Joseph Gordon-Levitt IS Bruce Willis IS a Time-Travel-Assassin-For-Hire: LOOPER

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Also posted in the Chez Tremblay JGL JGL JGL (a thread for Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45560.msg631883/topicseen.html#msg631883

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uIWGOKW5OM[/youtube]
Published on Apr 12, 2012 by ENTV

Also posted in the Chez Tremblay JGL JGL JGL (a thread for Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45560.msg631883/topicseen.html#msg631883

[Meryl]

That sounds interesting!  Glad you're out there sniffing out these tidbits, John. 

[oilgun]

I'm a sucker for time travel movies.  I'm just not sure I can handle JGL's look.  I understand they were trying to make him look like a young Bruce Willis but it just creeps me out.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

also: click and scroll for video intervew:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/14/joseph-gordon-levitt-looper-bruce-willis_n_1673233.html



Joseph Gordon-Levitt
In
Looper
Actor Reveals How He Became
Bruce Willis For The Film

By DAVID GERMAIN
07/13/12 10:37 PM ET

SAN DIEGO -- The big time-travel paradox of the sci-fi thriller "Looper" is whether Joseph Gordon-Levitt is playing a young Bruce Willis or whether Bruce Willis is playing an old Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Gordon-Levitt, co-star Emily Blunt and writer-director Rian Johnson gave the Comic-Con fan convention Friday a sneak peek at footage from "Looper," which centers on a hit man who's supposed to kill his future self.

To play the young assassin, Gordon-Levitt, 31, spent three hours in makeup every day to have a prosthetic nose and other cosmetic tweaks applied to make him look more like the 57-year-old Willis.

But much of the transformation comes from Gordon-Levitt's mimicking skills. He says he watched Willis' movies over and over and listened to the actor's dialogue again and again on an iPod.

Much of what he aimed for, however, was capturing the cool essence of Willis, Gordon-Levitt said.

"I'm not a good mimic, to be honest. I don't do good impressions," said Gordon-Levitt, who also co-stars in next week's Batman  finale "The Dark Knight Rises." "I didn't think an impersonation would be appropriate, anyway. It would just be distracting. So I just tried to internalize and do something that made sense to me. ...

"The most I learned from him is just hanging out with him," Gordon-Levitt said. "He's a sweetheart and he loved this job. He was clearly there to play."

The movie opens Sept. 28.

"Looper" is set late in the 21st century, when murder has become difficult to carry out. Time travel allows the mob to get rid of people by sending them into the past, where a hit man awaits and victims can be disposed of with no questions asked.

Johnson had previously directed Gordon-Levitt in the 2005 low-budget drama "Brick," when the filmmaker first raised the idea of the time-travel story. He wound up writing the script specifically with Gordon-Levitt in mind, even naming the character Joe.

"We've just been dying to work with each other again," Johnson said. "It's always best to make movies with your friends."

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/09/looper_reviewed_joseph_gordon_levitt_meets_his_future_self_and_he_s_bruce_willis_.html



Looper
Joseph Gordon-Levitt meets his
future-self, and he’s Bruce Willis
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2012, at 8:54 AM ET


Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper.


Looper  is the third film from Rian Johnson, whose debut feature Brick  (2005) somehow pulled off the brazen gimmick of setting a noir murder mystery in a suburban American high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (then known to most audiences as the alien kid on the family sitcom Third Rock from the Sun ) played the lead role—a teenage Sam Spade investigating his girlfriend’s murder—with an alchemically perfect combination of hip detachment and wary melancholy. Gordon-Levitt was already a rising actor, having been singled out by critics in less-mainstream roles, like the gay drifter he played in Gregg Araki’s moody, unforgettable Mysterious Skin.  But it was only after Brick  that he began his steady rise toward household-name status, playing a lovelorn greeting-card designer in (500) Days of Summer,  a brain-cancer patient in 50/50,  and a credible action sidekick in both Inception  and The Dark Knight Rises.

I’m an avowed JGL fan, so the prospect of Gordon-Levitt and Johnson working together again was enticing. So was Looper’s high-concept sci-fi premise: Gordon-Levitt plays a hired assassin whose targets are sent back in time from the future. It’s 2044, and time travel hasn’t yet been invented, but—to employ the future-perfect tense useful mainly for time-travel movies—it will have been invented in 30 years. By that point, a fearful, vaguely post-apocalyptic government will have forbidden any use of the technology ... so, to paraphrase the NRA bumper sticker, when time machines are outlawed, only outlaws will have time machines. Soon the contraptions (which look, pleasingly, like Jules Verne-era bathyspheres) are used solely on the black market, transporting the human garbage of the future back in time for the past to clean up. At least, that's how Joe (Gordon-Levitt) justifies to himself the fact that he makes his living waiting in deserted fields for hooded, cuffed men to appear out of nowhere so he can shoot them with a blunderbuss.

Underground assassins like Joe—members of an organized force led by menacing boss-from-the-future Abe (Jeff Daniels)—are known as “loopers,” for the chilling reason that, after being paid handsomely and given an early retirement that lasts exactly 30 years, they themselves will be captured, sent back in time and killed, thus closing the “loop” of their lives. As the film begins, a new crime lord, a fearsome gangster known as the Rainmaker, has taken over in the future and is issuing new orders about the existing loopers: He wants all their future selves sent back in time and killed immediately, preferably by the younger versions of themselves. (Why exactly this setup would be desirable was one plot point among many that eluded me. Given that the victims from the future are being sent back with their heads covered, why would it matter which looper killed whom?)

Joe’s featherbrained fellow looper Seth (Paul Dano), encountering his own later-self, isn’t able to bring himself to pull the trigger, and the man gets away, resulting in a very bad outcome for both present and future Seths (and the first of several extended bursts of stomach-churning violence). Joe resolves that, when and if his own future self appears in cuffs before him, he won’t hesitate to blow him away—but when that day comes and Joe’s future self turns out to be Bruce Willis, all bets are off.

Future Joe manages to knock Past Joe out cold, take his gun, and head out into the world to find and kill the child destined one day to grow into the Rainmaker. Based on a tip about the super-criminal’s date and place of birth, old Joe has narrowed the candidates down to three small children, one of whom (Pierce Gagnon) is the son of a lonely sugarcane farmer (Emily Blunt) in whose barn young Joe has taken shelter while on the run from Abe’s men, who are now hunting down both Joes with extreme prejudice.

You see where this is going: At some point, Young Joe and Old Joe are going to have to meet up and debrief about the 30 years that separate them, then decide whether they’re going to continue as allies or enemies. The moment this finally happens, in an Edward Hopper-esque diner in the middle of nowhere, was for me the movie’s high point. As they stare at each other in profile over two identical plates of steak and eggs, Willis and Gordon-Levitt, such different types both physically and temperamentally, make a strange sense as each others’ time-traveling avatars, especially since we’re meant to imagine that Joe’s years of hard living to come will make him a coarser, tougher man in middle age. (Levitt was also fitted with facial prosthetics to make his fine-boned face more closely resemble Willis’ craggier features. The nose works; the eyebrows are pushing it.) The diner scene also snaps with smart dialogue that playfully bats around sci-fi clichés; asked by his 2044 self to explicate one of the paradoxes of time travel, 2074 Joe impatiently dismisses the question, insisting they have no time to “start making diagrams with straws.”

Too bad, because a well-thought-out straw diagram might have been able to get me through the movie’s last half-hour, in which timeless philosophical questions of free will vs. destiny, nature vs. nurture, and utilitarian ethics (would you consider killing a child if you knew it meant saving countless future lives from the monster he might grow up to be?) get raised, then chucked aside as the story hurtles to a rushed, gory conclusion that leaves nearly as many plot holes as bullet holes. Saddest of all, after their juicy mid-movie encounter at the diner, Old and Young Joe hardly ever share the screen again, and when they do, it’s mostly to exchange terse remarks and gunfire.

Looper  felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship—a face-to-face encounter between one’s present and future self, in which each self must account for its betrayal of the other—and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper  as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com//review/looper-movie-review-joseph-gordon-levitt-bruce-willis-368330






Looper
Toronto Review
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis go head-to-head in
writer-director Rian Johnson's clever science fiction tale.

