Rian Johnson talks Looper, The Terminator, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt becoming Bruce Willis

We’ve shared the few scant details known about LOOPER as soon they became available. You know we’re excited. So I won’t spend time dwelling on that fact (also because thinking about the September 28th release date will just depress me), and instead I’ll cut straight to the chase with a plot recap followed by some nice little insights shared by Rian Johnson today:

“A present-day killer (Gordon-Levitt) works for the mob of the future. He, along with other so-called “Loopers”, dispose of people sent from the future to eliminate evidence of a crime. When he recognizes one victim (Bruce Willis) as his future self, he hesitates, letting the man escape.”

Johnson’s thoughts on JGL’s performance and “playing” Bruce Willis:

“To bring the premise to life, Gordon-Levitt had to look (and act) like Bruce Willis… and that meant spending three hours a day in the makeup chair.  ‘That was really scary because you commit to that and there’s no real way out of it,’ said ‘Looper’ writer-director Rian Johnson of using practical prosthetics to make one actor look more like the other. ‘But 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.'”

The TERMINATOR connection:

“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.”