For the next few weeks, a lot of people will be talking to Rian Johnson as his great film The Brothers Bloom begins to roll out. (It opens limited this week, then wide on May 29.) He’ll be getting a lot of questions about his next film, Looper, which he’s previously described as a violent, character-oriented sci-fi film involving time travel.
Johnson told /Film during the IFFB that the story will take place about thirty years from now in a dystopian future. Now he’s given a few more tiny tidbits to Vulture:
“It’s not like a I, Robot–type thing. It’s a very
character-based film, and it’s very violent and very dark. It’s set in
the near future, and things are very bad in an industrial town in
Kansas. The worst crime you can commit 30 years from now is messing
with time travel, so the only people who will mess with it are big
criminal groups. It’s a weird mixture; it has elements of the first Terminator and Witness, bizarrely enough.”
There are bits in there that sounds tantalizing: going Dystopian but also rural, and having criminals be the time travelers. (Previously, he’d told /Film the criminals were ‘a disruptive element’.)
With respect to the Terminator reference, Johnson has said “I’m using time travel in a way almost identical to the first Terminator, which helps keep things simple,” though there’s also a more recent post from his forum (“I took somebody’s advice and just went balls out with it”) that, if not at least slightly facetious (or, more likely, a reference to the wild Balls Out script, as one email suggested) could mean that simple is out the window. Regardless, this is something to be excited for.