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Critical acclaim and spoilers aside, “Looper” is ripe for influence to other creatives. When the team is committed beyond press releases and junkets, when the marketing material is unbridled access and creative exploration, when the publicist isn’t always in control, good stuff shines. Most important of all, it helps bring a movie out of the theater — while it’s still there — to discuss at and beyond the water cooler, the base camp, and the social newsfeed.

• Honest Q&A’s

  Director Rian Johnson jumped on a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), which included an affirming quote regarding independent film financing and the ability to greenlight a realistic project:

  I wrote Brick when I was just out of college, and basically spent my 20s trying to get it made. We had a producer break down the script, and we said “OK we need X amount to make it.” Then we started looking for that amount. And after years and years of failing at that, I met my producer Ram Bergman, who told me I was doing it wrong. I should see how much money I can scrap together right now, and then figure out how to fit my film into that amount. So that’s what I did. It wasn’t easy but we were able to get it made, we shot it in 19 days on 35mm for about $450k. This is before digital was really an option or at least before it saved you any money.

• Conversational Tweets

  Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a Twitter aficionado in part thanks to his collaborative production company, hitRECord.org, has a handful of “Looper” posts, but the official @loopermovie is both promotional and conversational, which is rad and rare.

• Video Content with Depth

  In a video interview with The New York Times, the director brings up a world where there’s no middle class. IGN picked up a featurette questioning the possibility of time travel. And Wired went into the archive, looking at other time travel tropes. Each are great moves for starting discussion all over the place.

• Candid Photographs

  The director toted around his Leica M6 camera to shoot his own behind-the-scenes stills. Entertainment Weekly showcases 20 shots. It’s always great to see this, slightly moreso than a production’s Instagram account, and often much moreso than magazine editorial (unless Annie Leibovitz is involved, right?).

• Bonus Content

  The director’s cousin, Zach Johnson, hand painted 700 frames of the film which led to a poster and six prints, now on sale. The poster ties back to a fully rotoscoped (and therefore animatd) trailer that’s now out, thanks to a collaboration with Noah Fisher. Aisde from some sweet looping GIFs for your Tumblr, that’s some great synergy there. (That said, all the copies of the trailer on YouTube are bootlegs of the Apple.com Trailer file, rather than an official account. Oops.)