September 23, 2012

Joseph Gordon-Levitt



 Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as "Joe" in TriStar Pictures, Film District, and End Game Entertainment's action thriller LOOPER.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt endured hours in the makeup chair every day to pass as a younger version of Bruce Willis in 'Looper'

It’s the most fantastical, modern science-fiction concept: Joseph Gordon-Levitt passing as a younger version of Bruce Willis.
But that’s exactly what writer-director Rian Johnson pulled off for his time-travel tale about the mob of the future, where they send their victims 30 years in the past — to 2042 — to get rubbed out.
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Opening Friday, “Looper” stars the 31-year-old Gordon-Levitt as Joe, one of those “loopers” contracted to show up at a certain time and place and just pull the trigger. In a dystopian world with a bad economy, it’s a lucrative gig — at least until the gangsters send back your future self for execution to “close the loop.”
Willis, 26 years older than Gordon-Levitt, also plays Joe. Willis is the version from the future, the one who mucks up his younger self’s life by escaping.
In 2012, of course, the two actors look nothing alike.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the set of TriStar Pictures, Film District, and End Game Entertainment's action thriller LOOPER.

looper9“First it was just a great victory for us, because he’s perfect for the part,” says Gordon-Levitt, joining his director for an interview with the Daily News at Sony’s midtown Manhattan offices.
Soon, though, Gordon-Levitt was asking himself a question. “How am I going to do this?” the actor remembers wondering. “And I like a challenge. That’s what turns me on. I like becoming someone different than myself. So the premise of 'Looper' offered me the opportunity to transform myself more than I ever have in any movie before. So I was just excited.”
Gordon-Levitt was transformed into a Bruce Willis lookalike for the film.

looper8Makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji was a lot less thrilled when Johnson approached him for the job.
“I told him, they’re totally different, it’s impossible,” says Tsuji, who worked on “Men in Black” and the 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
“It could ruin my reputation by doing this job, because not much could be done. Most of the features that Joe has, you almost have to cut the nose off to make it look like Bruce Willis ... I told them I can not guarantee the outcome.”
He faced, so to speak, a multitude of issues. Like Willis’ eyes are green, Gordon-Levitt’s brown. Like the “Die Hard” actor has a “unique” nose shape and much longer upper lip. And like how Gordon-Levitt has ears that stick out more. The two actors even have eyebrows that slope in the opposite direction.
Gordon-Levitt wound up spending close to 3 hours every day in the makeup chair.

LOOPER23F_3_WEBThe creative team faced a moment of truth. The two actors would be sitting opposite each other in a 10-minute diner scene, where the audience could see them side by side. And the makeup artist knew he couldn’t ask a star of Willis’ stature to spend a lot of time in the makeup chair to close the gap between the actors a little bit more.
Why couldn’t Gordon-Levitt just play the older version of Joe, a tack that worked very well for Tsuji’s team on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”?
“We did talk very briefly about that notion,” Johnson says. “I would be fascinated by that version of the movie where [the young] Joe played both parts. I think he would do a great job. It would be really cool to watch.”
“But I think it was really wise that you didn’t go with that idea, because there’s something that you earn with age,” interrupts Gordon-Levitt, who worked with Johnson on 2006’s indie whodunit “Brick.” “And I think no matter how strong the young actor is, you don’t have those years and that’s something that Bruce has that I don’t yet. One day maybe, I’ll have that kind of gravitas of a guy in his 50s, and I look forward to that.”
Gordon-Levitt as the younger Joe in “Looper.”

LOOPER23F_2_WEBGordon-Levitt wound up spending close to three hours every day in the makeup chair. That time was needed to apply a series of small, thin prosthetic pieces, loosely based on Willis’ look from his “Moonlighting” era.
Jamie Kelman, who applied the makeup daily, started by trimming the inside corners of the actor’s eyebrows. Then Gordon-Levitt’s face was primed so that the pieces would stick to the skin. Next came the painstaking process of putting on the nose, upper and lower lip pieces, with skin-tone, stubble and lip-colored makeup used to camouflage the edges.
“Then his eyebrow inner-corners were laced with hair pieces that Kazuhiro made that cover the top edge of the nose, where that piece goes over [Gordon-Levitt’s] real eyebrows,” Kelman says. “So now he’s got proper-looking eyebrows again that extend to the proper place. And the final things are the contact lenses to make his brown eyes green.”

Bruce Willis as the elder Joe in "Looper."

Plastic pieces held Gordon-Levitt’s ears back to an angle matching Willis’. “It’s very important to get the silhouette right,” Kelman says.
One thing these movie magicians couldn’t do was to make it easy for Gordon-Levitt to eat with his fake lips on. A salad with dressing would wreck the glue, requiring emergency repair work in the makeup chair. So to preserve time, meals became protein shakes sucked through a straw. “Which meant you were basically tired, hungry and uncomfortable,” Johnson quips to his star.
No wonder Joe looks so angry when he confronts his older self in the diner scene.
Even before the first stroke of makeup was applied, Gordon-Levitt spent as much time as he could eating meals with his famous co-star — talking about the movie and “music, life, love, whatever.” He paid attention to Willis’ subtle facial expressions, but stayed clear of aping his co-star’s voice.
“We didn’t want it to be an impression. We thought that could be distracting or funny,” Gordon-Levitt says. “We just want the audience to understand easily without thinking about it that these two actors are playing the same character.”
Somehow, they pulled it off.
“It was a terrifying thing,” says Johnson, remembering the first day of filming.
Short of inventing a real time machine and going back to the idea of having Gordon-Levitt play both parts, the entire movie would live or die in the makeup trailer.
“Even when you felt really confident about the makeup,” Johnson says, “I remember before we did it, there was that moment like before you bungee jump off a bridge.”




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