Looper Sets A Serious Mood At TIFF

TORONTO—Opening night sci-fi thriller, Looper, set a serious mood for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The film, which screened on Thursday, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young hit man, a.k.a. a looper, who is faced with the challenge of killing his own self 30 years in the future. Gordon-Levitt’s future self is played by Bruce Willis.

Although the film involves themes of violence, gangs and gloomy settings, director Rian Johnson said his intent was to use the sci-fi aspects to create a really human story.

Hearing the news that his film was to open the festival, Johnson said, “I was stunned and thrilled.” Johnson is a relatively new face in the Hollywood film industry, making his first break in 2005 with his crime drama, Brick, which also starred Gordon-Levitt.

The idea for Looper came to Johnson a decade ago. He was absorbed in sci-fi novels and wrote the script for Looper with Gordon–Levitt in mind. Having established a friendship, Gordon-Levitt didn’t think twice before accepting the role. The trick was to find the older version of boy-faced actor.

When Willis read the script, he immediately requested to be in the film.

“It’s really an emotional film and when I saw it I was emotionally moved by it… I wasn’t expecting that to happen,” said Willis at the film’s press conference following a screening for journalists.

Johnson then faced the challenge of making Gordon-Levitt into Willis. It wasn’t easy to pull off, Johnson said, but make-up and Gordon-Levitt’s performance helped.

Looper caught the attention of TIFF’s Artistic Director, Cameron Bailey, who was attracted to the dual nature of the film—a sci-fi thriller about time-travel and an emotional story about relationships and their influence on our future choices.

“I saw Rian’s debut feature Brick at the Sundance festival and was impressed by his ability to engage both the mind and the heart,” Bailey said in a release.

Gordon-Levitt said he studied Willis’s movies, downloaded snippets of audio from his films onto his iPod, and even had Willis record monologues for him so that he could listen to the Die Hard actors diction.

“He’s very good, he’s a very good Bruce Willis,” Willis added with a serious expression.

Gordon-Levitt said the scenes of the two together were intense and required focus with no no room for whoopee cushion pranks. That focus allowed Gordon-Levitt and Willis to get into their characters and think about their roles, he said.

“I want something to talk about when it’s over, I don’t want to be just walking out of the cinema and be like ‘OK, cool, what are we going to eat?’ I like something to have a conversation about, something to think about,” said Gordon-Levitt.

Apart from the shooting action, and many psychological twists, there is an underlying moral perspective, which Johnson said he hopes is one of the pleasures of the movie. “The tension that you feel throughout the whole thing is who you are supposed to morally identify {with}, who you are supposed to root for.”

“If you could read the script, and I think you should all get a copy of the script… it’s such a good story, it just reads really fast,” Willis said.

Looper gets increasingly violent, but that was not an issue for Johnson, who believes that the backbone of his film is about the “self-perpetuating loop that occurs when the solution to a problem is ‘Let’s find the right person and kill them'”—the theme at the heart of the film.

Willis said that taking violence out of the film would be like taking out any other emotion and would detract from the film’s theme. “I never judged the character of old Joe,” he said. Will said the character was caught up with the things that he had to do. When he saw the film, however, he realized just how terrible the things the character was doing to protect his family were.

If Willis was given the chance to travel back in time and change one thing, he said “I would remind myself every couple of minutes, not to take myself seriously,” he said.

Gordon-Levitt, a self-proclaimed optimist, said he would travel to the future.

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