Sony
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When Bruce Willis says a project is the best he’s ever done, you take notice. If you’re unfamiliar with Looper, you’ll definitely want to keep it on your radar. Director Rian Johnson as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt participated in a panel at Comic-Con to discuss the sci-fi action-thriller. The bad news? Bruce Willis was unable to attend. The good news? The reason for this is he’s filming a new Die Hard film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a character named Joe, an assassin who kills people sent from mobsters in the future, where murder is illegal. These assassins are called Loopers. Why? When the mobsters are done with the assassins, they send the future self back to the past to be killed by themself, closing the “loop”. Unfortunately, “my [Gordon -Levitt] future self is Bruce Willis, so I’m not able to kill him.”
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According to Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis is every bit as big of a badass as he seems.“Bruce is a soft-spoken man in real life. He doesn’t have to speak up. A lot of big macho guys talk loud and like to have a big presence in a room. They’re sort of scared they don’t have a presence in a room. And a guy like Bruce, who’s not scared of anything I imagine, he doesn’t have to raise his voice so people make sure they know he is there.”
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Gordon-Levitt’s character is named Joe for a simple reason: he’s been friends with director Rian Johnson for many years, and Johnson wrote the script with him in mind. Johnson compared the time travel to Terminator in that time-travel isn’t the defining characteristic. It helps set up the story and then gets out of the way, for the most part.
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Gordon-Levitt compared Rian Johnson to Christopher Nolan in that “even though he’s making these huge movies, he started making smaller movies and he maintains that sensibility.” That might sound like he’s overdoing the praise, but from the trailer we saw, Looper looks like it has that Nolan-esque quality of an amazing, thought-provoking script combined with plenty of action.
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Obviously, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis aren’t exactly the spitting image of one another. Rather than try too hard to get to them to look like each other, the makeup artists focused on a few key characteristics of Bruce’s face and made subtle changes to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s nose, chin, and lip.
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The real selling point is Gordon-Levitt’s performance. Bruce Willis would record Gordon-Levitt’s lines so he could listen to them in Bruce’s voice, and in the video we saw, he really nails it. As Emily Blunt put it, “it’s not a cheap impersonation, it’s am embodiment.”
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As for Emily Blunt? Of her, Joseph Gordon-Levitt said “shes funny…and let’s face it, most pretty girls aren’t funny.” They were all pretty tight-lipped about her character Sarah. We just know that her family gets embroiled in Joe’s fight with his future self, and “she’s a badass.”
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Still not sold? I’ll leave you with these two quotes from Emily Blunt: “I kind of signed on after 30 pages…this is the best movie I’ve ever been a part of.”
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Looper opens September 28th, 2012.
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Synopsis: In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented – but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a “looper” – a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good… until the day the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination. The film is written and directed by Rian Johnson and also stars Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels. Ram Bergman and James D. Stern produce.