'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.
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 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.
It was never in the plan for me to direct 'Episode IX,' so I don't know what's going to happen with it.
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.
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.
It's so much work to make a movie, and for me it has to get me off my butt. To get me actually writing you have to strike something inside, you have to hit a power main to get the energy. You have to strike something you care about.
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.
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.
The critical reaction to 'Bloom' has been similar to 'Brick.' There are people on board with it and people who are not.
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.
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.