Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's summer secret

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has 500 things to fill his days this summer — including filming his directorial debut (which stars Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore), tending to his record label and ramping up for the release of several new films with August’s bike-messenger thriller “Premium Rush” and September’s promising sci-fi film “Looper,” in which he and Bruce Willis play the same contract killer at different ends of a time-travel adventure.

And then there’s the topic that everyone wants to hear about the most but Gordon-Levitt wants to talk about the least: “The Dark Knight Rises,” the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which arrives July 20 with Gordon-Levitt as one of the stealth weapons in its all-star ensemble.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, left, and Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon in “The Dark Knight Rises.” (Ron Phillips / Warner Bros. Pictures)

If you approach Gordon-Levitt now you’ll get the same answer he offered last year during an on-the-set interview between scenes filmed at the University of London. “I’ve been asked not to say anything,” said Gordon-Levitt who (according to a Warner Bros. press release) plays John Blake, a Gotham City beat cop assigned to special duty under the command of Commissioner Gordon.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe in “Looper.” (TriStar Pictures)

The Internet rumor mill nearly burned out its bolts and belts with speculation that the “Inception” costar was playing the role of the Joker, the Holiday Killer, the Riddler, Robin the Boy Wonder, Azrael or pretty much any other comic book character who has passed through Gotham City other than Batgirl and Clark Kent. Hmm, wait … he could play Kent if he put on some glasses.

Nolan is notoriously protective of his plots and plans, but Gordon-Levitt said that shows a deep understanding that modern mythology films rely on tension and revelation, which can be easily undermined in this era of information saturation.

“Chris is very savvy in the way that he knows the story begins before you reach the theater,” Gordon-Levitt said. “What you know and don’t know, what you expect and the way a story unfolds … I will say this movie is very much a conclusion. This feels like a final chapter, it’s not just another one in a series. This is a final statement.”

Nolan is also savvy enough to let fans spin their wheels. In addition to bats and cats, a wild goose might be chased across Gotham City every now and then, Time will tell — and that could also be the motto of “Looper,” which reunites Gordon-Levitt with “Brick” director Rian Johnson. Gordon-Levitt plays a mob hit man who specializes in killing people in the future but problems arise when his next assignment is the incarnation of himself 30 years from now.

Gordon-Levitt studied Willis to find his rhythms as a speaker and in his body language. For director Johnson, watching his two stars morph into different versions of the same man was startling.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Sony’s “Looper” panel at Comic-Con International. (Credit: Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

“Once we cast Bruce we knew that we would be taking the cues from him, and Joe started working on this transformation, and it was strange for people,” the filmmaker said. “Joe’s an incredible actor, so I never worried that it would be just imitation. I knew it would go deeper. But it was still shocking to watch it happen.”

Gordon-Levitt also will be seen later this year in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (he plays Robert, the son of the 16th president) and beyond that, in “Don Jon’s Addiction” (on-screen he’s a porn addict, off-screen he’s the writer-director of the indie film). These are chameleon seasons for the former child star who has covered a lot of ground since his breakthrough role in the TV comedy “3rd Rock from the Sun.”

“On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be,” Gordon-Levitt said. “Our identity and our nature can be in our control. I don’t just mean the presentation of our identity. Look at Gary Oldman — look at his characters in ‘True Romance’ or the ‘Harry Potter’ films or in the Batman movies — you can’t be as good as he is by doing it just on the surface. We have the power to be who we want to be, whoever that is

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Dafuq?

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

HOTHOTHOT :drool:

GQ August:

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Part 1 of GQ interview:

This is what it's like, getting lost with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. "Oh boy. Dude," he mutters to himself as he steers his gray 2005 Honda Accord hybrid around a flat, arid stretch of the San Fernando Valley, the place where he grew up. We're trying—and failing—to find his alma mater, Van Nuys High School. "This is funny. It's been a long time," he says, laughing as he turns right, then left, then right again. Because Joe (as he likes to be called) is focusing on the road, it's easy for me to appraise his otherworldly features without seeming like a letch. The planes of his face, the pale skin, the gymnast's build. Dressed in a white T-shirt with a red circle on it, gray chinos, and a dusty pair of Vans, a slight stubble scruffing up his square chin and a red plastic watch cinched to his left wrist, the actor who's appeared in films as varied as 50/50, Inception, and this summer's Batman sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, doesn't look his age, which is 31.

We pull up to a nondescript campus dotted with the beige double-wide trailers that are synonymous with California's overcrowded public-education system. "Here it is," Joe says triumphantly. But it isn't. This is an elementary school, not a high school, I say. "Interesting," Joe replies, which is what I'm thinking, too.