The Bottom Line:
An engaging, neatly worked-out time-travel sci-fi thriller with
Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the same role.

by Todd McCarthy
8:15 AM PDT 9/6/2012






Looper  is a clever, entertaining science fiction thriller that neatly blurs the line between suicide and murder. An existential conundrum wrapped in a narrowly conceived yarn about victims sent back in time to be bumped off by assassins called loopers, Rian Johnson's third and most ambitious feature keeps the action popping while sustaining interest in the long arc of a story about a man assigned to kill the 30-years-older version of himself. A lively, high-profile choice to open this year's Toronto International Film Festival, this Sony release co-starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the same role should chalk up sizable returns in the wake of its Sept. 28 theatrical bow.

Probably the shakiest aspect of Johnson's original screenplay is what it asks the viewer to buy about the future: A mere 62 years from now, in 2074, time travel has become possible, but such a momentous breakthrough is limited to serving as a body-disposal system. Under the prevailing authority, time jumping is strictly outlawed because of its potential for messing with history. A large criminal mob, run by an overlord called The Rainmaker, defiantly uses it but only as a vehicle for assassination, with “loopers” -- disreputable gunmen living in 2044 -- laying in wait for people to execute so no bodies or other evidence can be found in the future.

But the premise is established in nifty fashion; the doomed, hooded with hands bound behind them, suddenly materialize in an empty field, and the looper immediately blows him away with his blunderbuss. One such executioner is Joe (Gordon-Levitt), a retro-looking hipster who drives a very old red Miata and wears ties, “a 20th century affectation” that offends his crankily genial boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). If he can get out of this racket, he says he'd like to go to France, which earns him further scorn from the older man; “I'm from the future, you should go to China,” he scolds.

Backed by a cynically confessional voice-over track from Joe that is not as self-consciously hardboiled as the commentary Gordon-Levitt read for Johnson in Brick  seven years ago, Looper mostly is set in a seedy metropolis that doesn't look all that different from sketchy neighborhoods in some big cities today; there are derelicts, bombed-out buildings, ruined cars and enough other signs of urban ills to suggest that, in Johnson's view, things will just gradually decline over the next three decades.

Joe hangs out in clubs, sees a sexy woman (Piper Perabo) who works in one of them and tries to help a friend and fellow looper, Seth (Paul Dano), who's imminently endangered by a new development that's come down from on high: They're “closing all the loops,” meaning they're sending the “future selves” of all the loopers back to be killed.

Almost immediately, Joe is in the same jam. When, a half-hour into the film, he goes to the field to do his next job, the guy who pops up to be shot is not hooded. Joe's hesitation allows the older man to escape, and it's clear who he is: It's Joe as his older self. And, for his failure to kill him, young Joe is in a pile of trouble with Abe and his “gats,” first-class hired guns.

When the two Joes finally sit down -- across from each other in a diner in the middle of nowhere -- there's no doubt they're working at cross purposes: Young Joe is determined to kill his older self, while old Joe is dead set on tracking down and taking out The Rainmaker, who would be a little kid in 2044, so his late wife won't die at his hands after all.

The biggest problem facing the makers of Looper is how to make the audience believe that the trim, long-faced Gordon-Levitt could somehow change so much in 30 years that he would look like the thicker-built and shorter-nosed Willis. The solution lay in altering the younger actor's appearance, imperceptibly at first, but gradually to morph his dark eyes into Willis' gray-green and to reshape his nose and eyebrows, either with makeup or digitally or perhaps both. At first, the effect is a bit odd, and you can't quite put your finger on what's off; then it feels downright weird to be looking at a version of Gordon-Levitt who is no longer the actor you've known for a few years now.

This is especially noticeable during the film's second half, much of which takes place at young Joe's place of refuge, the isolated home of feisty young farmer and single mom Sara (Emily Blunt), who has an unusually gifted son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon). Even as the temperature is kept at a low simmer, the film's pace deliberately is slowed here to develop some intimacy between these two isolated people and give some screen time to the kid, who pretty obviously will provide the reason for old Joe to eventually head for the farm. The eventual ending is great, the resolution to the tricky time maneuvering very impressively worked out.

Shot mostly in Louisiana, with a bit done in Shanghai, the film looks tightly made on a budget but sacrifices nothing for that; the world depicted looks dirty, dangerous and ramshackle, with a few high-tech touches here and there.

Their physical disparity notwithstanding, Gordon-Levitt and Willis both come across strongly, while Blunt effectively reveals Sara's tough and vulnerable sides. Daniels is particularly amusing as the garrulous old enforcer holding down the future's outpost in the past.



Opens: Friday, Sept. 28 (Sony)

Production: Film District, Endgame Entertainment, DMG Entertainment, Ram Bergman Prods.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Opening Night)

Cast: Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels, Pierce Gagnon

Writer-director: Rian Johnson

Producers: Ram Bergman, James D. Stern

Executive producers: Douglas E. Hansen, Julie Goldstein, Peter Schlessel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dan Mintz

Director of photography: Steve Yedlin

Production designer: Ed Verreaux

Costume designer: Sharen Davis

Editor: Bob Ducsay

Music: Nathan Johnson

PG-13 rating, 119 minutes

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948218/





Toronto

Looper
by Peter Debruge
[email protected]
Posted: Thu., Sep. 6, 2012, 8:15am PT





A time-travel twister that pits a ruthless hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
against his future self (Bruce Willis), "Looper" marks a huge leap forward
for Rian Johnson ("Brick"). His grandly conceived, impressively mounted
third feature shows a giddy, geeky interest in science-fiction, then forces
it into the back seat and lets the multidimensional characters drive. In a
genre infamous for loose ends, this thinking man's thriller marshals
action, romance and a dose of very dark comedy toward a stunning payoff.

Reception should be solid, not stellar, with a long cult afterlife.


In the future, mobsters dispose of unwanted rivals by sending them 30 years back to the past, before time travel has been developed, and into the hands of a team of young screw-ups called "loopers" to do the killing. Why loopers? Because sooner or later, these live-in-the-moment assassins will wind up killing their time-displaced selves -- or "closing the loop." They're rewarded, handsomely, and life is sweet until … well, until time travel is invented and they get booted back to face the barrel of their own blunderbusses.
 
You don't have to be Albert Einstein to know that sending assassins back to the past is a bad idea -- not for a movie, but as a system of gangland garbage disposal. Kick your unwanted trash into the future, and you're rid of it, but blast a career killer back in time, and there's a pretty strong chance the death-marked assassin will irrevocably alter the "future" from which he came if he can manage to escape.
 
That loophole, big enough to drive a plot through, is precisely what makes Johnson's crazy idea work. Joe, played by Gordon-Levitt with pale blue contacts, puffy lips and a fake schnozz that takes some getting used to, is pretty unconflicted about killing strangers from the future, himself included. But when Older Joe arrives in the form of grizzled action star Willis, his 30-years-younger self flinches just long enough for the guy to make his move, knocking Joe unconscious before disappearing into his own past.
 
Now, here's where things get fun for the kind of sci-fi crowd that likes to diagram and debate the logic of time-travel stories. You'd think that Older Joe has the upper hand, able to anticipate the way his younger self reacted, but as cat-and-mouse games go, the young punk has a distinct advantage, since the slightest injury to Gordon-Levitt's body travels forward to appear as scar tissue on Willis.
 
The pic demonstrates just how this works with Joe's sidekick Seth (Paul Dano). After purposefully allowing his older self to escape (or "letting his loop run" in the parlance), Seth hides out at Joe's place -- not a smart idea, considering that Joe prizes money over friendship, and doesn't put up much resistance before surrending Seth to the syndicate chief (Jeff Daniels, whose blood runs cold behind a bearded smile). What follows is a truly disturbing death scene, as Seth's loop (Frank Brennan) tries to hop the nearest train, only to see 30-year-old injuries start to appear all over his body, the result of the younger Seth being sadistically tortured offscreen.
 
Kill the kid and his loop goes, too -- a rule that puts Older Joe in the awkward position of simultaneously having to run from, and protect, his younger self. Trickier from a storytelling standpoint is the fact that auds don't meet Willis until the first-act break, at which point the film must rapidly supply a romantic backstory for a character who, in the present reality, technically does not yet exist. So, while Gordon-Levitt's Joe is a heartless hustler, Willis' older-and-wiser counterpart brings soul to the character, having discovered -- and had to watch die -- the love of his life.
 
