This has been quite a year for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, as each of them have appeared in a number of movies with JGL taking a more prominent role in movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and Premium Rush and Blunt leading romantic comedies big and small with The Five-Year Engagement and Your Sister’s Sister.
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, ComingSoon.net 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 Johnsonsaying 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.
