That's part of the appeal of time-travel movies: The notion of going back and fixing something.

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

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.

Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life.

I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.

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

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