Back before 'Brick,' I wrote a short film that I never ended up shooting: hit men in the present who work for a mob in the future who send their victims back in time. A guy is sent his future self, he lets him run, and the whole short was them chasing each other across the city. That sat in a drawer for 10 years until after I made 'Brothers Bloom.

Well, you know, we all grew up as 'Star Wars' fans.

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.

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 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.

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

Memory is a form of time travel. That's something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing.