Hey Life in 7 Songs listeners, it's Sophie.We wanted to take the opportunity this week to share a special episode of a show we think you'll really enjoy, American Masters Creative Spark.
It's a show that interviews iconic artists across disciplines about their creative journeys in a way that really inspires. This episode features an interview between host Joe Skinner and Tony Award-winning actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The actor discusses the vast spectrum of realism in his line of work.
Whether it's the recently released Beverly Hills Cop Axolotl, Lincoln, Third Rock from the Sun, The Dark Knight Rises, Mysterious Skin, 500 Days of Summer, or one of the dozens of other projects he's starred in, Gordon-Levitt really shows his range.
We think you'll enjoy listening to him unpack his creative journey.And one more thing.Next week on our show, we've got Mark Cuban sharing the seven songs that shaped him.This one comes out October 8th.You won't want to miss it.
So without further ado, here's American Master's Creative Spark.
Can you imagine working at the same job since you were basically in kindergarten?
I've been doing this so long, right?I'm 43 years old.I started working professionally when I was six.
I was doing something akin to acting well before that, you know, if you want to call dressing up in a costume and pretending to be somebody and having fun acting, which it is.
That's Joseph Gordon-Levitt.Before you saw him in The Dark Knight Rises, or Inception, or 10 Things I Hate About You, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was selling toaster pastries on a national broadcast by the age of 10.
We're out of here.Hold on, Mr. Rushing-out-the-door.You haven't had your breakfast yet.Oh, I know.Tick, tick, tick.Look, you've got time for Kellogg's Pop-Tarts.That's my boy.Now you're cooking?
At 13 years old, Joey Gordon-Levitt was starring opposite Christopher Lloyd and Danny Glover in Angels in the Outfield.
Dad, when are we going to be a family again?
A boy searching for a future.I'd say when the angels win the pennant.
God, if there is a God, maybe you could help him win a little.
I'm Joe Skinner.This is American Masters Creative Spark.In each episode, we have a guest on to break down their creative process and inspiration behind a single work of art.But we're cheating a little bit this week.
I interviewed Joseph Gordon-Levitt about more than just one movie.Yes, he does have a new one out, Beverly Hills Cop Axl F. Definitely check it out on Netflix if you're a fan of the franchise.
But I wanted to figure out what it's like to have the same job since you were six years old.Does your craft just become second nature at that point?
But before we get into that, I have to share one more of my favorite moments from the younger Joey Gordon-Levitt days in the 90s.
His films include A River Runs Through It, The Juror, and Angels in the Outfield.From the hit series Third Rock from the Sun, please welcome Joey Gordon-Levitt.
In Caulfield, the hero of this Salinger novel hates movies, phonies, and his classmate Ernest Morrow.
That was 1997, and already in demand for celebrity jeopardy.And he was just starting to reach new heights in his career with his comedic performance in 3rd Rock from the Sun.By age 16, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was an industry veteran.
I'm a dad, you know, one of the best parts I think about playing with kids is their lack of inhibition, willingness to just like pretend that something else is happening, pretend that reality is completely something else. My daughter is almost two.
She'll just be perfectly happy to pretend to make eggs, and there are no eggs there.She doesn't care.She doesn't need convincing VFX.All you have to do is go, shh, and the pretend faucet has turned on its water.
That, I think, is a lot of acting, and you can just make reality whatever you want to.It's magic.
I'm a little younger than you and I came up with your movies and TV shows basically right alongside as you were in them.
And so I very much lived this sort of Joe Gordon-Levitt experience of like, starting with you with Third Rock from the Sun when we were both around that age.And then I'm like, okay, I'm in college now.
What's the, this movie Mysterious Skin is like so exciting to me.And it's like, oh wait, this is not Third Rock from the Sun.And I've always found that really remarkable about your career is just,
this adaptability to these different genres and forms, and you don't see that with every actor.Thank you.I think that's really interesting.
I'm glad you brought up that movie.That's certainly one of my favorites.Mysterious Skin was in a lot of ways where I got to become an adult as an actor.
Your face looked like you'd been erased, like you were just empty inside.And you just fell face first on the floor, bam.And we pulled you up, your nose was bleeding.
The Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I knew from Angels in the Outfield and Third Rock from the Sun suddenly had become a very different kind of actor, taking on more challenging, dramatic work.
In Mysterious Skin, he played a sex worker and a victim of child sex abuse, and then in the neo-noir movie Brick, he was an amateur detective solving a murder.
I've always been fascinated to be somebody other than myself, because Who wants to just be one person their whole life?I only get to live once.Wouldn't I want to try on someone else's self?
Acting is sort of just, in that way, the art of empathy, I guess.Have you found that acting has been a way for you to connect with others?
I often think of this role I played in my 20s.I played an American soldier. who was a veteran who saw action in Iraq.
I think of that often maybe because I was raised by peace activists, so it's somebody who's pretty diametrically opposed to my upbringing.
I came to really care about and understand, I think, to some degree at least, what it meant to be a soldier and why that was noble and why somebody would do what they do, put their lives on the line for each other or your brothers out there.
I won't claim that I really know what it's like to be in a firefight, because I've never been in one. And I won't claim to know what it's like to have been there when a dear friend gets shot and killed.I haven't experienced that.
When else would I have had the chance to get to know a group of guys that had been to Iraq and really dive deep into their perspectives and become what I would consider to be real friends?
And it's absolutely been an avenue for that sort of expansion of my own
point of view and if you don't mind indulging me I would I would take this opportunity to say this is one of the biggest reasons why I think it's so important that schools do have theater and art and literature and stuff like that in them.