Willis can play the tough guy in his sleep, but it's the character's tenderness that makes possible the ruthlessness with which he sets about trying to change his own fate. Thirty years after the story takes place, a mysterious figure called "the Rainmaker" has risen to power, and in classic "Terminator" fashion, Older Joe has the rare chance to strangle the monster in his crib. His only clues are the kid's birthdate and mythology: They say he has a synthetic jaw and that he watched his mom die.
 
While Willis single-mindedly begins to hunt down and execute 10-year-olds, Gordon-Levitt tracks down a lead that points him toward an isolated Kansas farmhouse where Sara (Emily Blunt, stunning enough to suggest a new future for Joe) and son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) have cut themselves off from modern society, leading to the inevitable confrontation between the two Joes -- and a twist that not only rewards the intricate character work of the pic's laggy middle hour but beautifully ties everything together.
 
Complicated as it all sounds, Johnson paves the way with wall-to-wall voiceover. As in "Brick," the script's well-tooled lines are stilted enough to sound cool, and angled in the direction of comedy, relying on expressions less suggestive of a sci-fi future than they are of vintage film noir. Face-to-face with himself, young Joe hisses, "Why don't you do what old men do, and die?" For both thesps, the challenging roles amount to playing near-nihilism, while also subtly absorbing one another's characteristics.
 
The two actors look nothing alike, of course, which wouldn't be a big deal, if Johnson hadn't tried so hard to force a resemblance, burying Gordon-Levitt's striking mug under prosthetics (the most distracting being an application meant to simulate Willis' unique beak) instead of simply trusting auds to care enough about Joe to see past the differences. Still, Johnson steps up to the pic's practical challenges nicely, balancing high-caliber action with intricate character work. The support team leverages Louisiana to suggest a 30-year-distant Kansas (and Shanghai for locations 30 years farther down the line) without requiring too many effects, though the digital work looks convincing when needed. The loopers' signature weapon, essentially a sawed-off shotgun with a Steampunk twist, is evocative of both past and future. If the imperfect yet promising "Brick" teased an exciting new voice, then "Looper" suggests big things ahead.



Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a TriStar Pictures, FilmDistrict, Endgame Entertainment presentation in association with DMG Entertainment of a Ram Bergman production. (International sales: FilmNation Entertainment, Los Angeles.) Produced by Bergman, James D. Stern. Executive producers, Douglas E. Hansen, Julie Goldstein, Peter Schlessel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dan Mintz. Co-producers, Dave Pomier, Eleanor Nett, Lucas Smith, Christopher C. Chen. Directed, written by Rian Johnson.

Old Joe Bruce Willis Joe Joseph Gordon-Levitt Sara Emily Blunt Seth Paul Dano Kid Blue Noah Segan Suzie Piper Perabo Abe Jeff Daniels Cid Pierce Gagnon Old Joe's Wife Summer Qing

Camera (color, widescreen), Steve Yedlin; editor, Bob Ducsay, music, Nathan Johnson; production designer, Ed Verreaux; art directors, James Gelarden, Scott Plauche; set decorator, Katherine Verreaux; costume designer, Sharen Davis; supervising sound editor/sound designer, Jeremy Peirson; re-recording mixers, Tim LeBlanc, Peirson; special effects coordinator, David Nami; visual effects supervisor, Karen Goulekas; visual effects producer, Dane Allan Smith; visual effects, Hydraulx, Scanline VFX, Atomic Fiction, Base-FX Beijing, Pixel Magic, Incessant Rain Studios; stunt coordinator, Steven Ritzi; assistant director, Nicholas Mastandrea; second unit camera, Jaron Presant; casting, Mary Vernieu, Lindsay Graham. Reviewed at Sony Studios, Culver City, Calif., Aug. 28, 2012. (In Toronto Film Festival -- Gala Presentations, opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/06/looper-review-toronto?newsfeed=true



review
Four Stars

Toronto
Looper
Rian Johnson's thriller about hitmen who assassinate targets
sent from the future opens the Toronto film festival
in fine style and runs rings around most recent sci-fi releases

By Henry Barnes
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 6 September 2012 18.59 EDT


Smooth riders... Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Paul Dano in a scene from
Looper.


Kansas 2044. Time travel will be invented in 30 years' time and quickly made illegal. It will be used only by criminal gangs to send targets back to Loopers, cold-blooded killers employed to murder decades away from detection. The victim arrives out of thin air, hands tied, head covered. The Looper pulls the trigger, collects his cut of "silver" – brickettes of precious metal attached to the mark's back – and burns the body. Once in a blue moon the target arrives strapped in gold – the first sign that the Looper's contract has been terminated. He rolls the body over, takes off the mask and confirms that he's killed himself. His loop's been closed.

Rian Johnson's sharp, smart sci-fi thriller runs on such bizarre ritual. Delayed suicide is part of the cycle for Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who's eager for the chance to tap out and enjoy his last 30 years as he wants. His life until then is locked in a well-worn circuit – an assassination, steak and eggs at his favourite diner, a quick flirt with the waitress, then the trip to the city with the same clubs, the same drugs, the same girls. Around him the economy has flatlined. Only Joe and his kind – well paid, stylish, arrogant playboys – have the money to zip around in sleek flying machines.

Joe's expecting to meet and kill himself. It's only when his older self (Bruce Willis) escapes assassination that the system is undone. Joe senior has seen the future, likes where it leads and doesn't want to give it up. Joe junior, mindful of the punishment that's dealt out to renegades by his boss (Jeff Daniels), needs to track him down and finish the job.

From there, Johnson hauls us through a cat-and-mouse chase, peppered with great dialogue and two showcase performances from Willis and Gordon-Levitt, who's nailed the pained look of befuddlement, the mannered slouch in the walk, that made Willis a star. Even when Johnson winds down their screentime to make room for a side story featuring a prairie mom (Emily Blunt) and her mysteriously gifted son, Looper  still ticks along.

Johnson's debut, Brick,  asked a lot of its audience, incited you to keep up. Those who found his noirish high-school murder mystery too portenteous might struggle with Looper.  At its best, it's a similarly dense film. But, once you commit to the lexicon – to the blunderbusses, the silver, the loops that close and the loops let run – you're in for a breathless ride. It's been a patchy summer for sci-fi, absent of anything that really sticks in the mind. Johnson's deep, distinctive film plays on repeat.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/movies/looper-with-bruce-willis-and-joseph-gordon-levitt.html?ref=global-home&_r=0



Movie Review
In What Universe
Does This Guy Turn
Into Bruce Willis?
Looper
With Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 27, 2012




“Looper,” an obstreperously entertaining, bullet- and attitude-ridden science-fiction pastiche, opens in a futuristic world that looks and sounds paradoxically out of the past. Set in 2074, in a dystopia with Turner Classic Movies flavor, it puts a spin on the familiar figure of the existentially troubled gun for hire while leaving a layer of dust on many of the other genre fundamentals it plays with. Some of it you’ve seen and heard before, intentionally so, though it adds a weird wrinkle: an attempt to transform Joseph Gordon-Levitt, his nose prosthetically bobbed and a smirk surfing his thinned upper lip, into the wisecracking Bruce Willis of the “Moonlighting” years.

The ostensible reason for Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s extreme makeover is that he and Mr. Willis are playing the same contract killer, Joe, at different ages. A looper, the young Joe works for an outfit that exists 30 years beyond 2074, where time travel exists but is illegal. Whenever the outfit wants to dispose of a “problem,” it sends the problem with a hood over his head into the past where a looper is waiting with a gun to blow him to smithereens. The hook — you can almost hear the original movie pitch it’s so tidy — is that every so often the outfit sends back an older looper, who’s unknowingly killed by his younger self, which is how the 2074 Joe stares down his middle-aged counterpart.

