Last fall, as the science-fiction thriller “Looper” was building up steam in theaters, it wasn’t surprising to see fans lining up to see it a second time — the better to untangle the film’s complicated skein of time travel, shifting characters and life-and-death plot twists.
But why were those re-“Loopers” watching their beloved movie with their iPhones on and their ear buds in? It turned out that “Looper’s” writer-director, Rian Johnson, was giving them his own private guided tour through the world he’d created on-screen, by way of an in-theater podcast he produced specifically for that purpose.
(Neil Stevens/For The Washington Post)
(Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images) - Director Rian Johnson.
Johnson had done the same thing a few years earlier with his film “The Brothers Bloom,” an indie starring Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody that had been in danger of getting lost in the multiplex shuffle. “I was scrambling to figure out a way to generate more interest in the movie,” Johnson recalled in a phone conversation from Los Angeles. “I just thought [a podcast] was a unique idea I could do myself that would be this homespun thing.”
In the filmmaking world, “Clerks” director Kevin Smith proved an early adopter of podcasts as a canny, cost-effective way to promote his work and build his audience. But Johnson, 39, has taken the technology one step further in bridging the gap between conventional spectatorship and the kind of filmmaker-viewer engagement that audiences increasingly demand — and movie studios increasingly covet.
Johnson, an enthusiastic Twitter native who regularly interacts with fans on his Web site, admitted that “not that many people” availed themselves of the “Brothers Bloom” podcast. “But I still liked the idea. So I asked people on Twitter, hey, did anyone actually use that weird thing I did with ‘Brothers Bloom’? And I got a lot of positive responses, so I decided to give it another shot.”
So far, Johnson’s “Looper” commentary has been downloaded or streamed more than 27,700 times. After a brief etiquette lesson (please put your glowing screen in your pocket) and instructions on when to start the podcast (right after the TriStar pegasus shows up in the opening credits), Johnson begins his narration, a laid-back monologue during which he explains how he shot various scenes, the mechanics of the film’s special effects and stunts, and even where his mom and dad show up for cameos. (“Not her. . . not her. . . her!”) Whereas the “Looper” DVD commentary includes stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, Johnson’s in-theater version is simultaneously more conversational (you can hear him take sips of coffee throughout the nearly two-hour presentation) and more technical, with the filmmaker eagerly digressing into explanations of anamorphic aspect ratios and the vagaries of lens flares.
“You can be a lot more casual with the fans,” Johnson says of the podcast. “You kind of relax a little bit and dig in a little bit deeper. If someone’s doing this, they’re not a casual consumer. They’re really interested in the process, so you can dig in and not be afraid that you’ll bore them.”
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