Last October, Rian Johnson was gracious enough to hang out with us for one of our Cinecasts and Kurt managed to blindside him with early questions on Looper. At the time, preproduction hadn’t even started but Rian was pretty excited about the script and was ready to start filming once budgetary support was in place; though he wouldn’t divulge any of the specifics of the story, we knew it was sci-fi and possibly a time travel style movie. But in a pretty great interview with Cinematical he spills a few more beans on the project:

Looper is a time travel movie, set in a near future where time travel doesn’t exist but will be invented in a few decades. It’s pretty dark in tone, much different from Bloom, and involves a group of killers (called Loopers) who work for a crime syndicate in the future. Their bosses send their targets hogtied and blindfolded back in time to the Loopers, and their job is to simply shoot them in the head and dispose of the body. So the target vanishes from the future and the Loopers dispose of a corpse that doesn’t technically exist, a very clean system. Complications set in from there. I can’t wait to make it, I’m a big sci-fi fan and it’s going to be a fun world to play in. Fingers crossed.

Brick was a micro-masterpiece of the aughts and The Brothers Bloom was nothing too shabby either. So as it stands, Johnson is batting 1.000 in my eyes and can’t wait to see him tackle what might be my favorite genre. As soon as production begins, I’m sure we’ll be kept in the… ahem, “Loop.”