I’m noticing a trend in movies this year with Looper, Cloud Atlas and The Place Beyond the Pines and focus on the idea that our future is shaped by our past. Is this something you see as important?
That’s pretty integral, considering the main dynamic between young and older Joe in the story and the notion that in Looper specifically, when we introduce older Joe and at first you think the same thing older Joe thinks, that he’s evolved beyond this selfish person that [young] Joe is. But peeling those layers back over the second half of the movie you realize old Joe is actually in the same rut his younger self was in. He’s acting just as selfishly, it’s just for a new set of reasons. Then, to have young Joe recognize that, and having him evolve.
For me it’s not so much a societal comment or a “where the world is now” comment — although it is, it absolutely is, but only in the way that it’s a universal human thing. It is something that’s absolutely vital to right here and now, but it was also incredibly vital to right here and now 200 years ago. Those are the kind of things, for me, I feel like when I see into those kinds of things that’s what motivates me to sit down and write a story, not something very specific to the present, but something universal and applicable to the present.
Can you talk about the production design? I personally loved how you essentially dressed up the world as we know it and didn’t change too much in the future.
There were a couple of aspects to it and they were all motivated by the nature of the story and the characters. Joe starts the movie in a very selfish place and one of the things I looked at when I was writing was Rick in Casablanca, for example, where he starts as a very selfish person and then gets around to a selfless act by the end. And the same way Casablanca starts with a montage showing the desperateness of this world that Rick is in, so that you understand why he’s become this isolationist ass hole, it seemed right to build a world around Joe where you can see the reason he’s doing all these horrible things to hold on to his stash of silver, because if he loses it he’s going straight to the gutter. There’s no cushion in that society and the gutter is a horrible place.
There was that, and just besides it seemed visually interesting to present a very grounded future, it also seemed right because I knew there were so many things we were asking the audience to wrap their head around for that first act of the film — the time travel, the society of the Loopers and the Gatmen and all that jazz — I felt creating a world that was recognizable so they didn’t also have to wrap their heads around a big sci-fi world or crazy future technology, creating something where it is unique and hopefully evocative, but at the same time you can glance at it and say Okay, I know where we’re at. You don’t have to expend brain calories figuring out the world as well.
I was also attracted to the violence for 1.) the pure entertainment aspect, but 2.) because it speaks to the larger message of people being shaped by the world around them. The Rainmaker for example, that seemed to play one part in what made him who he was.
The violence, for me, was the reason I felt, not only comfortable [using] the violence as extreme as it is in the film, but I felt it was incredibly necessary. The film, at its heart, was eventually going to use all the weight of that violence toward, like you said, its end game, which for me boils down to taking a very hard look at the unquestioned premise of action movies, which is fixing a problem by finding the right person and killing them. At the end of this I wanted the film to take a hard look, not just at the moral implications of that, but at the logistical ones. Does that work, or does it create a self-perpetuating loop of violence?
For me, the violence was absolutely crucial toward leading up to that theme.
There was another structural thing I tried to do in the script where the whole movie is setting up this choice for Joe at the end and it’s a choice for Cid’s future. It’s the choice between Cid’s way of doing things and Sara’s way of doing things. So drawing a starker contrast between those two worlds was very important — not just visually with city versus country, vertical versus horizontal, male versus female — but also with violence versus nurturing and with hardness versus softness and creating these two interlocking halves of the film that could present two sides of a coin that are both vying for Cid’s future. That seemed like a very powerful, overarching structural conceit.
