With 'Brick' there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with 'Brothers Bloom' there was a really strong Fellini influence - both those movies wore that on their sleeve.

With 'Brick,' the style with language and the way it was shot was to create a world obviously elevated from the very first frame above a typical high school.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet.

All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.

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

'Game of Thrones' is just incredible, what they pull off every week.

In almost the same way you know what your grandmother looks and sounds like, you know what Bruce Willis looks and sounds like.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.'

The critical reaction to 'Bloom' has been similar to 'Brick.' There are people on board with it and people who are not.

Well, you know, we all grew up as 'Star Wars' fans.

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

Writing is not fun.

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.

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

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.'

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.

Hopefully with each thing that you do you're learning something, you're growing, and you're pushing yourself a little harder in some way or another. So I think you'd be in real trouble if each new thing that you create didn't feel like 'Oh, wow. I feel like I'm doing something a little different this time.'

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.

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.