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Oct 13, 2012

» LOOPER's borrowed story structure

The NYTimes has a great piece on Rian Johnson’s influences while making LOOPER. (One of my favorite movies I saw this year.)

He conceived of the movie in four acts, each one related to a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and he borrowed the story structure from another source I totally missed:

He also points out that “Looper” owes more to “Witness” — the 1985 drama starring Harrison Ford about a Philadelphia cop who hides out on an Amish farm while investigating a murder — than it does to “Blade Runner.” While he was plotting “Looper,” Johnson sat down and watched “Witness,” diagraming its structure on a piece of paper so he could dissect exactly how that screenplay worked. “It starts in the city, creates this noir-type tension and atmosphere, then transfers to the farm, but loses none of that momentum and keeps you in suspense until the end,” he says. “Which is like a magic trick to me. So I studied it.” One thing he noticed: “Witness” features a prologue on the farm before shifting to the city, which “helps acclimatize you to the visual world of the farm.” He liked that so much he aped it, situating his own opening scene in a sugarcane field — so that when the film shifts later to a rural setting, “it’s not like we’re going into a room we’ve never been in before.”

When asked about the name of the bar in the film, “La Belle Aurore,” he replied:

“It’s a Casablanca reference. If you take a close look at Joe’s narrative arc, I totally just stole Rick’s arc from Casablanca. So I named my bar after the bar they’re at in Paris when the Germans are attacking. I figured I owed that movie something.

Filed under: storytelling (via @maudnewton)