Another influence for Rian Johnson was the classic Casablanca, which influenced the character arc of Joe more than anything.
“It’s funny, that conception of the future was, for me, a practical consideration. These characters, especially Joe at the beginning, are acting out of a desperate self-interest,” Johnson explains. “And showing why he’s acting that way, it made sense for me to put them in a world where there was no cushion, there was no middle class. You either have your piece of the pie, your stack of silver, or it’s straight to the bottom and just dangerous destitution.”
He adds, “And Joe’s arc in the movie – another film that has nothing to do with sci-fi that I looked really directly to is Casablanca, you know Rick’s arc of going from, ‘I stick my neck for nobody’ to the selfless act that he does at the end of it. And Casablanca is the same thing, it same thing. It starts with a montage showing the desperateness of all the people that are in this world and why they’re acting that way. Hopefully to give you a cushion to realize he’s not a bad guy he’s just in a situation where this has to happen.”
For those who’ve seen the movie, there is a mind-boggling sequence which, perhaps more than any other, relies heavily on the concept of time travel. To some, it may seem like it makes no logical sense. Yet Johnson, like every other aspect of Looper, can explain it perfectly. The question refers to a sequence where Seth (Paul Dano) is seriously hurt and his future self experiences those injuries in real time. The questioner proposed that Seth’s older self would have had those injuries his whole life.
“Meaning that he would have had his foot gone for the entire time. That’s interesting. So my approach to that is that we’re taking a linear, experiential view of the time travel as it’s happening,” Johnson explains. “In other words, what you’re saying is correct if you step back from kind of a God-like perspective and say, ‘This thing creates a reality which is a whole other timeline underneath it which has to have played out back to the origin.’ If you look at it from a timeline, yes, technically we then drop down to another eventuality. The character himself moment to moment, whose heart is beating moment to moment, would not experience it like that. The effect would happen, and they would be there living it out.”
Finally Johnson addressed the argument central to the last half of the film, involving older Joe’s quest to change the future for the better by committing a heinous crime.
“Yeah, [this question was] something that developed as I started working on it. It was pretty early in the process of expanding it to a feature, that’s really what I grabbed on to,” Johnson says. “There’s obviously this old-man, young-man thing, and the notion of using that to set up this moral choice between – in many ways Joe at the end of the movie sees old Joe not as who he’s going to be, but who he was, he sees the selfish actions that old Joe is doing. Now old Joe has this view of his actions, he thinks he’s justified by love, he thinks he’s grown beyond his younger self and he’s found true love. Now in reality you look just beneath the surface, he’s doing exactly what Joe did at the beginning, he’s killing people in order to hold on to what he says is his.”
He adds, “So old Joe represents where young Joe was in many ways, more than where he’s going. And Sara is really the other side of the moral compass, the whole thing is constructed to kind of give this moral choice at the end between old Joe’s way of solving problems, finding the right person and killing them, versus Sara’s way of nurturing and raising your kids right to help the future.”
If anything is clear from the interview, Rian Johnson is as smart as he is talented. Looper is one of the most heady, entertaining sci-fi films in recent memory, and it’s clear why – Johnson is simply an immense talent.
Looper is now playing in theaters!
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