From the Sundance-favorite Brick in 2005, to his delightful sophomore effort The Brothers Bloom, and even a few episodes of Breaking Bad, Rian Johnson has had an impressive debut as a director. This in no way changes with Looper, a high-concept, highly-entertaining and thought-provoking time travel action film that turns out to be one of the year’s best. We recently sat down with Johnson to discuss Looper, his influences, time travel, and much more.

Before we continue, do take a look at our interview with Looper star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in case you missed it. Also just a quick note regarding spoilers. I’ve included any overt spoilers in the second page of this interview, but it may be best to read this one after you’ve seen the movie. At any rate, you should be safe with this first page either way.

Looper has been swirling in Rian Johnson’s brain for years, “The first thing that I wrote was this three page long script that I meant to make as a short film. This was ten years ago, back before we made Brick. I never filmed it. I don’t want to put it out now because it actually spoils the ending. It was a three page short, it was voice-over driven, it was basically the opening narration of the film and then when his older self shows up the whole short is a foot chase across the city while voice-over plays out and he talks through the moral conundrum he’s going through. Then they reach the beach at the end of it and there’s a confrontation between both of them on the beach. And it does have some of the films that ended up being in the finished film, but it doesn’t have any of the Sara and Cid stuff.”

Johnson actually echos Gordon-Levitt’s sentiments that, for all the fanfare and hype, Looper at its core isn’t really a time travel movie.

“I mean, this movie uses time travel, but at the end of the day it’s not about time travel,” Johnson says. “So it was wanting time travel to do its job, set up the situation, and then to some extent get out of the way. For me the model of that I really looked to was the first Terminator [film]. That movie is so deft with its use of time travel, it’s easy to forget that it’s a time travel movie. That’s a great example of it; time travel lights the fuse and then steps back. This situation that time travel has created is the thing that drives the film until the end.”

When prompted to discuss the time travel, Johnson is eager and excited to get into the nitty gritty details of it.

“I did spend quite a bit of time coming up with what my rules were for how the universe dealt with the time travel paradoxes and what the particular logic of this was going to be. I can’t say that it makes sense. No time travel movie makes sense if you look at it hard enough, but there was a consistent set of rules that we stuck to for it. Then it was a matter of disciplining myself to not explain those rules, but to just show the effects of them,” Johnson adds. “My hope is that even though we don’t have a chalkboard scene where we describe the rules for twenty minutes, my hope is if you’re really into that you can take a look at the cause and effect, take a look at how it plays out, and reverse engineer and realize there is kind like a net underneath these of a thought-out system.”

In fact, he was so determined to get the time travel aspect of the film right, that he consulted on the script with Primer director Shane Carruth, whose Sundance-sensation from 2004 (the year before Johnson hit it big at the festival) is considered by many to be one of the most ingenius time travel films ever. When asked about Carruth’s input, Johnson put simply, “Well he was very kind to take a look at the script and tell me all the things I did wrong.”

While a film like The Terminator would seem to be a logical influence for such a film, it was interesting to hear the types of films and authors Johnson looked to when creating Looper, many of which were unexpected.

“There is nothing I can point to with the directness of the way that Dashiell Hammett is to Brick. But when I wrote [the Looper] short I had discovered Philip K Dick and I was in the middle of blowing through all of his books, so my head was kind of steeped in that. Also in just a general sense, I always think of [Ray] Bradbury.” Johnson explains. “So I guess in a general way those two authors, and then I mentioned The Terminator. One movie I studied that I probably owe more to this movie than to any science fiction movie is the film Witness with Harrison Ford actually. Particularly once they get on the farm, that movie is just masterful. Seeing how it keeps the tension up even when they get to the farm. I studied and diagrammed that script and tried to figure out how they did it, basically.”

That about does it for the non-spoilery portions of the interview, if you’ve seen the movie please do click on the the second page of the post, where we get in-depth into the film from beginning to end. But remember, spoilers follow.

Looper is now playing in theaters!

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!