LOOPER
IN THE LOOP
Sophisticapted sci-fi thriller Looper blasts onto our screens this month. James Mottram speaks to director Rian Johnson about working with Bruce Willis, being inspired by Terry Gilliam and the logistics of time travel
A story set in 2044, about assassins whose targets are sent back from thirty years in the future, Looper is a very intricate sci-i . How did you approach writing it?
RIAN JOHNSON: Writing the screenplay, part of what I wanted to do with it was really focus on getting the script as tight as possible. Part of the pleasure and I hope some of the charm of [Johnson’s last i lm], The Brothers Bloom, was its unwieldiness. The fact that it’s this big, rambling carnival of a movie. Coming out of that, the challenge was to do something that was very, very focused. I ended up spending a lot of time revising the script, more than I’ve done with any other. Did writing a time-travel movie give you a real headache from a logic point of view?
RJ: It was dei nitely the most unwieldy part of writing the script. The tough thing was less about coming up with l ourishes, and more about at taming the exposition. I guess at ere the end of the day, that’s where a time-travel always becomes a ng. sticky-wicket, in terms of writing. ur Once you’ve come up in your re, head with this whole structure, it the temptation is to explain it ce all to the audience. But once a we started showing it, it was a at real pleasant surprise to see that audiences didn’t need that.
What are your favourite time-travel movies?
Twelve Monkeys RJ: is fantastic. I’m such a huge Terry Gilliam fan, and the phantasmagoria of how he deals with the complications al places of the loops and the emotional places t ilm are hard to beat I think the irst he takes it to at the end of that i lm are hard to beat. I think the i rst Terminator also. The way it used time-travel specii cally is something that I’m drawing from: how it’s part of the set-up but not an active part of the plot. I also think the i rst Back to the Future is an almost perfect script. It really holds up. They should really be studying that script in i lm schools. Bruce Willis plays one of these mob targets, sent back in time to be killed by his younger self. Did you cast Willis with a nod to his role in Twelve Monkeys?
RJ: No, not specii cally. It might have even been a little frightening, that connection, just because Twelve Monkeys is such a seminal time-travel movie. Drawing comparisons is incredibly dangerous in my mind. The one thing that did tie in specii cally with Bruce, and what he’s done in
the past, was just the fact he was Bruce Willis. The fact that, aside from being a tremendous actor, he has that Bruce Willis thing, where – when he shows up in a movie – he’s typically the hero who is going to i nd the right person, kill them and save the day. And that played really strongly into where his character ends up going in this one. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Bruce’s younger self, and apparently listened to recordings of his co-star to ape his voice. How did Willis react to that?
RJ: He loved it. The diner scene was the i rst time we really sat those actors across from each other, and that was about half way through the shoot. I think Bruce made some comment to Joe like ‘Ah, you sound like me!’ Something very understated and very Bruce Willis-ey. I think he got a kick out of it.
How did you approach the look of the i lm – specii cally designing what our future w designing what our future world will look like?
RJ: What I wanted to avoid was design fatigue. I feel like we see a lot of movies, especially since the advent of CG, which makes it affordable to create these instant landscapes – and I feel like we see a lot of sci-i worlds. To m me, it was more interesting to ground i it, to take our world and tweak it by ten p percent, so it’s recognisable – but there a are just a few things that are off about it. Arriving on the back of a summer A of of remakes, sequels and reboots, Lo Looper feels very fresh. Do you th think Hollywood lacks originality no now?
RJ: I don’t want to broadly shit-talk a big RJ gro group of movies. Some of the best i lms tha that have ever been made are adaptations. There’s nothing to say that just because it’s an existing property, you can’t turn it into a really amazing, original i lm. But I think there is a certain amount of recycling during this phase that we’re in. I know for me personally it’s much more interesting, just as a storyteller, to grow something from the ground up. What would you say to your future self if you met him?
RJ: To my future self? I’ve been asked about my younger self, but not my future self...oh God. I would ask him to bring me back a sports almanac.
Looper is on general release from Fri 28 Sep. See review page 64.
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