Rian Johnson 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.

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.

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.

The only advice I can really give to the young filmmakers is to be persistent, don't give up, and keep watching and making as many movies as you possibly can.

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.

The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

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.

I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes.