Ever since the Looper channel went live in January 2016, there is one video fans have
been requesting over and over: the untold truth of Looper.
Well, that moment has finally come, because we're here to peel back the veil of secrecy
and give you an inside look at just what went into creating Looper.
So, here it is, at long last:
The untold truth of Looper.
​Die Hard try hard
In this time-travel action film, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play young and older versions
of the same character, an assassin named Joe who's ordered to kill his future self.
Star Joseph Gordon-Levitt faced a tall task when it came to playing the younger version
of Bruce Willis, starting with the fact that they look absolutely nothing alike.
In fact, the film's makeup artists actually thought it was an impossible task and almost
quit the film entirely.
Director Rian Johnson convinced them to stay, and after months of experimenting, they finally
came up with a mix of prosthetics and makeup that worked — and also took three hours
a day to apply.
That's only one of the lengths Gordon-Levitt went to in order to deliver an authentic performance,
though.
He religiously studied Willis's performances, but he was careful to only study newer Willis
films, rather than classics like Die Hard.
Because he wanted to make sure he wasn't playing a young Willis, but rather a younger version
of the older Willis.
Geez, even the behind the scenes preparation for the story is too confusing to understand...
​The four page script
While the film hit theaters in 2012, Johnson actually came up with the idea for Looper
ten years earlier, back in 2002.
At first, it was supposed to be a short film, and Johnson worked out his initial idea in
a little four-page draft, which didn't include most of the twistier thriller aspects of the
finished film.
But the heart of Joe's story is all there, something curious fans can see for themselves,
as the story is posted online.
Thank Christopher Nolan
Director Christopher Nolan's twisty dream thriller Inception opened two years before
Looper and became a major critical and commercial hit.
According to Johnson, Inception was a "revelation" for him.
He saw it as proof that a wide audience would accept a complex sci-fi movie if it's made
well.
Inspired, Johnson dug that short story out of the drawer it had been languishing in for
years and developed it into the full script for Looper, eventually signing on his old
friend and Inception actor Gordon-Levitt to headline the project.
That's what we call "closing the loop."
Low-fi sci-fi
There's a ton of cool science fiction stuff in Looper, like flying bikes, but there was
almost a lot more.
Johnson revealed that he often had to ask the special effects team to tone down their
designs because he wanted the future to look as realistic and plausible as possible.
He told Time magazine,
"As a sci-fi geek, it took a lot of discipline to say, 'Well that looks really cool, but
let's pull that way back.'"
The diner was too authentic
One of the most memorable scenes in Looper involves a not-so-friendly meal at an old-timey
diner.
It's here that Old Joe and Young Joe finally get a little face time, allowing Gordon-Levitt
to learn a thing or two about table manners.
The diner is cool, but even cooler is the fact that the whole thing was built from the
ground up on location in Louisiana just for those scenes.
But the finished set was so authentic, locals kept interrupting the construction to ask
when the diner would open.
Sadly, you'll need time travel yourself to visit it, because the fake diner was reportedly
torn down in 2014.
No family values
If you watched the trailers and thought Looper was a tense, sci-fi thriller, you were only
half right.
The heart of the story involves a little boy who may or may not grow up to be a terrible
villain in the future.
But you wouldn't know that from the marketing campaign, which didn't mention the family
drama at all.
Johnson said Sony shied away from those aspects because it's a bit harder to sell those elements
in a poster or two-minute trailer.
A trailer that didn't actually give away the entire story?
The future might be worth living in after all!
From Paris, with love
Everybody wants to travel the world, even futuristic hit men, and Joe eventually winds
up in China.
That was a last minute change, though.
The script actually called for Joe to end up in Paris, but after crunching the numbers,
Johnson realized they didn't have the budget to film in France.
That's when the film's Chinese distributor, DMG, offered to foot the bill if they filmed
those scenes in China instead.
Johnson agreed, and the rest is…well, history.
​Loopholes
Having someone "close their own loop" is a critical part of the film's world-building,
but it's not something Johnson explicitly explained in the film itself.
It wasn't a plot hole, though.
In fact, early drafts of the script included a whole scene where Abe, played by Jeff Daniels,
explains that people in the future are desperately trying to protect the timeline from being
messed up by, you know, immoral thugs wielding guns.
Johnson explained the backstory as to why the assassins have to close their own loops:
"People in the future, all they know about time travel is to be afraid of it.
So they’re trying to keep it as tight as possible.
So the initial reason they set it up this way was to keep the causality loop as tight
as possible [...] Every bit of evidence is gone from that loop when you kill yourself."
But as good as that explanation is, it's not hard to prefer Old Joe's disinterest in talking
about time travel:
"I don't want to talk about time travel s---.
'Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about
it—and making diagrams with straws.
Good call.
Look at all these things!
No one's got time for all that nonsense.
Not even the Doctor wants to get into all the dirty details…
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear,
non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, tiny-winy stuff."
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