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

You never want to make a "message movie," but you always want to be talking about something that you care about.

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.

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.

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

If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.

I mean, the first “Back to the Future” is kind of a perfect script, I think. In terms of handling time travel the best, it depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story.