It isn’t a happy meeting, but the writer and director Rian Johnson makes it a largely diverting one, filled with wit, smashing edits and showy, at times distracting allusions that reflect his cleverness like little mirrors. Slamming genre cheap thrills together with high-art aspirations, Mr. Johnson spins a fast-moving entertainment out of a setup that could have been cooked up by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and was undoubtedly influenced by Chris Marker’s cinematic touchstone from 1962, “La Jetée,” in which scientists in a postapocalyptic world send, as the film puts it, “emissaries into time to call past and future to the rescue of the present.” The middle-aged Joe sets off on a similar mission, trying to persuade his younger self to go along.

It’s a juicy premise, ripe for the squeezing, though it takes a while to get over Joe’s looking less like a young Mr. Willis and more like Keanu Reeves with a dash of Marlon Brando doing Japanese minstrel for “The Teahouse of the August Moon.” Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s mug. The makeover is a distracting miscalculation and a curious one given that, for his last movie, “The Brothers Bloom,” Mr. Johnson cast the non look-alikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo in the title roles. Even so, after the bodies and plot twists pile up, and after you’ve scoped out the Bruce-ified downward curve of Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s nose and laughed when he worriedly touches his receding hairline, the movie starts getting its groove on.

There’s a lot to get past, including an antediluvian divide between hard-charging men and decorative dames, including a stripper, Suzie (Piper Perabo), who works at a club called La Belle Aurore, the name of the Paris joint where Humphrey Bogart once met Ingrid Bergman. As time goes by, indeed, or as Mr. Johnson prefers, loops the loop. (Using some metaphysical shorthand he also alludes to the cosmic cup of coffee brewed by Jean-Luc Godard in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.”) Things, or rather the gender politics, improve once Joe, fleeing the outfit — with his older self nearby — takes refuge at a farmhouse belonging to Sara (an appealing Emily Blunt), a single mom with a strange little boy, Cid (an excellent Pierce Gagnon). There, Mr. Johnson settles into something deeper, swaps the banter for real feelings and wins you over.

“Looper” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Lots of gun deaths.



Looper

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Rian Johnson; director of photography, Steve Yedlin; edited by Bob Ducsay; music by Nathan Johnson; production design by Ed Verreaux; costumes by Sharen Davis; produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern; released by TriStar Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

WITH: Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Noah Segan (Kid Blue), Piper Perabo (Suzie), Summer Qing (Old Joe’s Wife), Jeff Daniels (Abe) and Pierce Gagnon (Cid).

[Sophia]

This guy is sooo creative...if you go the theatre and see Looper, he wants you to take a picture of you in the theatre and send it to his facebook page were he publish it.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/movie-review-looper-david-edelstein.html


The Time Traveling
Looper
Delivers in Spite of Iffy Logic

By David Edelstein
Yesterday at 9:30 AM




You must remember this: The fundamental things don’t apply as time goes by in the ballyhooed time-travel thriller Looper.  In the fat gob of exposition that opens the film, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the protagonist and narrator, explains that time travel exists in the future, but it’s illegal. But for some inexplicable reason, the mob finds it expedient to send the bodies of people they want murdered back to the past (i.e., the film’s present, 2042), where they’re disposed of by “loopers” like Joe. (Question: Once cops in the future discover the practice, wouldn’t the corpses’ route be easy to trace?) For some other inexplicable reason, aged loopers in the future are sent back to the past to be shot by younger loopers—who would seem, on minimal reflection, the least reliable assassins, given their ties to the people they’re supposed to kill (not infrequently their older selves). However, if the loopers don’t shoot the old loopers, they (the young ones) will be hideously mutilated—but not killed, since killing them would change the future. (Question: Wouldn’t sawing off their limbs change the future, too?)
 
Joe’s boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), tries to ’splain all this to Joe and then throws up his hands and says, “Time-travel shit fries your brain like an egg”—the sort of line a friend calls a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that filmmakers give themselves. Getting permission to be bewildered is a gift to the audience, too. You can relax and enjoy the movie, which delivers in spite of its iffy logic.

At the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Looper  was ­acclaimed for its stylishness and narrative invention, which testifies to writer-­director Rian Johnson’s greatest talent: making clumsy storytelling look tricky and sophisticated. Tropes from Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys,  and the odd French New Wave thriller are mixed and matched to give the illusion you’re watching an “existential” mystery. Joe the looper turns out to be a junkie who gives no thought to future consequences (Quelle ironie!), styling himself like a twentieth-century American movie-star crook (or like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless  styling himself like a twentieth-century American movie-star crook). Early on, he sins in his own eyes by going all Judas on a looper pal (a mewling Paul Dano) who let his older self get away. Joe barely has time to ease his conscience—he offers a hooker his filthy lucre so she can start a new life with her son—before he’s staring down his gun at his own older self (Bruce ­Willis—and no, the two Joes don’t mesh in your head—Willis’s personality is too distinct). Young and Old Joe do not like each other one bit. “Why don’t you do what old men do and die ?” “Take your little gun out from between your legs and do it, boy ,” etc.

The second half of Looper  is part The Terminator,  part Stephen King’s Firestarter. The elite loopers (“Gats”) chase Joe, who’s chasing Old Joe, who’s hunting someone who will grow up in the future to be a mighty looper-killer called the Rainmaker. Young Joe stumbles onto the farm of hillbilly Emily Blunt, who points a shotgun into her wheat and yells, “Ah will cut you the fuck in hay-alf!” She has a strange little boy (Pierce Gagnon) with pouty lips, a big head, and temper tantrums so forceful she has to tuck herself into a steel cabinet and shut the door.

Looper  is all over the place—a series of barely aligned loop-de-loops—but if high-toned futuristic time-travel pictures with a splash of romance float your boat the way they do mine, you’ll have yourself a time. The climax is tumultuous, the payoff happy and sad in the right measure. The future might be ghastly, but heroism lives. The stars work hard, Gordon-Levitt to purge all traces of his puppy-dog persona, Willis to suppress his smirk, Blunt to smooth transitions that would trip up lesser actresses. (Her face seems incapable of registering a banal emotion.) Jeff Daniels creates the year’s most hateable bad guy by gazing on unfortunates with moist, sympathetic eyes before shattering their bones with a ball-peen hammer. As I left the theater, I heard two people in nearby aisles trying to explain different plot points to their companions. I didn’t listen. That information should only be dispensed on a need-to-know basis.
 

This review was originally published in the October 1 issue of New York.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.film.com/movies/looper-review

Film.com/movies

Review:
Looper
Is a Masterpiece

By Jordan Hoffman
September 24, 2012




This review was previously published on September 6, 2012, as part of Film.com’s Toronto International Film Festival 2012 coverage.

 
There is a shortlist of movies whose openings are mini-masterpieces of economic storytelling. An explosion of perfectly boiled-down moments stitched together with a dynamism and precision that simply does not let up. The gold medalist for me will forever be “Annie Hall” with “Raising Arizona” and “GoodFellas” nipping at its heels. It will take another viewing to confirm this, but the whirlwind beginning of the high concept science fiction adventure “Looper” may be a new addition to this club.
 
That second viewing is definitely in the cards for me, not because “Looper” is difficult to follow, but because I’m still shocked and amazed that this time-travel movie made so much sense. In an age where filmmakers are more likely to to shrug and suggest you simply embrace mystery, writer-director Rian Johnson (“The Brothers Bloom”) draws a line in the sand and says “no.” He has ideas – fun ideas – and he’s got a story to tell. Fans of rich sci-fi may want to keep a handkerchief on hand lest they find themselves drooling, while those who simply like a fun adventure with great actors in juicy roles ought to have a good ride, too. “Looper” is, no doubt about it, a terrific film.
 
It’s the future. It’s a mess. Crime syndicates run everything and those looking for a way out of poverty are working for them. One job is as a Looper, a low-rent assassin whose only skill is to be punctual. You go to a spot in a field, wait for someone to magically appear, then you blast them with a special kind of gun that never misses its target if used at close range.
 
Wait, magically appear? Yes, because in the far future (the future’s future, work with me)  they have invented time travel. Disposing of bodies is impossible in the future, so the mob sends guys they want to whack back in time where no one will miss them. Being a Looper is steady work (with access to addictive drugs) and there’s a nice severance package. You get a solid pay-out on the day you “close your loop” – when you kill your future self. (The crime lords like to sever all ties to the very illegal use of time travel.)
 
