Rian Johnson doesn’t play with genres, he turns them inside out. His debut film, Brick, reinvented film noir by setting it within the confines of a high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hard-boiled gumshoe investigating an old flame’s death. Next he made The Brothers Bloom, which mashed up a 70s caper comedy with the hermetic quirks of a Wes Anderson movie.
And now there’s Looper, a time-travel thriller in which a Mob assassin (Gordon-Levitt) must hunt down his own older self (Bruce Willis), who’s travelled three decades into the past to change the future.
Just hours before Looper opens the 2012 Toronto Film Festival, Johnson is telling me his movie isn’t as complicated as its synopsis.
“It’s a fairly simple film in many ways,” he says. “We did a lot of work to try and tame the sci-fi element of it, to make sure the lines of the movie were as clean as they could possibly be.”
It’s still a pretty ambitious movie, though, with shifts in perspective, pace and even tone. And Johnson gave himself another challenge when he cast Gordon-Levitt and Willis as the younger and older versions of the same character. They don’t exactly look alike, requiring Gordon-Levitt to wear prosthetics for the whole picture.
“You almost wonder if we could have gotten away without [the makeup],” Johnson says, then quickly takes it back. “I’m glad we had it. I think it’s good to give the audience a little something foreign about Joe’s face. And it was also fun for us, like a loony thing to do.
“But his performance is what sells it, I think. He’s such a versatile actor, and he’s just so good at what he does he’s also specifically great at transforming himself. He’s a leading man with a character actor’s soul, and those are always my favourite actors.”
I’ve been describing Willis in very similar terms for about 20 years, I say.
“Yeah!” Johnson nods. “In Twelve Monkeys, for instance, the emotional honesty and the nakedness of that performance – sometimes literally – is amazing, for the places he’s not afraid to go to. And he was so game for all the stuff in this movie he was especially excited about diving into the darker places. It’s really impressive.”
I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it, but there’s something Willis is required to do in Looper that… well, it’s pretty grim. And as Johnson says, not every actor would be willing to go there.
“That moment in the story was always an issue of great concern for us,” Johnson explains. “Is the audience just gonna say ‘No! Fuck you guys! Fuck this movie, we’re checking out!’ when it happens? Bruce’s being so entirely in that place and giving the performance he did – I feel like that earns a lot of that back, and in many ways buys us the moment that’s so essential. He’s just a tremendous actor.”
Interview Clips
Rian Johnson on creating Looper’s near-future world:
Rian Johnson on the appeal of science fiction and the importance of doing his own thing:
normw@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/wilnervision
