Joseph Gordon-Levitt Wouldn’t Kill Hitler

Director Rian Johnson’s (‘Brick’, ‘The Brothers Bloom’) newest film ‘Looper’ is one of the most highly anticipated science fiction movies of the year. It’s not a sequel or an adaptation- ‘Looper’ is actually fresh material that raises important questions about life, humanity, and the world we live in.

If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, ‘Looper’ follows the story of a young assassin, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who executes hits based on tips sent from the future. All goes well until he’s asked to murder an older version of himself, played by Bruce Willis.

During a conversation at Comic Con, Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt discuss the film’s premise and the life's big questions it attempts to answer.

“That’s part of the pleasure of science fiction in general and time travel movies specifically. They always seem to come back to these big moral questions. The ‘would you kill Hitler’ questions. And they are just very good at making you confront questions like that. My answer to that would be the movie itself, I can’t articulate my answer better. I can’t articulate it better than I did in the movie,” Johnson says.

“I think violence begets violence and I don’t think a way to solve any sort of conflict is with violence. Because nothing ever ends up solved that way,” Gordon-Levitt adds.

“That’s a big part of the movie, in many ways the movie is about this thing you see in action movies but unfortunately also in real life, this notion that can you solve a problem by finding the right person and killing them. That’s very available to the movie, Looper, the notion that that kind of thinking creates a sort of self-perpetuation loop and what can we do as human beings to break that sounds very highfalutin and yet these are some of the things that we hopefully wrestle with in the movie,” Johnson continues.

‘Looper’ is set for a September 28^th release.