I also found some of the interpretations I’ve read interesting such as those that suggest had old Joe not come back to kill Cid and in the process kill Sara then Cid never would have become the Rainmaker. Personally, I believe young Joe needed to come into the picture because his arrival offers the opportunity for Cid to learn his biological mother is still alive. As much as the whole film revolves around this perpetual loop of violence and learning from our mistakes, it also comes down to having that parental figure in our lives and how important it was for Cid to know Sara was his mother.
I think you’re right on the money. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I came to article exploring the plot holes and asking my readers if they should bother us. Because, to me, the human side of the story is far more important than the time travel aspect.
Oh yeah. Absolutely, and on one level, being a time travel movie fan myself, I would never begrudge anybody the pleasure of digging into logic questions in the time travel. That for me is something I love doing even with time travel movies that I love. But, the essential pleasure of something like Back to the Future for instance, is not thinking about the time travel aspects. The essential pleasure is the human drama, which the time travel sets up.
But, yeah, the short answer is I very much agree with you. The story uses time travel as a tool, but the tool is in service of what’s actually important, which is where these characters are going and hopefully something a little more applicable to our lives than the use of time travel.
Every year around this time stories start popping up about how movies are dying and television is taking over. Considering you are someone that has directed films as well as recently directed a couple episodes of “Breaking Bad” I thought I would put it to you and the direction you see movies going. Do you see television taking over? Personally I don’t.
Yeah, me neither. I think about that scene in The Apartment where Jack Lemmon sits down to watch TV and it’s very obviously movies commenting on television. You can see, baked into it, that fear was very present back then. So this is just kind of an ongoing thing.
I think the healthy aspect of having to talk about it though is, besides recognizing there’s some tremendous television out there and great stories being told, that any time people are thirsting for more interesting movies is a good thing.
I don’t think television is taking over and movies are going away, but if we can use that talk to push through more movies that are not only original, but engaging, totally engaging and really engaging for audiences on multiple levels, not just spectacle, but also hits you in the heart and hits you in the head. That’s not a bad thing.
For me, I’m really optimistic. I think it’s a great time to be a film lover. I think there are a lot of great filmmakers who are working, especially in genre and bigger films and are bringing their interesting ideas and personal perspectives to genre films.
What really excites me right now is the idea of erasing that divide between interesting movies and big budgets and the filmmakers that are working to do that. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan or Guillermo del Toro, people who are bringing personal visions to huge entertainment that reaches masses of people. That, to me, is something that’s fascinating and encouraging and really exciting. It’s something I want to see if I can move further into.
You bring up a great point. People talk about how many great television shows there are, well there are just as many, to me, great movies each year if not more.
Absolutely and there’s still something about the cultural flash of light of a film that really hits the zeitgeist that television shows — I don’t know, I don’t want to draw a comparison that diminishes a great TV show or its cultural impact, but I feel when a great movie hits in the zeitgeist there is something about the way it affects the culture that is singular and is huge and something that is hard to duplicate still in any other medium.
The other thing with film — and this is something that’s not better or worse necessarily, but is unique from a great TV show — when you set out on a film, that film is a completed object and it’s something that has a shape and you can turn around and look at all the facets of it and hold it as if it’s this object in your hands. And TV is just a different type of storytelling. A movie can be something that is a distinct shape, something like a bomb dropped into the middle of society basically. It can have a very different effect.
Yes, because otherwise films would be 12 hours long with cliffhangers every 60 minutes and a cliffhanger at the end that won’t be resolved for another year.
Exactly, the fact a film has an ending, that’s a very distinct storytelling thing. I think that’s something that’s very important and even though television has some fantastic storytelling and I’d love to engage with that at some point, but right now I’m very excited about movies because I love endings. I love bringing something to an ending that defines the whole as a distinct and valuable thing. An ending that nails you in the heart and gets at the theme of the film in such a hard way, it really is like the feeling of a bat connecting solidly with a ball when you get a good ending. It’s valuable.
And with that I have to ask what’s coming up next for you. Do you have any plans, are you directing any more episodes of “Breaking Bad”? Do you have a movie in mind? What’s going on?
I’m writing right now. I’m trying to dig into this next idea that I’ve got and I’m still in the relatively early phases, but I’m moving ahead with it.
Can you give me an idea of what kind of genre are you working in for your next film?
It is, actually, still kind of in the sci-fi world, but it’s very different from Looper though. But it’s a type of sci-fi.
And can I assume there’s a place for Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it?
We’ll see, I don’t know. If there is or if there isn’t I hope I get to work with that guy for the rest of my life.
Looper is still in theaters now worldwide. You can read my review of the film here.
