Rian Johnson isn’t a man to waste time. Or, indeed, time travel.
The director of Brick has just launched his follow-up film, The Brothers Bloom, at the Toronto Film Festival, but he’s already announced plans for his next movie: a time-travel thriller called Looper.
Although the title calls to mind unfortunate comparisons with Doug Liman’s Jumper, Looper is a very different beast with a very cool premise: it’s about a group of hitmen whose targets are transported to them from the future. And, judging from that title, some kind of time loop may be involved.
But it’s hard to second-guess Johnson who, with Brick and, if reports are to be believed, The Brothers Bloom, takes great pride and delight in wrongfooting audiences with his take on genre flicks. So expect plenty of twists and turns before all is revealed.
It’s early days yet, but Johnson is eyeing a start date sometime in 2009, with Endgame Entertainment, who produced The Brothers Bloom, likely to stump up the cash for this as well, although we’d be surprised if that means Looper will be a big-budget affair. No, we’d imagine this one would be a relatively affordable sci-fi, perhaps reminiscent of Vincenzo Natali’s Cypher.
Ram Bergman will once again produce, as he has with Johnson’s first two movies.