A street sign—Ranchito Avenue—sparks a memory: One of Joe's best friends in high school lived on this street. Worth a try. But when we turn a corner, we come up empty. "Fucking hell," Joe says, laughing again. "I have a really terrible sense of direction." Maybe it's farther west, I suggest gently. "Yeah, maybe," he says, turning the car around. "I'm starting to think I'm maybe on the right track now," he says, his brown eyes twinkly. Already he's shown me a park where the 10-year-old Joe played flag football. He's taken me over Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the route he and his mom traveled every day to auditions, beginning when he was 6. After asking me to hold his sunglasses, he's even summoned the graceful physicality he often displays in his work to do some tumbling, springing backward into the air. Then, having slightly bobbled that first backflip, he's grinned and tried again. And the second time, he stuck the landing.

Now, as we drive past a black-clad skateboarder with a Mohawk so spiky it could draw blood, Joe tells me there was a time when he disdained sidewalk surfers "because I grew up here, where skating started, and most of those guys were dicks." But that guy, the one we just passed? "That guy looks pretty cool," he says. When I ask if he went to his prom at the high school we're having trouble locating, he sheepishly says no. "I was a sort of serious little dude—snobby. I thought girls my age were very frustrating. They were, like, looking in their compact mirrors and shit, and I thought that was evil," he says, adding that he was in danger of becoming "a hopeless ivory-tower douchebag. I'm a little more forgiving now. I've grown to laugh at myself a little bit more than I did."

When we finally come upon Van Nuys High, a security guard at the front door sends us to the main office. "We have lots of liability issues," the guy says, explaining why we must get permission to wander around. Joe thanks the guy, but as we head down a hallway, he whispers: "We're not going to go to the main office." Left, then right, and we find ourselves in a sunny courtyard teeming with hundreds of teenagers. They're hurrying to class, trying to beat the bell, and I can't help but notice that many are wearing T-shirts and chinos and Vans. "This is pretty fucking awesome, dude," Joe says, grinning. "We came at just the right time."

···

Our adventure began at the Chateau Marmont hotel on the Sunset Strip, where Joe was greeted warmly by employees in crisp outfits who knew him by name. This made him uncomfortable. "I've been here a lot recently," he was quick to explain, "because it's a good place to have meetings. I'm directing this movie"—it's a coming-of-age story he wrote—"and that means lots of meetings." We didn't stay. Instead, we got in his aging vehicle, whose enviro-conscious reputation he calls "a sham" and whose make and model he asked me not to mention. "Don't put this in the story," he said, even as I told him I was going to. "It's so boring. I hate cars. Let's say it's a magic carpet!"

His career, certainly, is flying high and steady: He's about to be in four movies. In addition to The Dark Knight, he's got Premium Rush, a bike-messenger-under-siege action flick due out in August, followed by Looper, a sci-fi adventure, in September. In December's Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's biopic, Joe depicts the son of the sixteenth president, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who suggested Joe for the part.

Directors who've worked with Joe laud his collaborative spirit and uncommon versatility. No slouch in the serious-drama department (2008's Stop-Loss), he brings an arch intelligence to comedy that has made headbanging hilarious (last year's Hesher) and, yes, even cancer funny (50/50, also from last year). He can do noir (2005's Brick) and popcorn fare (2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra). Add to all that his eagerness to sing and dance ("What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"—an impromptu and slightly twee YouTube duet with Zooey Deschanel) and Joe emerges as a sort of old-timey showman. Imagine Fred Astaire hiding in the body of an edgy intellectual who's as likely to quote Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig as RZA, a founder of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201208/joseph-gordon-levitt-interview-gq-august-2012#ixzz20srUtQEF

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Part 2:

Raised by middle-class left-leaning professionals who still live in the same house he grew up in, Joe has Hollywood roots. (He is the grandchild of the blacklisted director Michael Gordon, who made the Doris Day–Rock Hudson classic Pillow Talk.) He got his first paying job—in a TV commercial—at 6 years old and was the star of his first feature film, Angels in the Outfield, at 12. Next came 3rd Rock from the Sun, on which Joe played Tommy, an ancient alien hiding in the body of a teenage boy.

