Less than two hours before his movie Looper opens the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, Rian Johnson is, well, jazzed.
“I’m just really excited about tonight, man,” the writer-director says at the end of a long press day. “To have the first screening in a city like Toronto, a city of cinephiles … it has that reputation, you know, that audiences just love movies in Toronto. So unveiling it for the first time in front of a crowd like that? As a filmmaker, I couldn’t be happier.”
I’ve made no secret of liking Looper – hell, we put its leading lady Emily Blunt on the cover of our TIFF issue – and I’m sure tonight’s audiences are going to go wild for it, especially once they see how well Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis line up as the title character, a dead-eyed hitman who finds himself a wanted man twice over when his older self leaps back to the present.
Head-spinning? Sure. But also weirdly personal.
“That’s one of the things I really love about sci-fi,” Johnson says, “how it lets you use these ridiculous premises to set up a situation that’s at once completely inflated and unrealistic but also incredibly human and recognizable, and something that we can all relate to. That’s definitely what we were swinging for with this one.”
Brick was a neo-noir The Brothers Bloom was a caper comedy. And Looper is a science-fiction adventure. What genre will Johnson take on next?
“I’m trying to figure it out,” he says. “I really love sci-fi – it’s a broad canvas, there’s so many different avenues of it. I really enjoyed the opportunities it afforded and the things you get to play with, so I might stick around in that world for a while. But I don’t know I’m still working on it.”
