Summary
- Looper used practical effects to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a younger Bruce Willis, with prosthetic pieces and vocal practice.
- The prosthetics caused some issues on set, including hindering expression and a dislodged nose during a sex scene.
- Despite some uncanny valley, Looper's practical approach to the young/old Joe split was successful and commendable.
Looper's Rainmaker was played by Bruce Willis.
Released in 2012, the movie trend of digital de-aging characters was nowhere near as prevalent as it is in modern-day Hollywood. Everyone from Samuel L. Jackson to Harrison Ford has now been given a CGI facelift after a movie they were starring in required a younger version of their character. Looper slightly missed that boat, meaning Rian Johnson needed to find some way of bridging the 26-year age gap between Gordon-Levitt and Willis, despite the actors bearing very little resemblance to each other. Impressively, this was largely achieved with practical effects.
Looper Ending Explained
The ending to Rian Johnson's mind-bending sci-fi actioner Looper rounds off its story in a neat and clever narrative flourish worthy of Young Joe.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Looper Transformation Required Prosthetic & Vocal Changes
The Effect Was Achieved Without CGI
According to Looper's DVD commentary, Rian Johnson briefly considered digital effects to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis, but the decision to go practical was swiftly made. This involved attaching prosthetic pieces constructed by makeup guru Kazu Tsuji to Gordon-Levitt's face in a 3-hour daily process. After taking casts of both actors' faces, Tsuji constructed a pair of lip pieces — upper and lower — and a nose attachment to Gordon-Levitt's profile (via MTV). The actor's ears were also pulled further back, and he had to wear false eyebrows and blue lenses.
The actor's vocal transformation was achieved purely through practice, with Willis making recordings of younger Joe's lines so Gordon-Levitt could match his tone and inflection.
Looking like Bruce Willis was only half the battle for Looper — Gordon-Levitt also had to sound like his future self. The actor's vocal transformation was achieved purely through practice, with Willis making recordings of younger Joe's lines so Gordon-Levitt could match his tone and inflection. As one might expect, the young Joe actor also studied 2000s Bruce Willis films like Sin City in order to nail the mannerisms (via Gizmodo).
The Problems With Looper's Young Bruce Willis Effect
The Prosthetic De-Aging Caused Some Practical Issues On Set
The prosthetic effects Looper used to turn Joseph Gordon-Levitt into a young Bruce Willis created several problems on-set. As well as somewhat hindering Gordon-Levitt's ability to express emotion, there was an incident while filming the sex scene between Joe and Emily Blunt's Sara where the couple's ionate kiss dislodged Gordon-Levitt's false nose. While the effects team implored the actors to be more gentle with each other, Johnson was pushing for an intense lock-up, requiring a tricky balance between practicality and artistic vision.
While one might assume that Gordon-Levitt's blue lenses would be the simplest part of Joe's facial ensemble, the coloring actually created several issues. Blocking out Gordon-Levitt's natural dark brown eyes with a lighter shade required the thickest and most uncomfortable of lenses. The blue also faded over time, which meant going through multiple sets of lenses during filming. According to Johnson in Looper's DVD commentary, Joe's blue lenses are visibly more faded during certain points in the film because of this.
Looper's Biggest Mystery Still Hasn't Been Explained 12 Years Later
Rian Johnson's Looper creates a detailed world within a relatively short runtime, but one aspect of the movie's canon was never properly addressed.
Why Looper's Young Bruce Willis Effect Worked So Well
Despite The Practical Issues, The De-Aging In Looper Is Incredibly Impressive
The biggest criticism of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Looper transformation is that it unavoidably veers into uncanny valley territory. The actor is universally recognizable, but appearing in Looper with altered eye coloring and distorted facial features means something feels off from the beginning, and unless the viewer has the specifics of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's normal face burned into their memory, it will not be immediately clear why.
The phenomenon is similar to modern day AI, which was nowhere near as powerful when Looper released in 2012. The image itself is technically sound, but it carries a creepy factor that is difficult to verbalize. Nevertheless, Looper's attempt to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis should be commended.
The facial and vocal changes were well-executed, making Gordon-Levitt believable as a more sprightly Willis without overdoing the visual comparison. When done badly, altering an actor's face digitally can come out jarring at best and laughable at worst — see Henry Cavill's CGI shave in Justice League for an infamous example.
Even in the 2020s, digital de-aging is very much a hit-and-miss tactic. Looper's dedication to achieving its old/young Joe split through practical effects is not only irable, it achieved the intended result far more successfully, helping it to become one of Rian Johnson's best movies. The viewer's mind may refuse to fully accept that it isn't being tricked, but Looper does as good a job as any movie possibly could of making Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a younger Bruce Willis.
How Looper Compares To Other De-Aging Attempts
Looper Making Joseph Gordon-Levitt Into A Young Bruce Willis Remains Unrivalled
One of the key reasons that Looper stands out is just how much Joseph Gordon-Levitt is believable as a younger Bruce Willis. What's more impressive is that this was achieved with prosthetic effects and no CGI — and more impressive still, the results were arguably better than many recent digital de-aging attempts in modern movies. For example, 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny famously had a sequence where Harrison Ford was digitally de-aged to play a younger Indiana Jones, one of a similar age to his own in movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
While the younger Indiana Jones was able, the CGI efforts weren't without criticism. The younger Harrison Ford definitely didn't elicit the same "uncanny valley" response as Joseph Gordon Levitt in Looper, either. Another comparable movie, and one with a somewhat similar premise to Looper, was 2019's Gemini Man.
While it doesn't feature time travel, Gemini Man saw Will Smith's Henry Brogan going up against a clone of his younger self. Digital de-aging was used for the clone in Gemini Man, and while the effect was somewhat better than Harrison Ford in The Dial of Destiny, it still wasn't anywhere near as good as Looper.
However, there is an example where practical effects were harnessed more prominently (alongside CGI) to de-age Bruce Willis, in 2009's Surrogates. In the movie, Willis plays an FBI agent who spends most of the movie operating through a remote connection to a surrogate android body that looks like a younger version of himself. This required de-aging Bruce Willis.
The effect was achieved by digitally removing the creases in Willis's face shot-by-shot, as well as some clever uses of lighting, rather than the CGI de-aging of Gemini Man or The Dial of Destiny. However, once again, it simply wasn't as impressive as Joseph Gordon-Levitt being such a convincing younger version of Bruce Willis in Looper.
Looper
- Release Date
- September 28, 2012
- Runtime
- 118 minutes
- Director
- Rian Johnson
Cast
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
WHERE TO WATCH
In the sci-fi action thriller Looper, time travel is possible, but illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a "looper," a hired gun, is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich as a Looper and life is good... until the day the mob decides to "close the loop," sending back Joe's future self for assassination.
- Writers
- Rian Johnson
- Studio(s)
- Sony
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