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

All of us have that feeling of some deficiency from our childhood. I think that's a universal thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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