Born in Los Angeles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been acting since he was 6, successfully transitioning from TV to film, comedy to drama, and child actor to leading man. Starting with a two-episode appearance on Family Ties, he's popped up in Murder, She Wrote, China Beach, Quantum Leap, L.A. Law, and Roseanne, among other things. Yet he remains best known for his long-running stint as an alien boy on the hit NBC sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun. After that show's six-year run ended, Gordon-Levitt switched gears by appearing in the independent film Manic as a violent, disturbed teenager, and he went on to establish himself as one of his generation's most exciting young actors, via lead roles as a small-town hustler turned gigolo in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and as a high-school gumshoe in Rian Johnson's Brick. In Scott Frank's The Lookout, Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, a young man whose involvement in a car accident has left him with motor deficiencies and lingering guilt. Gordon-Levitt recently spoke to The A.V. Club about being a serious child actor, the logistical nightmares of filmmaking, and the directors that have taken chances on him.
The A.V. Club: Your character in The Lookout has limited mental abilities and motor skills, but he isn't exactly Rain Man. What did you have to do to strike the right tone with this performance?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I started by hanging out with people who had been through similar things. With some of them, you could tell right away that they were suffering from a brain injury. With others, you couldn't. And it seems like it fits the script better if you couldn't. And so the guys that I spent the most time with were mostly just like hanging out with anybody else, except for certain moments when you'd realize, "Okay, that just reminded me that your brain doesn't work the same way mine works. You've been through something I haven't been through." It's something I've discovered while preparing for movies like this one and Manic, when I have characters who have unique traits that I need to research. You can read about these [medical conditions] all you want, but once you spend time with [the afflicted], you start recognizing them as individuals, as opposed to lumping them in with everybody else who might have those symptoms.
AVC: Where does the script end and where does your work begin? How much of it is written and how much of it are you allowed to take on your own?
JGL: Well, that was another thing that obviously helped me play the condition, because I had to keep reminding myself that it's all there in the script. All those little isolated moments in the film when an outsider, someone who doesn't necessarily know the character, can see, "Oh there's something different about you," those are all in the script. And so I knew that those would be there. That gave me the confidence that I didn't have to spend every moment trying to make sure the audience knew that Chris Pratt had a traumatic brain injury. Which isn't to say I didn't spend every moment being true to the character, because I did. But I didn't necessarily have to be too expository about the condition itself. And to me, that's the truth of what it's like to live with a condition like that. It's not every single moment that you're thinking, "I have a condition, I have a condition, I have a condition." Even though it affects every moment of your life, it's not always front and center.
AVC: The character also feels this lingering shame about his responsibility in causing the accident.
JGL: That's true. And I think that Chris suffers from that more than he suffers from the brain injury. And that's something we can all identify with, whether you've been hit in the head or not. You know what it's like to be ashamed of yourself, to regret something. And those are powerful feelings, and they can tear your life apart. And I think that they are tearing Chris apart even more so than the scratches on his brain.
AVC: So when you're working with first-time directors like Scott Frank, Rian Johnson, or Jordan Melamed, is the nature of the collaboration different? Do they rely on you to some extent to tell them what you need?
JGL: Well, every director is different. All three of those directors have had very different approaches. And all the movies are very different, and the characters are very different. So they should have different approaches. The fact that Scott is a first-time director was not something I really thought about much. I think he's born to make movies. You can tell if you have a conversation with him about movies that the man thinks in cinematic stories. That's just how his mind works.
AVC: What do you need as an actor? How do you like to be talked to in order to get your best work out?
JGL: It depends on so many things. In Scott's case, I think that what we found that worked was that he would stay on top of the story and make sure everything fell into place, because The Lookout is so tightly written and put together. Every moment in the movie leads to the next, and there's a purpose and a payoff for every scene. It's just really finely sewed up like that. And I couldn't possibly keep track of all those things, so that's he did. He made sure that all those moments were landing in what I was doing. And I made sure that in trying to satisfy all his requirements that I was just being true to the character we had come up with. So that was the back-and-forth between us. He'd be like, "You have to do this, because it would make sense for blah-blah-blah," and I would be like "Okay, but that wouldn't happen." So we'd have to work out something else. And that would be the occasional conflict, but mostly, it all just kind of worked. I could just do what was laid out in the script, and it would work.
AVC: How do scripts for movies like Manic or Brick get to you? It seems like when actors reach a certain level of fame, there are these filters that prevent you from doing scripts from unproduced writers.
JGL: [Laughs.] There are definitely filters, but everybody builds their own filters, and I like to read everything. That means I go through a lot of bad stuff, because most of the stuff that's written is pretty bad. But occasionally something comes along that's good, and I want to do it.
AVC: So you don't have agents or managers pleading with you to do more commercial projects? When you reach a certain point of success, do you have to sort of feed the beast at some point?
JGL: I think the people who work for me understand that that's not how I think. But I think it's an interesting lesson to learn, because they're still working for me. And it's not that they're still working for me because they've grown some sort of altruism or something. They're still doing it for money. They do their job. That's their job, to make as much money as they can. And what's interesting about that to me is there seems to be a notion in Hollywood that if you want to make money, you have to sacrifice doing good work with integrity. And I think that's bullshit. I think that's an excuse, and it's what people say who are scared that they can't do good work. I think that there is a market for good movies, for true—I hate to use the word, because people will think I'm pretentious or something, but—"art." I think you can make money. If you look at all the movies that have made tons of money, almost all of them are great movies too. Even Titanic. I think Titanic is a great movie. I recently watched it, and I thought it was fucking great.
AVC: Do you always put a lot of time into researching your roles, or are there occasions where you can just grip it and rip it?
JGL: That's a tough one to articulate. Not only is it different for every character, it's also different for every scene of the character. It's probably different within moment to moment in a scene. I think that anybody who says "This is the one way to go about being an actor" has probably not done a lot of professional work before. Because the truth of actually working on a movie set is that you're in the midst of a logistical nightmare. There are so many things going on. There are many factors that keep your ideal scenario from ever happening. And you're rarely going to get that. Occasionally you'll really have it, and you're like, "Wow this is so easy, everything is so nice." And much more often than that, you won't have anywhere near it. And so you have to do what you can.
When I'm on set, I do whatever I can to find my focus. One thing that stays pretty consistent for all my jobs is, I listen to a lot of music while I'm working. Because when there's all this stuff going on, for me to be able to put on headphones and listen to music helps me keep my focus, and then I can pick music based on what kind of scenes I'm going to do that day. A big part of creating a character for me is finding the general palette for what kind of music I'm going to be listening to. For The Lookout, I listened to only one band, which was actually the first time that I ever narrowed it down so much. I just listened to Pearl Jam. Partially because it's something really familiar, it's something I've listened to ever since I was little. Partially because they're fucking great. Partially because I think it kind of fit the character. Chris is a man's man, and sort of macho and tough in a way. He's a hockey player. I never played hockey before, but I started playing hockey and it's fucking hard, probably some of the hardest shit I've ever had to do physically. And Pearl Jam has that kind of drive to get you ready for that kind of pain. And at the same time, they're really emotionally kind of vulnerable and honest. So that balance, I thought, fit the character real well. But I couldn't exactly say why it ended up that way. It was just an idea I had, and as I did it, it felt right, so I kept doing it.
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