Rian Johnson Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You never want to make a "message movie," but you always want to be talking about something that you care about.
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In almost the same way you know what your grandmother looks and sounds like, you know what Bruce Willis looks and sounds like.
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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.
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Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!
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My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.
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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.
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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.
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The fanboy community can smell in an instant, like smelling fear, when something was tailor-made in order to reach them as a demographic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.
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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.
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The critical reaction to 'Bloom' has been similar to 'Brick.' There are people on board with it and people who are not.
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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.
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All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.
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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."
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If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.
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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.
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Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open.