Rian Johnson is no stranger to ambition.
His first feature, Brick, was made for under 0,000 and featured the sort of dialogue you’d expect from a know-it-all trying to ape Dashiell Hammett, and that’s precisely what it was, but it was really quite good. He then followed that up with The Brothers Bloom, an ambitious crime caper that although flawed managed to entertain with its twisting narrative and high-level cast.
This time round he’s gathered together another great ensemble including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Paul Dano to star in Looper, a film that on paper sounds like a bit of a mind-boggler.
The most detailed synopsis we have currently is a little vague but you can rest assured with Johnson at the helm things will get awfully complicated awfully quickly :
A present-day killer (Gordon-Levitt) works for a mob in the future and kills people who are sent from the future. He recognizes one victim (Willis) as himself and hesitates, resulting in the escape of his older self.
Talking to the Los Angeles Times the writer/director tried to play down the time travelling set-up explaining that, “if you just tell somebody the plot, you’re inevitably telling them the time travel stuff, but the movie actually uses that as a set-up. The best parallel I can draw is to the first ‘Terminator’ movie where time travel is used to set up this impossible situation between these people and then that situation plays itself out.”
In order to get Levitt to resemble a younger Willis throughout the film he will be wearing prosthetics, to quote Johnson: “the biggest thing is Joe’s performance, he’s really doing Bruce in a big and daring way, but he strikes a balance between obviously imitating Bruce and also building this organic performance.” It all sounds like a tough balancing act to pull off but the with the films obvious ambition whatever happens will at least be interesting. Better than that, like Brick, it may be something truly surprising and new.
Source: IndieWire
