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.

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

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.

The fanboy community can smell in an instant, like smelling fear, when something was tailor-made in order to reach them as a demographic.

When you're writing is when the "god should I just drop this" feeling can hit. When you're editing is when the "god this is awful and I've wasted everyone's time and money and will be revealed as a fraud" feeling can hit.

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