Quotes from Rian Johnson

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.

It took a while before I could sit across the table with Mark and not, every three seconds, think, 'I'm talking to Luke Skywalker.'

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

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.

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

'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

Luke Skywalker, right now, is the last Jedi. There's always wiggle room in these movies - everything is from a certain point of view - but coming into our story, he is the actual last of the Jedi.

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

As to whether Luke is the 'Last Jedi,' they say in 'The Force Awakens' he's going to find the last Jedi temple and Luke is the last Jedi.

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.

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.

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

That's part of the appeal of time-travel movies: The notion of going back and fixing something.

It's best if I stay out of future plans and let time go on.