Primer director Shane Carruth helps with time travel on Rian Johnson’s Looper

Filmmaker Rian Johnson (BRICK, BROTHERS BLOOM) is at work on his latest project LOOPER, a trippy time-travel story about present-day “cleaners” who are delivered criminals from a syndicate in the future to dispose of the bodies so the “evidence” never exists.

Of course, the finished story is bound to be far more complicated and challenging than that. So Johnson has enlisted the assistance of fellow time-travel filmmaker Shane Carruth (above on the LOOPER set), who made the compelling (and maddening) indie PRIMER, a Mobius strip style tale of garage scientists who push themselves into the past with mixed results.

While he’s spent the post-PRIMER downtime working on another ambitious sci-fi project called A TOPIARY, Carruth is now helping with effects for the time-travel sequences (per Badass Digest) and probably a bit of chronal displacement advice on Johnson’s movie, which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt.

You can follow the cryptic updates on Johnson’s LOOPER blog, and check out the PRIMER teaser below (but really, just go watch the movie).