RIAN JOHNSON

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

Writing is not fun.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.