Top 25 Rian Johnson Quotes

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.’

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

‘Game of Thrones’ is just incredible, what they pull off every week.

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

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 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.

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

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.

Showing your movie to an audience… it’s like your kid doing a piano recital. ‘Just let it not fail. Please.’

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.

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.

Writing Kylo Ren is just so much fun.

I was a musical theater kid in high school.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.