JASON REITMAN

The first set I remember was 'Ghostbusters.' It was a scene in which the street erupted. I remember even at seven years old thinking, 'Wow, if you direct a movie, you can break the streets of New York.'

Growing up sucks, doesn't it? I understand why people wouldn't want to get old - but it'd be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don't do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.

I grew up on movie sets, I'm comfortable on sets. A movie set is like a circus. I don't understand why moviemaking has to be such an insane environment.

Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.

I think it's a mistake for young filmmakers to just buy digital equipment and shoot a feature. Make short films first, make your mistakes and learn from them.

I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

I always believed that you can make challenging films, but they should be fiscally responsible.

My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.

Doesn't every generation feel like the one that's coming up behind them doesn't know how to grow up? I'm not sure if we're progressively getting worse or if your perspective shifts.

'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.

I'm a kind of private guy.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you're connected to everybody. You've got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don't actually talk to anybody. You're not close to anybody.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

'Juno' really changed things for me and I get a lot of screenplays come in now, but I like to self-generate and I like to kind of pursue my own ideas. And I think the more personal the better.

When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

Everyone wants to be loved; everyone wants to know where they're going in life; everyone wants to have a sense of direction and feel the next day is going to be better than today. We just all deal with it in a different way.

'Election' is a movie I'd give a leg to cross the director's name out and put mine in.

I don't know why I'm drawn to anti-heroes, but I certainly am.

I find nice people kind of boring.

Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays, and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater, where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts, but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.