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My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.

Rian Johnson

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Rian Johnson
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: December 17
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
Silver Spring
Maryland
Rian Craig Johnson
Stories
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Learned
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Going
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Family
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More quotes by Rian Johnson

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Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.
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I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes.
Rian Johnson
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Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.
Rian Johnson
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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.
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With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.
Rian Johnson
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Back before 'Brick,' I wrote a short film that I never ended up shooting: hit men in the present who work for a mob in the future who send their victims back in time. A guy is sent his future self, he lets him run, and the whole short was them chasing each other across the city. That sat in a drawer for 10 years until after I made 'Brothers Bloom.
Rian Johnson
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Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son. A man who would kill for his wife. A boy, angry and alone. Laid out in front of him, the bad path. I saw it. And the path was a circle. Round and round. So I changed it.
Rian Johnson
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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.
Rian Johnson
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Storytelling wise, you've gotta take it as far as you can possibly take it with each individual movie. If you're holding out something for a sequel or some cliff-hanger, that's not how I think of a satisfying story.
Rian Johnson
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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.
Rian Johnson
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You come out of each movie just thinking, God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right.
Rian Johnson
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Even if I had $200 million, I’m very wary of overusing CGI. I think it’s a great tool and it can be used really effectively, but I feel like it does tend to be overused and especially in sci-fi stuff.
Rian Johnson
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The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.
Rian Johnson
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I do love science fiction, but it's not really a genre unto itself it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done, I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.
Rian Johnson
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I think what I love about science fiction and what sci-fi can be really good at is obviously you're working with outlandish concepts that have very little to do with the real world, like time travel for instance.
Rian Johnson
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All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.
Rian Johnson
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Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!
Rian Johnson
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If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.
Rian Johnson
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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.
Rian Johnson
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In almost the same way you know what your grandmother looks and sounds like, you know what Bruce Willis looks and sounds like.
Rian Johnson