Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

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

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

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.

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.

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