Joe's filmography is littered with these kinds of time-warping cinematic devices. He loved Memento, Christopher Nolan's 2000 thriller, which moved forward and backward in time, so much that he lobbied to get a role in Inception, that brilliantly confusing 2010 movie about the inner workings of the mind (I think), in which past and present were fluid at best. He was in the 2007 film The Lookout, in which he played a star athlete, injured in a car accident, who can remember events only if he thinks of them as stories and works his way backward from the end. Come to think of it, even (500) Days of Summer, the 2009 not-a-love-story Joe starred in with Deschanel, started at day 488 of their doomed affair and then went back to day one (then to day 290, day one again, day three, etc.).

In the upcoming Looper, Joe plays a hit man who works for the Mob of the future and recognizes one of his targets as his future self. During production, Joe spent three hours a day having prosthetics applied to his face and wore blue contact lenses—all to make it more believable that the characters "Joe" (Joe) and "older Joe" (Bruce Willis) are the same person. The result suggests a young Robert Forster, but it's subtle enough that it messes with your head in an interesting way, making you sometimes wonder if Joe is in the movie at all. (When I share that observation with Joe, he looks like he wants to hug me. Instead he says, "That's precisely the highest compliment I think you can pay an actor: 'I wasn't sure if it was you.' ")

Less is known about Joe's role in The Dark Knight Rises, which Nolan, the director, has shrouded in his customary secrecy. Joe plays John Blake, a Gotham City cop (who's rumored to also be Robin). Nolan recalls being struck by the actor's "youthful energy" when they first met: "He has tremendous charisma and that incredible kind of positivity that can't be faked." Which makes him perfect, of course, for Commissioner Gordon's protégé. "We really needed somebody with a sense of idealism to contrast with Gordon's weariness," Nolan says of Gary Oldman's role. "I thought of Joe first and foremost."

···

"A little bit of a contrarian" is the way Zooey Deschanel describes the Joe she first met on the set of the 2001 movie Manic. "Very intellectual. Very, very serious and very intense." Joe, then 19, had just decided to quit acting and was headed to Columbia University to read Nabokov. Deschanel, meanwhile, had just dropped out of college to become an actor.

"We would joke about that. I would be like, 'You hate movies.' And he'd be like, 'You hate books,' " she says. "The Joe that I knew back then, I would never think of him as having anything but wonderful qualities. But you would say something, and he would go, 'What do you mean by that?' Not a word went unexamined, you know?"

I do know, in fact. During our day together, I definitely saw remnants of that hyperanalytical, smarty-pants (dare I say ivory-tower douchebaggy?) quality, like when Joe told me how much he hated Americans' fawning over celebrity. "I really don't like this notion that some people are more important than other people," he said. "These stories about these elevated people called 'celebrities' teaches you"—and by "you" he meant regular, nonfamous folks—"that what you have to say doesn't matter. It's degrading." It is a testament to Joe's bright-eyed friendliness that he managed to say all this in a way that didn't make me feel dirty. This is, after all, a celebrity profile.

Still, Deschanel says that eight years after Manic, when they co-starred in (500) Days of Summer, Joe was lighter, less burdened. "He changed a lot," she says. "He became a lot more open-minded." When I tell her Joe did a backflip for me, she laughs. "Of course he did. He loves to do backflips."

Now Joe is telling me that traditional Hollywood—yes, the industry that employs him—is crumbling. "The entertainment business as it has been is not going to be around that much longer," he says. "The way it's going is, there's going to be artists, and they'll make their shit, and they'll connect to their audience, and you don't need any of the middlemen—the studios or the agents." He's been regaling me about how the Internet is "ushering us into a cultural golden age" and how curation "is the art form of the twenty-first century." He's been lambasting American intellectual-property laws (see: Lessig) and comparing Hollywood's current crisis to how the blacksmiths felt when the car was invented. He's also been waxing poetic about how quality is more important than originality.

"Ever since I was a kid, I'd always played with video cameras," Joe says, explaining his answer to this tectonic shift: hitRECord.org, a site into which he has poured $500,000 of his own money. The site describes itself as "an open-collaborative production company" where "we make things together." Joe recalls how the red record button on his family's Hi8 camera inspired hitRECord's logo, a red circle (which explains the dot on his T-shirt). "I turned it into a symbol for getting going. A motivational mantra."

Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201208/joseph-gordon-levitt-interview-gq-august-2012#ixzz20sriOBcc

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Part 3:

Built around a simple idea most of us learn in nursery school—sharing—the site allows users to post things and others to remix them and mash them up, all with the goal of making them better. HitRECord also hosts live events, giving Joe the opportunity to draft his famous (but not more important than you) friends: Anne Hathaway, for example, who recently sang a duet with Joe in French. Joe launched the site with his older brother, Dan. A photographer and fire spinner who went by the moniker Burning Dan, the elder Gordon-Levitt died of an alleged drug overdose in 2010. "It was an accident" is all Joe will say about that. Recently, when hitRECord published an anthology, RECollection, which includes a book, a DVD of short films, and a CD of music, he dedicated it to Dan.