On the day you close your loop, you get a ticket to live 30 years in a party frenzy (or so it would seem) – but what happens when you can’t kill your future self?
 
Can’t kill or won’t kill? This and many other scenarios are played out and, my Lord, this is all still in the very first chunk of the movie and I’m still leaving a boatload of stuff out. This alone makes “Looper,” a studio movie with a genuine budget, an absolute miracle. How the hell did the studio heads sit through the pitch?
 
“Looper”‘s star is ostensibly Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but he shares an awful lot of the spotlight with his older self, Bruce Willis. JGL (and a soupçon of makeup) evoke the spirit of Willis without resorting to mimicry. It’s a very different type of role for him; he’s sympathetic, but frequently makes the wrong or selfish move. Willis is similarly layered. It’s one of his quiet, brooding performances, similar to “Unbreakable,” and while he may come off mean or amoral, there are quick flashes justifying his behavior that are quite heartbreaking.
 
“Looper” is not flawless. There are a number of narrative twists (again, how did this get greenlit?) and, for my tastes, the movie ends in a corner of the story less interesting to me than some of the other stuff. That there are so many crevices, however, is a testament to its world-building. From the billboards, to the costumes to the weapons and props there is, quite simply, a surplus of stuff up there on the screen. I mean, it took me until the end of the movie to realize that Garrett Dillahunt, one of my favorite character actors, was in this movie. That’s no diss against Dillahunt, it’s a salute to the dizzying nature of the film.
 
When the movie does eventually slow down it may shift a bit, but it never stops making sense. All the sci-fi works. The paradoxes of time travel are shown rather than, to paraphrase Willis’ character, mapped out with straws on a table. I scribbled a number of questions during the film and, upon reflection, 98% of them were all answered in the text. The few niggling issues feel resolved in a thematic sense. This is, in short, a smart movie.
 
It’s also a movie that rarely gets made these days. “12 Monkeys,” I suppose, might be the last whacked-out big budget trip that felt so legit and so accomplished. Let’s hope Bruce Willis can continue to come back to us for more.
 
GRADE: A-

[Sophia]

We are so in Joseph Gordon-Lewitt bubble...tonight we saw Looper.  But we missed the real Joseph, even thou he did younger Bruce Willis very well.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 

We are so in Joseph Gordon-Lewitt bubble...tonight we saw Looper.  But we missed the real Joseph, even thou he did younger Bruce Willis very well.

[Sophia]

 

Now we looking forward to his next project. By the way he was fabulous in SNL.  OMG *spoilers*

he plays a teenage girl during the end of show, he is doing it marvelously.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/rian-johnson-on-his-writing-process-and-the-appeal,85463/




Interview
Rian Johnson on his writing process
and the appeal of alternate-history films
by Tasha Robinson
September 27, 2012





Writer-director Rian Johnson launched his career in 2005 with Brick,  a remarkably smart, ambitious movie that mashes a ’40s noir mystery into a high-school setting, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt starring as a hard-bitten, hard-jawed detective archetype who also happens to be a slouchy teenager. Johnson followed up in 2008 with the less well received but still impressively original The Brothers Bloom,  starring Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as con-men brothers out to take advantage of weirdo heiress Rachel Weisz. Since then, Johnson has directed an episode of Terriers  and two of Breaking Bad  (including the memorable, divisive, but stylish bottle episode “Fly”), while working on his latest feature film.
 
Looper  is a significant departure for Johnson: an action-focused time-travel movie starring Gordon-Levitt as a thug hired to murder prisoners sent back into the past for disposal by a ruthless criminal syndicate operating 30 years into his future. When they send back his 30-years-older self (played by Bruce Willis) to be murdered, Willis escapes and starts trying to change the past to eliminate the criminal syndicate, with Gordon-Levitt in hot pursuit. The role, which Johnson scripted with Gordon-Levitt in mind, required the actor to wear facial prosthetics to look more like a younger version of Bruce Willis, and to imitate his vocal cadences and movement—all of which Johnson alluded to when The A.V. Club sat down with him in Chicago to discuss guest-directing for TV, why the killing-Hitler time-travel conundrum is boring, and how much he’s looking forward to the Internet picking Looper  apart.
 
The A.V. Club: Looper  was more than a 10-year process, right? Where did it start for you?
 
Rian Johnson: I wrote the first seed of the idea as a short film that I never ended up shooting about 10 years ago, and I’d been reading a ton of Philip K. Dick at the time, so that probably informed some of it. It was before we made Brick,  and I was in this place where we were still trying to get the money to make Brick,  and I found that all I was thinking about all day long was just getting money to make a movie, and it was getting really frustrating. So my friend Steve [Yedlin], my cinematographer, and I just started making shorts on weekends, just to start making movies again. With no agenda of getting into film festivals or anything. Just to be making movies. And this was a script I wrote to do that with. We never ended up shooting it, but the idea stuck around, and eight years later, after I made Brothers Bloom,  I pulled it out and expanded it.
 
AVC: How did the process of developing the story compare to your work on Brick  or Brothers Bloom ?
 
RJ: Well, I don’t know. The thing is, it’s so different. With Brick,  I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn’t make the movie until I was 30. So that was a thing where the script as a whole was in my head for that same amount of time. Brothers Bloom  was a much quicker process, but then this, the seed of the idea was written, but I didn’t write the script until right before we made it. So I don’t know, it’s different. I do think that I’m a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren’t consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You’re working on them, even if you don’t know you’re working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing. I hope it is.
 
AVC: This is the first time you’ve had a movie that’s really been heavily backed by a studio. Did that change the process for you?
 
RJ: Well, not in making it. We made it independently, so the process of making it felt strikingly similar to Bloom,  and even to Brick.  It was a lot of the same people. My DP is my best friend since college, my composer, Nathan [Johnson], is my cousin, and Joe [Gordon-Levitt], obviously—it felt like this little family we make movies with. So that didn’t feel very different. But this process that we’re going through now, and the fact that people are actually paying attention to the movie and it’s actually going to get released, it’s night and day. I’m still kind of adjusting to it. It’s good. [Laughs.] I like this better.
 
AVC: Are you ready for the kind of thing that happened with Primer  and Inception,  where the Internet starts dissecting the story and the science in minute detail?
 
RJ: Oh man, I’m so ready for that! I can’t wait! I mean, I know I’m screwed, I know people will be coming up with stuff that I never thought of, that invalidates the entire film, but I love it. As a science-fiction geek myself, that’s one of the real pleasures of the genre, is when you can dig into it and get your teeth into it. And if this is the type of movie people are compelled to do that with, nothing would make me happier.
 
AVC: Did Inception  give you hope that Looper  would have mainstream appeal, that people would be able to follow a complicated, multi-threaded—
 
RJ: Absolutely. Inception  specifically. It was a revelation for me, seeing a movie that was as uncompromising and obviously personal a vision, also as narratively complex, but told in such a deft way that an audience could absorb it. It’s less about the audience… the fact that an audience would accept a complex movie. It’s more seeing that [Christopher] Nolan was able to take a complex subject or concept and tell it in such a way to where it could be mainstream. And that just really excited me. And for me, even moving forward, the biggest creative challenge for me and the thing that’s most exciting is, can we go bigger? Can we do something more mainstream that still has the stuff we care about in it? Can we tell stories that are important to us and that give the audience credit and give them something to really chew on and really engage with, and still have eye candy and still make it big and fun and create the kind of movies we went to when we were kids over the summer?
 
AVC: Your movies are always dense and fast-paced. Do you have a philosophy about challenging viewers to keep up, or to take in a certain amount of material?
 
RJ: No, not specifically. Because that makes it sound like that’s where something originates, and it always has to come from a purer place than that, I think. I think it’s probably more like a function of what’s interesting to me. I mean, a lot of my favorite movies are films where you do have to watch a few times, you do have to take them apart. At the same time, with Looper  for example, even though it has a lot packed into it, and even though you can dig into it, it was very important to me that not only did the film not feel like algebra homework, that it was incredibly entertaining, but that it was satisfying on the first viewing. Even for a non science-fiction crowd, it was satisfying on some level on the first viewing. Even if there were questions at the end, even if there was stuff you wondered about or argued about on the way home in the car with your friends, on some fundamental level, you understood the whole thing. You saw why it ended up in the place it ended up.
 
