Photo: Bryce Duffy
When Rian Johnson makes a movie, he’s really making three. The first film is a love letter to a genre: In 2005′s Brick, it was detective noir; in 2008′s The Brothers Bloom, it was the con-man movie.
The second is his twist on that genre: The molls and dicks of Brick were teens, and The Brothers Bloom got a heavy infusion of Italian auteur cinema.
Then there are the movies themselves, which manage to be both brawny and charming. And now, at 38, Johnson has made his best film yet with September’s Looper, a time-travel yarn that pits Joseph Gordon-Levitt against his future self (played by Bruce Willis). It’s the best sci-fi movie since Inception. Yes, really.
Is sci-fi the apex of genre stuff for you, or is it just another one you’re crossing off the list?
I do love science fiction, but it’s not really a genre unto itself; it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I’ve done, I’ve ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that’s made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things. It gives you the same tools—not to be too grand—that the Greeks had with their gods, but it gives them to you in a way that allows a modern audience to absorb them. The fact that you have this layer of science over everything makes these magical instruments palatable to the modern audience. The fact that you can talk about a very real situation like sitting across from your father and saying, “I’m not gonna turn into you,” but have it be young Joseph Gordon-Levitt speaking to his future self, played by Bruce Willis, just blows it up on the emotional intensity scale.
Any people or books that have been influences for you?
Oh, tons. Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I’m a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that’s unique and for me incredibly influential. And then, of course, there’s all the sci-fi films we grew up with. Our generation started with Star Wars, and Blade Runner was this darker, more adult thing, and then the Alien movies were the forbidden, dangerous fruit. And it all happened as this new generation of movie effects was becoming possible. You’d probably be hard-pressed to find somebody in our generation who isn’t at least a casual sci-fi fan.
Were there any particular challenges in working with sci-fi after two reality-based movies?
There’s not a ton of complicated world-building—it’s just the slightly dystopian near future, so really the time travel was the big banana. It’s like containing a brush fire. Back to the Future does that brilliantly, and the first Terminator is probably the model that I looked at the most for how to deal with time travel: We use it to set up the situation, then it gets out of the way.
What was the first germ of the idea for Looper?
Back before Brick, I wrote a short film that I never ended up shooting: hit men in the present who work for a mob in the future who send their victims back in time. A guy is sent his future self, he lets him run, and the whole short was them chasing each other across the city. That sat in a drawer for 10 years until after I made Brothers Bloom.
Do you often keep two boilers going at once, choosing from those skeletal ideas, or do you work strictly sequentially?
Attaching any kind of “process” to it is too complimentary. [Laughs.] I’m in the middle of it right now, trying to figure out what the next thing is, and it’s not like I have a drawer full of ideas. You kind of get done with one and fumble for what the next one will be. It’s very chaotic, and it feels like a miracle when something comes together.
But the process of bringing an original idea to the screen has to be a bumpier road than a licensed property.
We had a pretty easy time getting this one together. A lot of that had to do with Bruce Willis signing on at the beginning; once you have Bruce Willis attached to a science fiction movie, everything happens pretty quickly. The other element of it is that we’re not spending $200 million on our movies and we’re not making them with studios—we made Looper independently. Otherwise, many more jobs would be on the line. That’s what generates the fear that makes people cling to existing properties.
During Brick, you and the cast watched Billy Wilder movies for rapid-fire dialog cadences and timing. What wormed its way into Looper’s DNA?
This was a lot less about any specific formal influence. With Brick there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with Brothers Bloom there was a really strong Fellini influence—both those movies wore that on their sleeve. With this, what interested me more was making a watertight watch of a story, so I didn’t really look at specific movies for exterior style. It has some influences from Westerns in terms of the way it’s shot, but for the most part I was just trying to tell the story and strip away some of those affectations.
The hit-man angle came first, but when did the father-son dynamic and the destiny-vs.-free-will stuff start creeping in?
That’s the real writing process for me—that’s what has to happen for something to seem like it’s worth not only spending a few years making, but asking people to sit in that dark theater for two hours watching. For lack of a better word, something really takes off when I find the theme of it. “Theme” just instantly sounds boring—we all have connotations from high school English class. Or it sounds reductive, like it’s the message you’re trying to jam down the audience’s throat. For me, it’s more about finding some big question I don’t know the answer to. What makes a project take off for me is when that attaches itself in this perfect symbiotic way to a concept, to a plot, to a character, to a world, and suddenly I say, here’s this vehicle to talk about this thing that’s really on my mind right now.
Time to be reductive, then: What was that question in Looper?
A few years ago I would have jumped at the chance to start talking about it and explaining, but hopefully it’s there in the movie and is better presented in the movie than I could present by saying it. Not because it’s something secret or incredibly deep or complicated, but divorced from its context in the movie, it’s the least interesting thing to plop on the table dry, without any sauce.
You write and direct, which means at least four years between movies. Do you ever want to just write a screenplay and hand it off or get a finished one to direct?
Oh, God, man, yeah. Well, I don’t think I would ever write something and hand it off—that would feel like doing the drudge work and not having the fun. But finding a script to direct was actually my first instinct coming out of Looper, because I had so much fun making it that I didn’t want it to be another year and a half before I had another script. My agent sent me a bunch of scripts, and I read a lot of really good stuff by very talented writers, but I realized that what actually turns me on about all this is doing something from soup to nuts.
So you’ve gone through scripts and you know that’s not how you want to do it. What’s your new kernel?
I’ve got something I’m chewing on. You started the interview asking about sci-fi, and I’m really into sci-fi right now, so I might end up sticking to that realm. It’s still early days, though.
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