Rian Johnson Thinking Quotations

Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.

All of us have that feeling of some deficiency from our childhood. I think that's a universal thing.

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."

I think what I love about science fiction and what sci-fi can be really good at is obviously you're working with outlandish concepts that have very little to do with the real world, like time travel for instance.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.