Quotes by Rian Johnson

“I wrote the film right out of film school when I was 23. Its mainly a detective movie, from my point of view. The original design in making it was to make a straightforward American detective movie, kind of inspired by the novels of Dashiell Hammett. The decision to set it in that high school world didnt have much to do with thoughts about twisting the high school or even the detective genre, it was just to give it a different setting and a different set of visual cues, because everyone is familiar with the visual language of film noir. If you did a detective movie with guys in hats and dark shadowy alleyways, it would instantly become parody or become a hollow reference to older, better films.”

“The language was what we did the most work on. A big part of it was just performance wise, figuring out how to attack it. We thought that maybe wed just try applying a modern, natural style of acting to it and just ignore the fact that its this very formal type of language, and that didnt work at all. That totally fell completely flat. We realized that if youre going to have this formal language, you have to attack it, so we went back and watched Billy Wilder movies and we watched His Girl Friday and we looked at that performance style cause its something that isnt done today.”

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 its the most serious time of your life.

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.