AVC: You scripted it with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in mind as the protagonist. How did that affect the process?
 
RJ: Well, the writing process, it didn’t really affect, because it’s not like there’s anything of Joe in this character, thank heavens. My friend Joe was not the inspiration for this character. I just really wanted to work with Joe again. We’ve stayed really close friends since we made Brick,  and we get along really well and we work together really well, so it made sense. But I guess one thing that maybe gave me permission to go down the road of writing this movie was knowing I had Joe for it, and knowing that this was going to require a real intense transformation on the part of the young actor. And knowing that Joe would not only be up for that and be good at it, but be genuinely excited about putting another actor’s face on. That’s a lot to ask from a young actor, I think, with leading-man looks, to paste a bunch of shit over that. [Laughs.] And do someone else’s voice. But I like to say Joe is a leading man with the spirit of a character actor. What he loves is disappearing inside a role, so this was something he was excited about.
 
AVC: What went into the decision to remodel his face with practical effects instead of CGI?
 
RJ: I just don’t think CGI is up to manipulating the human face yet. I feel like you can get away with it with aliens or monsters or something that’s intentionally foreign, but I have yet to see anything digital to do with the human face that doesn’t just look ridiculous. Especially with the budget we were working with, I didn’t want to get put in a place where we had given that as our only option, and we had to try to make it work. I felt like I would be much more comfortable looking at it on set and judging how well we did, and then just shooting it. But that said, we were taking a big risk. We were placing our chips down on this, and even when I was shooting it, I was still a little bit nervous. Although when Joe showed up and started doing the voice and the mannerisms and really did the performance, that’s when I relaxed a little. I realized, “Well, as long as the makeup doesn’t get in the way—and hopefully for most people, it won’t—I feel like we might actually pull this off.”
 
AVC: You’ve said in the past that your films are all about unresolved questions for yourself. That Brothers Bloom  was about the intersection of reality and storytelling, and Brick  was about resolving some of your adolescent feelings. Is there a central question in Looper, or a central problem you’re trying to fight?
 
RJ: Yeah, there absolutely was, that I was chewing on, and I don’t know how… I feel like I was really open about what that was with Brick  and Bloom,  and it seems less interesting to me to just spew it on the table in a couple of malformed sentences. [Laughs.] With this one, it seemed, I feel, a little more… It’s there in the movie, and I think it’s probably… It’s not like it’s a complicated text. The themes are right there on the surface. But it has to do with—having said that, I’ll now just spew it on the table in a couple of malformed sentences—it has to do with violence, and the fundamental question of approaching the world’s problems by finding the right person and killing them, vs. by raising our children right, I guess. That’s what was on my mind when I started really developing it. Hopefully it gets to something.
 
AVC: Did you start with the old time-travel question about whether it would be moral to go back and kill Hitler before he came to power?
 
RJ: No! And it’s funny, because on some level, you can say that this is a form of that. But I actually… That is such an uninteresting question to me. That would be the dullest thing in the world to hinge a movie on, from my perspective, because it’s this fanciful, completely inapplicable moral question that’s also kind of a false moral question, because it has so many assumptions to it. The thing that’s interesting to me is not “Would you go back in time and kill Hitler?” but “Would you go out and kill a man whose death would profit you right now?” And that’s something that is directly and morally applicable, unfortunately, to our times, and to being a human being. And that, I hope, is the question the movie poses, more than a pie-in-the-sky alternate-history one.
 
AVC: You’ve done some directing for TV, with Breaking Bad  and Terriers,  and TV episodes are the only thing you’ve directed that you didn’t write yourself. Is there a reason TV is different for you?
 
RJ: Well, yeah. It’s quicker, first of all. It’s a commitment of a couple of weeks. And both the things I’ve done, working with Shawn Ryan and Ted Griffin on Terriers  and Vince Gilligan and the great writers on Breaking Bad,  are shows I’m a big fan of. And it’s almost like a vacation for me to show up and serve somebody else’s vision. To show up and just do the directing, and kind of do the fun part. I mean, writing is a pain in the ass. Writing is not fun. [Laughs.] So to have someone else do all the sweat work and then just to get on set and be able to create the world they’ve written, and to serve their vision, it actually is a really nice respite.
 
AVC: So much has been said about the process of TV direction—you show up and the script’s in place, the set and the tone and the characters have been determined, you can only deviate so far from anything—it makes it sound like there’s nothing to directing.
 
RJ: No, and I don’t want to give that impression. Obviously, there is quite a bit to it. I guess what I mean, though, is, there are so many creative decisions that are made day-to-day on set, and you are forging the content to be seen, in a way, when you’re on set. By serving their vision, I mean that you’re focusing all of that energy, hopefully, on giving them what they want. I guess it’s just that you’re trying to tell the story that’s on the page, and you’re trying to make sure you’re creating the world they’re setting out to create. I guess that’s the only distinction I mean. You’re still moment-to-moment picking the shots and you’re figuring out how to do that, it’s just your eventual aim is serving a master, instead of creating your own work.
 
AVC: Are you interested in doing more TV?
 
RJ: I love it, really, but I love doing it when it’s something I’m a fan of. It’s not something that… I feel like I have this little window right now where I’m able to get movies that I’ve written made, and I don’t know how long that’s going to last, and I kind of want to spend my time sneaking as many of those in as I can before they figure me out and shut me down. [Laughs.] There’s that sort of being-a-bandit-and-getting-away-with-something feeling right now. So I want to focus on that, but then something like Breaking Bad  comes along that I just can’t resist, and I’ve got to go out to Albuquerque.
 
AVC: Do you have any kind of mental shortlist of shows you’re a fan of, where you’d come running if they called?
 
RJ: Oh, boy. No, not really. I don’t have a pie-in-the-sky thing. I mentioned before that I’m friends with the guys that do Game Of Thrones,  and I love fantasy stuff—that would be incredibly fun. But who knows if that will ever work out. But no, I don’t really have a list in my head like that. I guess Breaking Bad  would have been on that list, but I just kind of—whatever ends up getting tossed at me, if it’s fun, I’ll jump on.
 
AVC: Do you know what’s next, while you’re in the window of getting movies made?
 
RJ: I’m figuring it out right now. I’m writing, and I’ve got a couple of things that I’m juggling, and they’re both… Yeah, it’s early days, but they both have kind of science-fiction hooks. They’re very different from Looper,  both of them, but I really enjoy the opportunities that science fiction gives you, storytelling-wise. I might stick around there for at least the next one. But who knows, we’ll see… Cut to… [Claps hands.] Musical! Cut to courtroom-drama musical.
 
AVC: That’s funny, the last thing Joseph Gordon-Levitt said when I interviewed him for this film was that he wants to be in a musical someday.
 
RJ: God, man. He would be so good in a musical. He should direct a musical, is what he should do. He would be fantastic at it.
 
AVC: These two ideas you’ve started working with, are they the same kind of situation, where you’ve had the ideas on the back burner for a while?
 
RJ: No, I got out of shooting Looper,  and I had nothing in the tank. I had nothing in the drawer, and I kind of panicked. And the nice thing is, I’ve spent the last eight months or so of this year brainstorming, and I now have five or six little seeds of ideas that I think will carry me through for a while. But no, there was a sense of panic coming out of Looper  that I didn’t have one of those. So I’m feeling a little bit better now. At least I have a wall to beat my head against.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/joseph-gordonlevitt-reveling-in-looper-hitrecord-a,85392/




Interview
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
reveling in Looper,  hitRECord,
and his directing debut, but not fame
by Tasha Robinson
September 26, 2012





Joseph Gordon-Levitt started acting on television and in ads at age 6, but he’s been one of the few child actors to successfully make the leap to a serious, wide-ranging adult career. He moved from small roles on shows like Family Ties, Murder, She Wrote,  and Quantum Leap  to a career-making stint as Tommy on 3rd Rock From The Sun,  then became a respected young film star with a lead role in Gregg Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin.  He followed it up in 2005 with the lead in Brick,  the writing and directing debut of filmmaker Rian Johnson; the stylish neo-noir murder mystery, incongruously set in a high school, brought both of them a steadily growing cult fandom.
 
