Quotes from Jason Reitman

'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

I hear the way people talk about the children of famous people. They're not treated very well. The presumptions are usually quite awful. So I tried to establish myself with a couple of movies. After 'Juno' I thought: 'I think I've defined myself enough as my own director that I'd love to work with my father.'

I really enjoy theater. I just went to see 'Death of a Salesman,' and it knocked me on my ass.

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.

I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I'm not going to make a Haneke film. That's just not in my DNA.

Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'

Directing 'The Office' is kind of like someone going, 'Would you like to drive my Lamborghini?' And I'm like 'Yes, I would like to drive your Lamborghini. That sounds like fun.'

I grew up on movie sets, I'm comfortable on sets. A movie set is like a circus. I don't understand why moviemaking has to be such an insane environment.

I find nice people kind of boring.

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

I am an obsessive flyer, myself.

Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.

When characters change on screen, it makes you feel better about yourself. You think, 'Oh I change too, I'm constantly becoming a better person.'

Most people are nostalgic in a way that they're fond of the past, but they still are happy that they are where they are now. You know, when you say, 'Oh, high school was this or that,' you don't want to go back. No matter how much you loved high school, you don't want to actually be back in high school. I certainly wouldn't.

I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.

I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

I'm equally guilty of using technology - I Twitter, I text people, I chat. But I think there's something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we're closer when in fact we're not seeing each other, we're not connecting.

And I certainly like being on a plane, next to a stranger, having conversations that you'd never otherwise have. You're unplugged, your phone doesn't work, you're not online.

I have one of the original 'Ghostbusters' guns in my house.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.