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.

With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.

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 my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.

Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open.

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.