Rian Johnson Builds a Better Time Machine Emily Shur for The New York Times "Looper" is a film about fate, regret, decisions, revenge and the old maxim that the child is the father of the man, but mostly it's about time travel, so let's travel back in time: to 10 years ago, before the director Rian Johnson's celebrated 2005 debut film, "Brick" (or his follow-up, "The Brothers Bloom"), to the moment he first had the idea for "Looper." Back then, it was conceived as a short film, about 10 minutes long, which he never actually shot. But the script would eventually provide the opening voice-over for "Looper": "Time travel has not yet been invented. But 30 years from now, it will have been. The film's basic idea - a young hit man is pitted against his older, wearier, wiser future self - was, as Johnson describes it, a "nice little sci-fi hook." The next step - the one that took up the next eight years of his life, while the idea rattled around in his head, and he made two other movies - was finding a bigger theme to attach it to. "My favorite sci-fi," he says, "always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust." The result is a science-fiction film of the best sort: one that feels both thrillingly outlandish and discomfortingly familiar. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a so-called looper in the year 2044, who coldly kills mob patsies sent back to him from the future. His life is upended when his older self (Bruce Willis) appears as his next assignment - then escapes, and young Joe has to hunt him down. Part of the future Joe's motivation to return to his past, it turns out - I'll do my very best here to avoid spoilers, but consider yourself warned - is to track down a future mob boss who will eventually destroy his life. In this sense, the film nods to that classic late-night dorm-room weed-addled conundrum: If you could travel back in time and kill someone like Hitler, would you do it? Could you do it? But what separates "Looper" from, say, "Timecop" or other rickety time-travel contraptions is that it explores exactly this kind of question to its full emotional consequences. "For me, that's essentially the wrong question," Johnson says. "Which is weird, because you could say that, in some way, it's the question that "Looper" eventually puts its chips down on. But for me, the real question isn't "Would you kill Hitler?" It's "Does solving a problem by finding the right person and killing them ever work? Or does it create a self-perpetuating loop of violence? And that to me is not a theoretical, time-travel question. That's a real-world question. In order to construct an airtight, internally consistent and thematically interesting time-travel movie, Johnson naturally started out by not watching time-travel movies at all. Or thinking about science fiction. With the possible exception of "La Jetée," the classic French short from 1962, a film that, when I mention it, Johnson says, "It wasn't in my mind, but it was in my mind" - see A. O. Scott on "La Jetée." Instead, he started with a little Haruki Murakami. Then "Macbeth" - which is, he points out, a kind of time-travel story itself, insofar as the main character is told, right at the start, what the future holds, and that knowledge affects all his subsequent actions, "right up to the fact that Macbeth does all these horrible things to retain this vision of what the future could be," Johnson says. Another touchstone: "Four Quartets," by T. S. Eliot. Johnson conceived of the film in four acts, each related to an Eliot quote. He reveals each of these influences somewhat painfully, it should be noted, and accompanied by a string of self-conscious caveats about sounding horribly pretentious. He also points out that "Looper" owes more to "Witness" - the 1985 drama starring Harrison Ford about a Philadelphia cop who hides out on an Amish farm while investigating a murder - than it does to "Blade Runner." While he was plotting "Looper," Johnson sat down and watched "Witness," diagraming its structure on a piece of paper so he could dissect exactly how that screenplay worked. "It starts in the city, creates this noir-type tension and atmosphere, then transfers to the farm, but loses none of that momentum and keeps you in suspense until the end," he says. Which is like a magic trick to me. So I studied it. One thing he noticed: "Witness" features a prologue on the farm before shifting to the city, which "helps acclimatize you to the visual world of the farm." He liked that so much he aped it, situating his own opening scene in a sugarcane field - so that when the film shifts later to a rural setting, "it's not like we're going into a room we've never been in before." There were other influences, of course: some conscious, some inadvertent. Johnson started writing the screenplay while he was living in Belgrade, Serbia, pursuing a love affair. "Every morning I'd listen to "Cabaret" on my iPod and walk to this local cafe called Absinthe," he says. There was something about writing the city stuff of the movie in this metropolis that had this romantic, foreign feel to it - Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm. He wrote the second half of the film, which takes place largely on a farm, while back in sunny L.A., listening often to David Bowie's "Eight Line Poem," from "Hunky Dory," and later, to the prelude to "Das Rheingold," which is based on one swelling chord that builds to a stirring climax. "That's where I wanted to get the ending to," he says. "I think I actually talked to Nathan" - his musician cousin, who did the soundtrack - "about, Can we do the whole score in one chord? He rightly shot me down. He was like, What are you talking about? On close inspection, "Looper" is packed with little nods to its various inspirations, whether the French New Wave films that Johnson studied as a model for Joe's descent into hedonism (in "Looper," Joe's learning to speak French) or the bar where the loopers assemble, called La Belle Aurore. A name like that can't be an accident, and Johnson laughed when I asked about it, as though he'd been caught. "It's a Casablanca reference," he said. If you take a close look at Joe's narrative arc, I totally just stole Rick's arc from Casablanca. So I named my bar after the bar they're at in Paris when the Germans are attacking. I figured I owed that movie something.