Gordon-Levitt went on to many high-profile roles, starring in (500) Days Of Summer, 50/50, Hesher,  and Premium Rush,  and becoming a major part of Inception  and Christopher Nolan’s 2012 trilogy-capper The Dark Knight Rises.  He plays Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert Todd in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Lincoln.  And currently, he stars in Rian Johnson’s third film, Looper,  as a low-ranked assassin trying to track down and murder his time-traveling 30-years-older self, played by Bruce Willis. For the role, Gordon-Levitt wore prosthetics to make him look more like Willis, and spent weeks studying Willis’ movements and voice in order to play him more credibly. The A.V. Club recently sat down with Gordon-Levitt in Chicago to discuss that process, plus his online artistic-collaboration collective hitRECord, and his writing-directing feature debut, due out next year.
 
The A.V. Club: Rian Johnson wrote the protagonist of Looper  with you in mind to play it. Did that give you more input into the character? Were you part of the process as it was being created?
 
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Yeah, Rian really included me in the process much more than I’ve ever been included as an actor. I mean, normally you get a script several months before you start shooting, and this was something where I’d been involved in the project for several years. And even before that, Rian had been talking to me, having conversations. Before I even saw a draft of the script, Rian started telling me about this time-travel idea he had, not long after we finished shooting Brick.  So it’s something we’d been talking about. With that said, it was really all him. He would bounce stuff off me and we would have conversations, but I think I would serve as, more than anything, just a sounding board. I don’t think there was even one single example where I was like, “No, not this. I think you’re wrong.” There wasn’t any of that. This is his movie, and I was delighted to kind of be a collaborator.
 
AVC: Was there anything specific that you wanted to see in the character?
 
JGL: I can’t think of anything like that. No. I think it was there already.
 
AVC: You were with Rian from the beginning of his feature-film career, on Brick.  How did that experience compare with this one, now that he’s had more time to mature as a director?
 
JGL: Well, I think there’s more confidence in the experience that he’s had doing a couple more movies, but I actually was more struck by the similarities than the differences. Really, it felt like making a movie with my dear friend. The scope of this one is obviously much grander than Brick,  but the sentiment was very much the same—still just making a movie we thought was cool. It wasn’t about, “Well, it’s going to be bigger, so we better make sure it appeals to a broad audience,” or anything like that.
 
AVC: How’s his style with actors compared to Christopher Nolan’s?
 
JGL: Well, they’re really different filmmakers and really different people, but one thing I would say they have in common is, they strike a really good balance between… They both approach any given day with a really well-thought-through vision of what they want the scene to be. They’ve really done their homework. But they’re both very welcoming and encouraging of collaboration and spontaneity, and they’re flexible. You could also say this of Steven Spielberg, who I worked with on Lincoln.
 
And I think that balance is key to any filmmaker’s success, because making a movie, there’s so many variables, and it’s such a logistical beast that you’re never going to get reality to line up with exactly your abstract ideal, preconceived notion of things. Sometimes for dumb reasons, like “Ooop, sorry, we had to put our trucks over there, so you can’t shoot that way.” Sometimes for really good reasons, like, “Oh shit, I just didn’t think of that. It really doesn’t feel so natural to say it this way or to move right then,” and so you need a director to be able to adapt and be flexible. Rian and Chris and Steven are really good at that.
 
AVC: You have a reputation as being a very serious actor. Are you comfortable with that image?
 
JGL: Sure. I would hope to use “sincere” over “serious,” ’cause I like doing fun stuff and funny stuff, too. Premium Rush  came out this year. There’s nothing serious about it. It’s just pure, unadulterated fun and hilarity. But I approached it sincerely, and I care about it. I love movies, deeply. And it’s not just a job to me. It’s what I love to do, so I guess maybe that’s where that comes from.
 
AVC: Do you think having that kind of rep makes directors more willing to work collaboratively with you and take your input?
 
JGL: I don’t think it’s the reputation. I think, though, that if you do the work, then maybe you’ll have something to contribute.
 
AVC: When we talked to you about Brick,  you said Johnson did a lot of rehearsal and very few takes, because the budget was so small and you were working on film. Did Looper  having a bigger budget affect that preference or your working methods?
 
JGL: It was still very tight, because the scale of the movie is also so much bigger. In fact, the movie looks a lot more expensive than it was. For the amount of money we had, it’s crazy how big the movie is, and that’s a credit to Rian and a credit to Ram Bergman, Rian’s producer, who produced Brick  and Brothers Bloom  and Looper.  And also produced the movie I just directed, or am directing. That’s his specialty, taking a little bit of money and making it go a long way. So we had more time, but we had more to do. We were pretty equally tight and focused. I don’t think it’s really Rian’s style to be loose, which isn’t necessarily good or bad. That’s just his style. Like on 50/50,  that was their style. Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and Jon Levine, the director, and Will Reiser, the writer. That whole creative process of that posse of guys is loose, and that works for them really well. It feels really natural and real and that’s because oftentimes it is. People are improvising, and that’s fun, too. I really enjoyed that.
 
AVC: Though some of it presumably was tightly planned. When you’re shaving all your hair off, you can’t go back and do it three or four more times.
 
JGL: You can’t, that’s true. But they rolled two cameras and we did the lines. And then we just started improvising, because it takes you five minutes to shave your head, and there wasn’t five minutes of dialogue written. So we kept going and just said a bunch of stuff, and a lot of what’s in that scene was stuff we made up on the spot. But there’s nothing like that in Looper.  And again, I don’t think one’s better than the other. They’re just different approaches.
 
AVC: You’ve been on record in the past as not really enjoying fame and the attention that comes with it. How do you deal with that in a year where you’re in this many high-priced, high-profile projects?
 
JGL: Well, I’ll start by making a distinction. I love movies, and when people also love movies, I love that. Anytime anybody comes up to me and has clearly had any connection to a movie that I did—they say “Hey, I saw Inception  and now I’ve been thinking about my dreams more,” or “Hey, I saw 50/50  and it made me cry,” or “I saw (500) Days Of Summer  and it made me laugh or it made me think about my ex,” or whatever—any of that, I love that. That’s really meaningful to me. What I don’t like is when people have no real interest in the movies and just want to be close to the spotlight or something like that, or take a picture of me so they can put it on Facebook and say, “Hey, I’m next to a celebrity.” That to me is kind of objectifying, and I feel used. So is that happening more this year? I guess, yeah, because all these movies came out at once. But I think when you do anything professionally, you take the good with the bad. There are parts of the job that are less fun than other parts, and the parts that I love are worth it.
 
AVC: You’ve talked in the past about preparing for shooting days by listening to character-appropriate music because it helps you shut out the chaos on the set. Did you do that here?
 
JGL: My preparation revolved less around music this time, and more around Bruce Willis’ voice. But there was some, yeah. I listened to a lot of Billie Holiday for this role. Also a song that’s in the movie, it’s called “Powerful Love,” this old soul record, and it’s on this great compilation called Eccentric Soul  [Twinight’s Lunar Rotation] that Rian turned me onto at the time. It’s all these old dirty soul records that never made it on the radio. And a bunch of those songs were good. I was listening to those. So yeah, because I think the character of Joe, and loopers in general, they’re all into these 20th-century affectations, as Jeff Daniels’ [character] Abe puts it. And Billie Holiday in particular, she has a really sad voice. You feel a weight on her shoulders, and I wanted that for this character. He’s a sad guy. He’s not living a life he wants to live. He’s not a hero by any means.
 
AVC: In the process of listening to Willis’ voice and watching how he moves and trying to imitate that, did you reach a point where you unconsciously internalized him? Was it something you had to think about, or did it become second nature?
 
JGL: That’s what I went for. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be focusing on the technical details of getting his voice or manners right by the time we were shooting, because then I’m faking it. So that’s about doing the homework in advance, such that once you show up to set, that stuff has all become practiced enough so that it’s like riding a bike: You don’t have to think about why you’re doing it, so I could just be concentrating on what the character’s feeling. Because really, it’s a drama. It’s a movie about feelings, about how these characters think and feel and are. Much like The Dark Knight Rises.  It’s a superhero movie, a sci-fi time-travel movie, but it’s really a profound drama, a character-piece morality tale.
 
