Looper report

What is Looper? On Rian Johnson's Tumblr page it says, simply and modestly, “the next movie from the people who made Brick and The Brothers Bloom”. While this is certainly true, there is still a lot more to be said about it. We'll start with what we officially know, that it's a sci-fi action drama starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, a smalltime hitman who bumps off hooded victims sent back by a crime cartel from the future. We also know that the film co-stars Bruce Willis as another hitman named Joe, this one sent back in time to be killed, only to find that his assassin is himself.

There is more to this story than that, of course. Some of it we know, but can't tell you yet, having been the only publication allowed on the sci-fi film's ultra-secretive Louisiana shoot during its especially spoilerish final week of shooting. But there's plenty more that Johnson is keeping up his sleeve for now. The metaphor is apt, since as well as music and movies Johnson is a major fan of the magic arts, and here there is certainly a lot for him to conjure with. On Brick the trick was turning a teen movie into a credible film noir. With The Brothers Bloom, two conmen played an elaborate game of Find The Lady. But here, Johnson is aiming for the big time with his most ambitious illusion yet: turning such a rarefied arthouse conceit into mainstream box-office gold.

“I first wrote Looper as a short,” he recalls, when we reconvene in an LA hotel bar in the first week of January 2012, three days before the film's second public test screening. “This was a long time ago – before I made Brick, actually. I was really frustrated because Brick had come together and fallen apart so many times. Finally I said, 'Let's just do some short films to get our heads back into it.' So I wrote, and we made, a short film called The Psychology Of Dream Analysis, and in that same mode I wrote a script called Looper. It's essentially the basic premise of the movie, but done as a two-page script that I never ended up shooting. It sat in a drawer for ten years, and after Bloom I had an idea for how to expand it. So it just kinda became obvious it should be the next thing.”

It seems, at first sight, that Johnson plus sci-fi seems a strange fit, especially considering his previous two movies. Johnson, however, seems surprised by at that suggestion. “God, well, I'm from the growing-up-on-Star-Wars generation,” he says. “I've always loved sci-fi so much, and I'd always wanted to do it, but...” He stops himself. “I was about to say I would have needed to get to a certain point budget-wise before I could attempt sci-fi, but that's obviously not true, if you look at what Shane Carruth did with Primer, even Duncan Jones with Moon. But, yeah, I've always wanted to make a sci-fi, and, it's weird, because it almost seems that sci-fi grew up with my generation. We had Star Wars as kids, then Blade Runner and Alien came along – the 'adult' sci-fi movies that you have to start wrapping your heads around. It's a strange genre, though. I don't know what a pure sci-fi movie would actually be. It's almost like a genre that fits on top of other movies, like you can have a sci-fi detective movie, like Blade Runner, or a sci-fi haunted-house movie, which is what Alien effectively was.” He smiles. “And then the time-travel genre is a whole other thing...”

So what does sci-fi sit on top of here? “Several different things,” he decides, “and that's what was exciting to me. There's a time-travel movie, there's a hitman movie and… well, I'm still figuring out how much of the rest to give away, because part of the pleasure of it is not knowing where the movie's gonna go. But at its heart, it's a movie with a time travel-type premise that is actually an action-drama, I think. There are elements from a lot of genres in it, because even though it has this sci-fi theme to link the whole thing together, the underlying genre shifts during course of the movie, and part of the fun is trying to figure out what kind of movie it actually is.”

For most people, though, the movie will be a Bruce Willis movie, and Johnson is happy for that to be the case, even with all those expectations. “Honest to God, he was awesome to work with,” he enthuses. “You hear all kinds of things about all kinds of people, but I just had such a fantastic experience with him. He was exactly the way you would hope Bruce Willis would be like to work with, he was cool and funny but really intense. He worked his ass off – he was just so into it.”

“He brought so much of his personality to it,” he continues, “but it didn't change what the story was, or the script. And that was part of the pleasure of working with him. I think what it is that he does well really complimented the script. Without getting too much into spoiler territory, things happen with the character that are much more intense because it's Bruce Willis onscreen doing it. It's the first time I've really engaged with someone who's an action movie icon, and a fascinating part of the process – when you're cutting the movie and showing it to audiences – is realising what that buys you. And what you have to fight, also, because audiences just love Bruce Willis. If you want them to feel negatively about something he's doing, you have to make it ten times as negative as you usually would – because they're SO programmed to believe he's doing the right thing!”

At this point you're probably wondering what kind of alchemy can turn the whippet-like Gordon-Levitt into the bullish Willis. And you wouldn't be the first to be suspicious. “When we first cast Bruce,” Johnson reveals, “it was kind of a big problem, because the make-up guy looked at Bruce and Joe's faces and said, 'There's no way you can do this, their faces are way too different. Anybody but Bruce!'” He laughs. “So it took a lot of convincing to get him to adjust a couple of things and just get it as close as possible. But it's a testament to Joe's performance that he's able to sell it. I can't wait for you to see the film, see the whole performance.”

Here we jump back in time to Looper's plantation setting, in May of 2011, where Gordon-Levitt is taking a break between set-ups. Only, it doesn't quite look like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Thanks to some contact lenses, a prosthetic nose, an upper lip and perhaps even a bit of chin, the actor looks uncannily like the younger Willis, especially in scenes being played back on the monitor. Maybe as a result of working with Christopher Nolan, Gordon-Levitt won't be drawn on plot or character. But the Brick star does wax lyrical about Johnson, who wrote the long-form Looper with him in mind.

“I love working with a director that has such a clear vision of what they want,” he says, “and I think that's why Rian's movies are so particular and have such a unique voice. He really knows what he wants it to be. At the same time, he's also extremely collaborative and open to what happens in the moment, from one take to the next. It's been fascinating watching how this project has evolved from a story in his head to a real-life movie with flesh and bone, especially how the old Joe character changed once Bruce Willis got involved – and how my character changed once Bruce Willis got involved. He really defined it. I mean, he has to – he and I are the same person!”

Was Gordon-Levitt concerned about that? “Well, that was always crucial: who was gonna play that part? But Bruce is the perfect, perfect person to do it. He's someone I've always admired, I've always liked his movies – both the big-time action movies as well as something like 12 Monkeys or Pulp Fiction, so it's an honour and also kind of flattering that I'm playing him as a young man. It's also kind of inspiring, as an actor. I've never done that before, y'know? It's always a big part of any acting job, because that's what an acting job is. It's figuring things out – who is this person? How do they talk, how do they walk, how do think, how do they feel? And to have such an iconic figure like Bruce defining that for me is a very particular challenge.”

Back to LA, and 2012, where Johnson admits that his own challenge was the time travel element, some details of which have now been pared back since the first assembly. “It was hard,” he admits. “But the approach that I took to it was really similar to the first Terminator movie, where time travel sets up the premise and then gets out of the way. I really admire movies like Primer, where it actually does engage with time travel. Or even Back To The Future 2, which is zapping back and forth the entire time! But for me, it was much easier on my brain to set up the circumstances and then have the characters take over and try to resolve this big problem that time travel has caused.”

He pauses. “For the most part, the big, freeing thing was realising that time travel was never, ever going to make sense. It just doesn't make sense. So my job was not to make a version of time travel that does make sense but to somehow fool the audience into not noticing that it doesn't make sense. And that's what every successful time travel movie actually does.”

He laughs. “It's just a magic trick.” 

* A version of this story appeared in Empire magazine...