RECollection also includes a series of "tiny stories," one of which is authored by Joe. Here it is in its entirety: "When I was younger, I wanted to be something. Now, I just want to be younger."

All this begins to make sense when I reach John Lithgow, who met Joe on 3rd Rock from the Sun. "It's kind of extraordinary that he was playing an old man in a young boy's body then, because that's kind of what he was," Lithgow says. "He was a very mature boy—I remember him carrying on about the ecological damage that is done when people build new golf courses. What teenager worries about that? And now he's a very youthful adult. He's done a flip-flop."

Rian Johnson, Looper's writer-director, agrees, noting Joe's ability "to merge work and play. He's found a way to turn his fame into this fuel that he uses to drive what he really cares about." Which, lately, is directing that film he mentioned, Don Jon's Addiction—a change of course he feels so strongly about that he dropped out of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained in order to commit fully. The film, shooting now, features Joe as a selfish, porn-addicted lout, as well as Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, and Tony Danza (with whom Joe last shared the screen in Angels in the Outfield, eighteen years ago, when he was not yet in high school).

I flash on this when the girls at Van Nuys High first spot Joe. We are wandering the campus, aiming vaguely toward the room where he once took calculus, when he feels them on his heels. "We might be caught," he says to me under his breath, and before I grasp what he means, we are surrounded. To their credit, none of these fresh-faced teens is looking in a compact mirror, but one of them does squeal, "Oh. MY. GOD!"

Joe puts a finger to his lips. "Shhh! I'm Joe," he whispers, gallantly shaking hands even as he says he can't pose for pictures. "Nice to meet you. We're trying to keep this quiet." The girls—not evil at all, it turns out—disperse, and riot defused, we keep walking. That was sweet, I say—then, seeing the way his eyes are darting around, revise my pronouncement: Maybe it doesn't feel sweet to you? "No, it's sweet," he says, breathing easier. "Sweet."

Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201208/joseph-gordon-levitt-interview-gq-august-2012#ixzz20srrSjCR

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

One more GQ pic:

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Joseph Gordon-Levitt on ‘Dark Knight’ Director Christopher Nolan

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/video/joseph-gordon-levitt-praises-dark-349870

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Dark Knight Rises:

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

Dark Knight Rises Premiere:

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

"Looper was written especially for me"

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For MeJoseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For MeJoseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For MeJoseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For MeJoseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For MeJoseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Looper' Was Written Especially For Me

Gordon-Levitt ('The Dark Knight Rises') reveals that the flick was written especially for him to play the not so coincidentally named character of Joe. He and Johnson met one another when they worked on the crime thriller 'Brick' in 2005 and, according to Gordon-Levitt, were good friends ever since. "[Johnson's] literally one of my best friends in the world and has been for years now", he gushes. 'Looper' is about a group of mobsters in the future who use the outlawed method of time-travel to send people back thirty years to be assassinated by hitman Joe known as a Looper. When a future version of himself (played by action legend Bruce Willis) is sent back to him, he realises that the mob want to close the loop by forcing him to shoot himself.

Both Gordon-Levitt and Blunt ('The Five-Year Engagement') struggle to define the movie as a single genre; Gordon-Levitt compares its mind-blowing sci-fi complexity to that of 'Inception' (in which he also stars), 'The Matrix' and 'Bladerunner' but adds that it still has the thrill of 'badass action'. Blunt agrees but adds that there is an element of 'emotional drama' happening also. Gordon-Levitt also reckons that 'Looper' is the perfect flick to be promoted at the diverse crowd that is Comic-Con goers: "Every single reveal or twist or turn in the movie has been thought out perfectly. So I think there's a lot to nerd out over".

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

GQ:

Lkjh · July 17, 2012

'Looper' Is In The Tradition 'Blade Runner,' Says Joseph Gordon-Levitt

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2012/07/16/looper-blade-runner-joseph-gordon-levitt/

Single_Lady · July 17, 2012

Teen Vogue October 2005

by Carter Smith

with Nora Zehetner

Single_Lady · July 17, 2012

Director Marc Webb, actress Zooey Deschanel and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt of the film '500 Days Of Summer' poses for a portrait at the Film Lounge Media Center during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2009 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Matt Carr)