to see the movies only once or twice, but playing with the toys in your backyard, that's where you're first telling stories in your head.”

“Writing Kylo Ren is just so much fun.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“I grew up having a sense of who Luke Skywalker is.”

“'Game of Thrones' is just incredible, what they pull off every week.”

“'Star Wars' boils down to the transition from adolescence into adulthood.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Writing is not fun.”