Director Rian Johnson Explains The Difficult Path to ‘Looper’

Rian Johnson opens up about the long road of writing and getting financing for his Looper.

Writer/director Rian Johnson‘s Looper is an intricately told film. Nearly every scene in the movie is packed full of new information, from character development to world building. As Johnson explains finding that structure, it was like creating stepping stones across a pond for the audience, so they don’t fall into the pond of mind-numbing exposition.

That wasn’t an easy path to make, either. Johnson spent many years developing the story from a two-page treatment to a feature length film, and much of that process was dedicated to handling all of the film’s information. After Looper‘s box office and critical success, it’s fair to say he managed with flying colors.

With the movie out on Blu-ray, Johnson took some time to speak with us about the story’s mother/son dynamic, why the best science fiction has something we care deeply about at its core, and his desire to write more economically:

A lot of sci-fi films never match their premise, and I’d say you avoided that pitfall by having that high concept lead to a mother/son story. How early on did you know you were going to steer the set up into that direction?

That’s a good question, because all the sci-fi I grew up loving — Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, or whoever it was — used its sci-fi premise as a tool to talk about something we really cared about. To me, that’s what sci-fi is for. It’s not necessarily to preach or send a message, but just to talk about what we as human beings can relate to, while using these fantastic concepts we cannot relate to at all. That’s a very powerful thing, I think. The idea of going onto the farm in the second half of it with the mother/son relationship developed as I was writing the script relatively late in the game.

It was a less about switching the focus from the basic set up of the old man versus the young man, but more about: what is the best, deepest way of exploring this old man versus young man dynamic and the basic concept between them? You can either have them go head-to-head in the second half of the movie — having more chases and shootouts between them or the two of them ganging up — but it seemed much sharper giving them both the same problem to deal with, and then exploring the conflict within them by how they deal with that problem.

The problem that seemed to cut most to the bone was this thing between children and mothers, which was the exact opposite of the world we had just been in. I don’t know if I’m making sense, but, for me, it was not a way of departing from our main theme, but digging deeper into it.

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