LOOPER Production Notes - Visual Hollywood

LOOPER (2012)
PRODUCTION NOTES
designer Ed Verreaux. The film is set in the near future – a choice that allowed Johnson to thread
the needle between science fiction and grounded reality. “I wanted it to be set far enough in the
future that we could do a couple of fun things, but not so far ahead that we couldn’t have a
grounded world that you recognized,” he explains.
“The future is a pretty bleak place,” Johnson continues. “Everything is a bit broken down;
people are still driving cars from 2010 that they have had to keep up for 30 years.”
“The description that Rian likes to use is ‘theatrical realism,’” says Yedlin. “That sounds like an
outright contradiction, but because Rian and I have worked together for so long and talked about
it, it really did mean something specific – the lighting, the feel of the sources, it’s all based on
something realistic but it’s theatrically heightened.”
“We didn’t want a completely destroyed future or a completely shiny and wonderful future,
either,” says Verreaux, the production designer. “It’s a future where things didn’t go well – the
economy fell apart, major manufacturing stopped. That’s why all the cars in our movie are 30
years old; there are a few special new cars for the uber-wealthy, but everyone else is driving old
cars.
“The idea was that the look was derived from sociopolitical change, rather than technological
change,” Yedlin explains.
“We always knew that it wasn’t going to be ‘Tron,’” says Stern. “We were going to a kind of
retro-future, and also a future that’s been tagged with a bit of urban blight. The slat bike is a
perfect example – it could be a World War II motorcycle, but it’s also futuristic, which gives it a
unique look.”
Even with that, though, Johnson took a decidedly low-tech approach. “Rian likes to do
everything in-camera, practically, that he possibly can,” he says. “There are a few CG
background elements, but most of the CG in the film is wire removal, rather than adding
elements. Even for the slat bike, we put a real bike on a rod, with the rod connected to a truck –
© 2012 TriStar Pictures
10