SAN DIEGO -- Time travel might be the hook for Looper, but writer-director Rian Johnson said his thriller about a hit man (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who tries to murder his future self (Bruce Willis) does not overwork the pretzel logic inherent in wormwhole-riddled dramas.
"My model for how to use time travel is very much like the first Terminator, which uses it to set up the story and then gets out of the way," Johnson said.
Trailer snippets plus new material shown Friday at a Comic-Con International panel featured lots of shotguns colliding with a dystopian set of hard-hearted losers. It's a grim shock to see victims materialize "hands tied and heads sacked," but the most bracing footage showed a tense diner scene in which Gordon-Levitt talks tough to Willis.
"Your face looks backwards," he snarls. Ouch.
Johnson said Gordon-Levitt went through three hours of daily prosthetics to bring him physically closer to Willis. "If we can just give a little bit to the nose, a little bit to the lips ... " the director said. "But Joe's not an imitation where he's mimicking Bruce Willis. He's doing a character that could have been played by a young Bruce Willis. It's an incredible hat trick."
Gordon-Levitt drilled himself by archiving dialog from Willis' movies on his iPhone to study the action icon's cadences and inflections. "What's so striking about Bruce is that he's so soft-spoken," Gordon-Levitt said. "He doesn't want other people listening to him and also, he doesn't have to speak out. A lot of big macho guys talk loud because they're sort of not having a big presence a room. Bruce probably isn't scared of anything."
Lowering his voice to a near-whisper, Gordon-Levitt said, "Bruce talks like this." It was actually a pretty good impression of the Die Hard actor.
Co-star Emily Blunt described Looper as the "best movie I've ever been a part of." "My character is a badass," she said. "I live in the middle of nowhere in the middle west, so she's an American -- screw you Brits!" The cheeky English expatriate added, "The most challenging thing was learning how to chop wood convincingly. I had logs transported to my house in L.A. for practice."
Gordon-Levitt said he liked working with Blunt, then drew gasps from his co-star when he opined, "Let's face it. Most pretty girls aren't funny."
For Johnson, who first directed Gordon-Levitt in his quirky Orange County high school gumshoe drama Brick, getting Looper from page to screen required a decade's worth of Hollywood-style time travel. "About 10 years ago, I was reading a lot of Philip K. Dick and was so steeped in his books that I got into the idea of a mob from the future as a way to set up this situation of an assassin who faces his future self," he said.
The filmmaker said he enjoyed unleashing his concepts on Gordon-Levitt and Blunt.
"Writing is no fun," he said. "Writing sucks, so to have guys like Joe and Emily surprise you and see where they take it -- that's what you're looking for."
Looper opens. Sept 28.
