Rian Johnson has seemingly achieved the impossible. He's made a time-travel sci-fi epic that makes sense – and is also a western. The Looper director talks to TARA BRADY
A LITTLE WAY into the hotly anticipated new movie Looper, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits down in a diner with his older self, played by Bruce Willis. The younger man is a Looper, an assassin specialising in targets sent back from the future. Willis, Gordon-Levitt’s latest designated victim, decides there’s little point in attempting to use the condiments on the table between them to recreate the temporal zig-zagging that landed younger Joe and older Joe at this peculiar junction.
What a shame.
Writer-director Rian Johnson, who has been developing this time-travel adventure for almost 10 years, is certain he could have made the condiments work.
“Definitely. In the context of that table at that exact moment, it all checks out when you use the condiments. I spent a lot of time working it out. I accept that when you’re dealing with time travel into the past there’s always going to be a certain point where paradoxes take over. But I did come up with a system. And I’m pretty confident it works in terms of moving the ketchup and the mustard and the mayonnaise around.”
Looper reunites Johnson, an agreeable, spectacle-wearing banjo player, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the star of Brick, the director’s debut film. The pair have been talking about the sci-fi adventure for eight years, in a series of what-ifs and script drafts.
“He’s one of my dearest friends,” says Johnson. “I wrote it for him largely because I just wanted to work with my friend. He was the first person to read it. But I also knew that Joe was specifically suited in terms of studying and mirroring another actor. It’s the kind of thing he really enjoys doing. Joe has all that charisma of a leading man, but he is really a character actor at heart. He does that Daniel Day-Lewis thing of vanishing into the characters he has created.”
He laughs: “It wasn’t like I said: ‘You got this: I’ll be at the craft services table’. But usually you cast an actor, you have a meeting with them and they show up a week or two before you start shooting if you’re lucky. To have this kind of long-time collaboration with someone for a part is a real luxury.”
They used prosthetics to bring GordonLevitt’s facial furniture in line with Willis’s. But mostly, says Johnson, it fell to his studious performance to bridge the gap.
“It’s all Joe: it’s his voice and his mannerisms that allow you to believe they’re the same person,” says the director. “He studied Bruce. He wrapped himself around Bruce. He hung out with him and watched how he talked and moved. But one of the many, many great advantages of casting Bruce is that you can go back and see exactly how he looked and sounded at Joe’s age. Joe had 30 years of watching Bruce Willis movies to fall back on.”
It’s not a first foray into time travel or science fiction for either star. Still, there’s something special about Looper. For months, fans have generated an impressive array of viral pamphlets, recreating early glimpses, teaser trailers and stills in Lego and abstract poster design.
“I’ve been managing the Tumblr site myself,” says Johnson. “It’s been unbelievable. I can’t believe the work and creativity people have put in.”
The online cheerleading team are right to be excited. Looper has tremendous punch and epic ambitions. Johnson cites The Matrix, Terminator and Akira as his primary inspirations, and yet the film’s minimal use of futurism and insistence on vérité points toward such clever, modestly budgeted and concept-driven science fiction pictures as TimeCrimes, Sound of My Voice and Primer. Sci-fi, says Johnson, is back in the multiplex where it belongs.
“I’m feeling really bullish about sci-fi right now,” says Johnson. “I think it’s a really potent time right now for indie sci-fi particularly. These films don’t cost $200 million. So you have to take some creative chances with the storytelling. It’s actually a really exciting time with low-budget films like Duncan Jones’ Moon and mid-budget films like Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium coming through.”
Looper is at the higher end of the indie spectrum. With a $30 million dollar production spend and a cast that includes Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano and Gordon-Levitt, Johnson was able to stretch to a hoverbike chase.
“Everyone feels a certain way about hoverbikes,” observes Johnson. “I think back when we all saw Back to the Future first there was some idea that we would be getting hoverbikes soon. And I think everyone feels a bit gypped by that. The gag in Looper is that even when we get hoverbikes they don’t always start or stop or even run all that well.”
Strip away the special effects and unreliable hoverbikes and Looper retains the handmade quality of Johnson’s earlier films. Over the course of just three features the composer, banjoist, screenwriter and filmmaker has assembled a team of reliable recurring personnel. Looper marks his second collaboration with Gordon-Levitt and his third with actor Noah Segan. Nathan Johnson, Rian’s cousin and the other half of Rian’s folk duo, The Preserves, once again, composes the music. Elsewhere on the credits, other members of the Orange County clan pop up on design and illustration duties.
There are small group in-jokes scattered throughout the screenplay. Segan’s character is called Kid Blue, Segan’s favourite film and part of his email address. Gordon-Levitt’s character parrots slow, deadened French phrases from a language learning tape: the actor has a degree in French poetry from Columbia University.
“It makes a lot of sense to work with people that you care about – and I enjoy being cruel to my friends,” says Johnson. “Hopefully, that kind of comfort level around you helps you to take greater risks and leaps. I think my sets feel like very safe places. I’ve been making movies with Nathan since we were kids. We would get together for family vacations and enlist our cousins and brothers and sisters.”
Did they have plots?
“Oh yeah. We mostly made parody films. Like Beebusters, which was Ghostbusters with bees, and ended with us destroying a wasp hive. We made a different genre every time we got together actually. We made a Hitchcock movie. We made a spy spoof. We made a mock documentary about monsters living underneath the hotel we were all staying in. We still have copies but they’re way too embarrassing to put out in any form.”
Johnson has remained a playful and dedicated student of the finer points of genre ever since. Brick, his award-winning 2005 feature, reimagined a Dashiell Hammett gumshoe in a contemporary American high school. The Brothers Bloom (2008) was a surreal, romantic caper. With Looper, Johnson references obscure delights like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu and pop classics like Back to the Future’s disappearing photo.
“It makes no sense that the family are disappearing one by one if you think about it,” says Johnson. “But it makes perfect movie sense.”
In keeping with Johnson’s genre mashing back catalogue, Looper is also a western.
“I hope I left enough western things in there that you can just notice it,” says Johnson. “The whole movie sets up this moral choice between Joe’s life in the city and Emily Blunt’s character’s life on a farm. So westerns were a big influence. And Witness with Harrison Ford. I love that movie dearly. I went back and watched it over and over to figure out how to maintain tension when you’re stuck on a farm. It’s amazing how they structured it.”
The buzz around Looper is particularly gratifying after the lukewarm response afforded The Brothers Bloom, a film many dismissed as a product of Difficult Second Album syndrome.
“It’s so nice seeing Looper in adverts,” says Johnson. “That’s a big leap up for us. But you know I’m a big believer that a film will always find its audience. You can sit around and blame marketing, but sometimes, for whatever reason, films don’t connect with audiences in theatres. It’s been really nice to people connecting with Brothers Bloom on DVD and Netflix. On a long enough timeline, people find the film they were meant to see.”
He pauses.
“But hopefully this one will find its audience just a little sooner.”
Looper is out now on general release
