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.'
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.
You never want to make a 'message movie', but you always want to be talking about something that you care about.
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.
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.
With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.
Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.
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.
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 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.
Writing is not fun.