AVC: The heart of the movie is a conflict between a man at two different ages, with completely different, incompatible agendas. Did you largely take your own character’s side in that conflict?
 
JGL: Well, when the cameras are rolling, you certainly take the side of your character. Yeah, you can’t be removed like that. That’s the director’s job. You’ve got to trust your director to put you in the right context of the whole story, and really just see it from your character’s point of view. But that’s interesting that you say they have two totally different approaches. What would you say are the two different…?
 
AVC: They’re both protecting their lives, but those lives are different, and they fundamentally rest on valuing different things. And they’re both too selfish to see any value in each other’s lives.
 
JGL: Right. That’s the commonality.
 
AVC: Were there points where you thought your version of the character took his agenda too far?
 
JGL: Well, they both do horrible things. But they both feel like they’re doing the right thing, and that, I think, is the crux of the movie. No one committing an atrocity thinks they’re committing an atrocity. They think they’re fighting for the noble cause. So how do you get out of that cycle? Because that just leads to more and more finger-pointing and more and more violence begetting violence begetting violence. It’s a circle.
 
AVC: Do you get the same satisfaction as an actor out of something as dialogue-driven or concept-driven as Rian Johnson’s movies, and something like Premium Rush  that’s more energy and adrenaline?
 
JGL: I love the variety, both as a movie-watcher and as an actor. Sometimes I just want to watch a fun chase movie. And Premium Rush  is really good for that. And then sometimes I want something that’ll—I think Looper  is really great at offering both. It’s kind of like Inception,  where it is just a really fun adrenaline rush if that’s what you want. But it also can offer you a lot to chew on and think about if you’re interested in looking under the hood.
 
AVC: What’s your involvement in hitRECord these days?
 
JGL: Since I’ve been shooting Don Jon’s Addiction,  I’m less involved than I’ve been at other times, but I’m still quite involved. But I also—we’ve been growing a lot, so there’s more and more people both on our staff and in the community that help, that are doing a lot of that stuff. Whereas in the past, it was kind of me going through all these records and finding the good stuff, or the stuff I wanted to cultivate and work on. Now we have armies of people doing that. And I think that’s good, and that’s sort of the whole premise of hitRECord, is, “Why would I just leave it to myself when we can do this together?”
 
We have these resident curators on the site now. They’re all just members of the community, just people who joined the site like anybody else, but have proven over time to do good work and have good taste and recommend good things. We kind of tap them and give them duties, and they’re stoked to perform them, because whereas we used to get some records every day, now we get 2,500 new records every day. Even our resident curators can’t go through all that. That takes the community, more than 100,000 people on there, to go through everything and do the curation necessary to find stuff that we want to work with as a production company. But hitRECord’s going gangbusters. I’m so pleased with it.
 
Speaking of Looper,  we actually are just forming a partnership right now with Sony. Sony’s putting out Looper  and Sony’s supporting hitRECord for the rest of the year. So we split our profits: Half go back into the company, and half go to all the different contributing artists. So we’re going to be able to pay our contributing artists way more than we’ve ever paid them before, thanks to Sony. And in fact, Levi’s is coming on board too, to do a similar partnership.
 
AVC: What’s their end of the deal? Is it for exposure, or do they get ads out of it or something else?
 
JGL: Levi’s has supported lots of great artists in the past. They’ve supported Shepard Fairey. They’ve supported James Murphy. They did this thing called Art In The Streets  at MOCA last year. They’ve been doing this for years now, and it’s just part of their—they’re a brand that believes—I’ve asked them about it. I’m like, “How do you guys know this is worth it for you?” And they’re like, “It’s really hard to prove scientifically, but we feel like it’s good for us to support things in the culture that we think are positive.” I think that’s great of them, and I’m proud to be on their list of great artists. They’ve done partnership stuff with Snoop before. They partner with all sorts of good people. And I was very clear with them: “We’re not making commercials. We’re just going to basically do what we would do anyway.” And they’re like “Yeah, that’s what we want. We want you to just do what you do, and we’re going to support you.” And I was like, “Okay, great!” They have their name on some particular short films of ours that we’re working on now that they particularly like, that they think represent them, and that kind of thing. And now I’m here talking to you about it. That’s also part of what’s in it for them. But I think it’s awesome.
 
AVC: What’s the likelihood of another Morgan and Destiny short at some point?
 
JGL: I don’t know. There’s so much good new stuff. I wouldn’t count it out. You never know. But I’m flattered that you know what that is. Thank you.
 
We’re putting out a new record right now called Move On The Sun.  It’s really good music. It’s definitely the best music we’ve ever made. It’s astonishing to me. And I wrote one of the songs and sing on one of the songs, but the rest is all just great musicians under our direction, collaborating together and making all sorts of stuff. There are great hip-hop songs, great electronic pop songs, there’s great funk. So much good stuff. It’s really moving to me to see it blossom like this.
 
AVC: You’ve mentioned working on Don Jon’s Addiction  a couple of times now. Where is it in the process?
 
JGL: We’re editing it now.
 
AVC: What’s the release plan?
 
JGL: Well, it’s a real independent movie. We made it for very little money without any distributor behind it. I was pretty keen. I teamed up with Ram, the same guy who produced Brick  and Looper.  And was clear that I would take a lower budget in order to maintain complete control. The strategy is to finish the movie and make it exactly what I want it to be before we introduce it to the world. Yeah, we’re still finishing the movie. We finished shooting about two months ago, and we’ll see. I can’t wait for you guys to see it. I’m really, really proud of it. Scarlett [Johansson] is fantastic in it. She’s playing a character that’s really different than anyone she’s played before, and she’s really funny and great. Heartfelt performance. And Julianne [Moore] is, I think, one of the great actors alive. Talk about a chameleon. She’s really great at that.
 
AVC: Did you have either of them—or any other actors, really—in mind when you were scripting?
 
JGL: I had Scarlett in mind when I was writing it. I hadn’t figured out the other characters, but I did have Scarlett in mind, and it was nerve-wracking. I was like, “What if she doesn’t like it? God, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” But luckily, she did like it and agreed to do it.
 
AVC: Given that you wrote and directed and starred in the film, can people look at this and say it’s your ideal role?
 
JGL: Well, I wouldn’t say the ideal role. It’s definitely a role I was really intrigued and inspired by. It’s really different from anything I’ve done before. There are lots of ideal roles. I’d love to be in a musical. This is not that. And the character is really nothing like me. And I guess in that way, it’s ideal, because I like playing characters that are really different from me, whether it’s like in Looper  or Hesher  or Don Jon’s Addiction.  That’s usually what I get the biggest kick out of.
 
AVC: What was it like directing yourself?
 
JGL: Well, speaking of hitRECord, I do think that that was a big part of why I felt capable of doing it, because I spent all these years making little things, getting used to looking at myself. ’Cause when actors say they have trouble watching themselves, they’re not just being humble. It’s a weird thing, I’m sure, if you’re ever seen—you’ve probably seen yourself on camera. It’s odd to see your own face and hear your own voice, but it is something you can practice. And you can get used to it over time like anything, so I think the time I’ve spent doing these hitRECord videos like “Morgan And Destiny” or any number of other ones got me used to seeing myself on a screen, and therefore allowed me to be objective and watch playback—if we did a take I thought was good, I felt like I could watch playback and not just be like, “Oh God, I look weird,” but be productive and say, “Okay, I need to change this, but that’s good,” etcetera.
 
AVC: How does wearing Bruce Willis’ face throughout a film change that process?
 
JGL: Oh, it only helps. I mean, it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, but other than that, it’s—wearing the face was key, key inspiration for the character. And I remember when we did the final, final makeup tests, not long before we started shooting, and that was really where it clicked. I mean, I’d been working on it for a long time, circling the character and figuring out what I wanted to do in studying Bruce, etcetera. But there’s always a moment with roles where it clicks over and you’re like, “Now I totally get it, I can do this now,” and that really didn’t come until—I remember it pretty specifically, looking in the mirror with the final makeup done, and the eyes and everything, and being like, “There he is. Got it. Okay. Wow. Okay. Now I get it.” So it was really key.




Also posted in the Chez Tremblay thread, JGL JGL JGL (a thread for Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45560.msg638715/topicseen.html#msg638715