They come together in Rian Johnson’s Looper, a futuristic crime noir in which JGL plays Joe, a hitman who kills targets sent back in time from 30 years in the future until the day it’s his time to “close his loop” where he encounters his future self, played by Bruce Willis. Before he can take care of his target, the older Joe cold cocks him and sets off on his own mission to kill the man responsible for his future woes while he’s still a child. Blunt plays a woman named Sara who lives out in a rural area where she’s protecting a young boy who may be that future crime overlord.
At the Looper junket at the Toronto International Film Festival, SuperHeroHype was scheduled to talk to Gordon-Levitt and Blunt, and we begin with the former, who previously starred in Rian Johnson’s debut film Brick and whom Johnson wrote the part of Joe with him in mind. We spoke to Joe about:
* How Rian approached him with the idea of doing “Looper”
* When he knew that Bruce Willis would play his older self
* Doing the long scene with Bruce in the diner
* How Rian has changed as a director over time and making a bigger budget movie
* Directing his own movie and what he got out of working with the likes of Nolan, Spielberg and Johnson—saying they have a lot in common and how he feels they all belong in the same echelon
Oh, and we did throw in a quick question about whether he’d be interested in showing up in the planned Justice League movie as Batman or Nightwing with the right script or director and here was his response:
“Well, you know, I always decide my projects based on the same things, if I’m really inspired by the material and if there’s a filmmaker who I really admire and I really connect to. That’s kind of always how I do it.”
In other words, we may just have to wait and see, and of course, it’s up to Warner Bros. if they want to continue John “Robin” Blake’s story into another movie post-Nolan.
Next up is the lovely and delightful Emily Blunt, who shows up in the second half of the movie, and we spoke to her about:
* How she found out about the movie/role and how she wanted in before knowing who she might play
* How Sara is a very different role for her
* How her half of the movie is different from the other half
* Whether it was fun to get into the world of action and chopping wood
We also spoke with her about All You Need is Kill, the sci-fi action movie she’s doing with Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman, which she called a “high concept ‘Groundhog’s Day’.” She considered that more of an action movie than Looper and that it’s been intimidating to learn all the stunts and fighting that will be involved with the role. “It’s highly physical, that role, but I’m with Tom Cruise who has done it a million times, so he’s very reassuring about the whole thing,” she told us. She’ll start filming that in October and she feels that’s going to be a long “epic” shoot.
She was in the middle of talking about that when she turned to the door and yelled, “What do you want?” And who should walk in but Bruce Willis himself! As you can see in the video, he grabbed a chair and sat down next to Emily and allowed the interview to continue.
Now, mind you, this was already rather odd and not something that happens often, let alone TWICE. You see, we had experienced a similar “Bruce Willis sit-in” experience when we interviewed Karl Urban for Red at Comic-Con a couple years back. We had just been telling someone this very story minutes before and then it happened again!
Willis tends to be rather soft-spoken and he wasn’t mic’ed properly, nor did they actually have the lighting set up in a way that you could see his face well, but we think you can get the gist of it, so check out the video to see what happened and hear him and Emily talking about how great Rian is as a writer and director–Bruce even compared the script of Looper to that of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense which was a huge hit for him 12 years ago–and about the young actor Pierce Gagnon who appears with Blunt in the second half of the movie.
Looper opens nationwide on Friday, September 28. Look for our video interview with filmmaker Rian Johnson soon and you can read our interview here.
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