Even though a theater class is likely not going to prepare you for a lucrative career, any career you pursue is going to involve empathy.
Any job you do, you're going to have to understand the other people you're working with, the people you're working for, your customers, your employees, or your boss. whoever, you're going to have to understand them.
You have to communicate with them and to try to put yourself in their shoes.Communicating with somebody involves trying to get inside of their own head.And this is what you do when you learn how to act.
It's sad to see theater and arts programs cut more and more. from schools, and not just sad because art's fun, but sad because that kind of empathy is what makes civilization work.
Have you found, since you're a relatively recent parent, have you found that acting has helped you in that arena too?Oh, 100%.
Yeah.Parenting has everything to do with it, whether it's about something
really practical, like just, you know, getting someone to eat some dinner, or something a lot more complicated, like trying to help someone work through their feelings or work through a relationship.
If I can be really empathetic and put myself in their shoes, really think to myself, what would it be like to be this six-year-old or even this one-year-old?
asking myself a lot of the same questions that I ask myself when I'm building a character for a movie.
I definitely am not an actor, but in film school, I did have to take some basic acting classes.One of the acting teachers who kept coming up in the literature was Uta Hagen.It was eye-opening for me to read her work.
When you are spaceless, when you don't know where you are, what surrounds you, where you came from, and where you are heading, your body will tense, you will get very self-conscious, and start to arrange yourselves.
It was all about understanding the given circumstances of where a character is coming from, answering questions about who, when, where, why, and how they came to be in the scene, and in the story.
Much like how Joseph Gordon-Levitt describes his process, it really felt like studying the art of empathy.
If you know where you're going, where you came from, what surrounds you and how that influences your behavior, you get free.Then all the wonderful work, psychological work you do on character and on the movement of the scene can take place.
So I'm just curious, you know, to learn more about the process you take for building a character that you're preparing for and
Well, it's interesting because I recognize all the principles that you're talking about.I just, I wouldn't be able to attribute it to her because I never studied formally in that way.But how do I go about it?Well, it really depends.
What's the medium?What is this movie going to be like?Are we in a comedy?Are we playing for laughs?Are we in a more of a tone of realism.There's sort of a spectrum of realism.How closely do we want to adhere to what would really happen?
How a person would really behave or really talk?On The Lookout, I was playing a character who'd suffered a moderate traumatic brain injury.It was a really intense,
thing to try to do because people who have suffered injuries like that, sometimes their whole kind of point of view gets rocked.
And it can really impact how their emotions work, how their intellect works, and just their moment-to-moment experience of life.
Once upon a time, I had the perfect life. Now I have to write everything down just to make it through the day.
I dove into it as hard as I could and got to know people who had suffered a variety of different injuries and read all about it and spent a lot of time focusing on getting to a place where I felt like I could be real, like I could realistically feel at least something approximating what this character would be feeling.
Crying?Raging?Taking your meds?
What I maybe didn't understand enough was we weren't making a total drama.We were actually making a bank heist movie.A bank heist movie that was centered around a character with a moderate traumatic brain injury So it needed to find that balance.
It needed to have that dramatic realism.Again, it's a spectrum between totally realistic and totally not realistic.So it needs to be somewhere in the middle there, leaning towards realistic, but not entirely realistic.
Because in a bank heist movie, things need to clip along faster than real life does to really make that genre go.
So this is one of the things that I think about a lot when I'm trying to figure out a character, is where are we on that spectrum between realism and a lack of realism? that'll really change my approach.
If we're all the way over on the end of realism, like I did a movie a few years ago called 7500, where the whole thing, and the reason I wanted to do it was the director does this very unconventional thing with how he makes movies.
Patrick Vollrath is his name and he has a script but he basically says you don't have to stick to the script and what you do is you just know your character super super well and they roll camera for 20, 30, sometimes 40 minutes at a time which is
Very rare.I've never done that in all my 30 years of hundreds of jobs.You roll camera for one, two, three minutes usually, and he's doing 20, 30, 40 minutes.It's very unusual, but it's really powerful and immersive.
Passengers, listen to me.This is the pilot speaking.There's a young woman in the front of the plane, and the hijackers are threatening to kill her.But who can stop them?There's only two of them.All they have is glass.They don't have guns.
They don't have knives.They have glass.They're going to kill a young woman.Please?If you work together, you can beat them.Please?
It allows us as actors to go just all the way into, I am here, I am really here.And he doesn't want you to try to make it entertaining.The camera operators just holding the camera on their shoulder and moving around and catching what they can.
And the lights are just set up so that the actors can just go wherever they wanna go.And he does everything in this very extreme way to optimize for an immersive, realistic experience.And if you watch the movie, it's very realistic.
And it's part of what's so powerful about it.And then on the other hand, like, I, you know, I did Third Rock from the Sun.
Hi, I'm Melissa.Yeah, I know.
I mean, I'm Tommy.That's my name.
We've been in class together all year and we've never met.
No, we have not never met. I'm Tommy.
Yeah.So, we're trying to get these fruit flies to mate, huh?Well, that's kind of cold, isn't it?I mean, they just met.What?Can you imagine meeting somebody for the first time and then all of a sudden there's people trying to force you to mate?
That's a lot of pressure.I couldn't do it.
Well, if my lifespan was only for like a day, I think I'd be okay with it.
farcical, big, bombastic, theatrical comedy, which is not about realism almost at all.I don't want to say at all, but almost at all.You're really not thinking about, let me be here now.Let me completely immerse myself in this experience.
You're thinking about beats.You're thinking about rhythm and what does it take to bump, bop, bada, and they laugh, and da, da, uh, uh, and they laugh again.And it's a whole other thing.
And so where my mind is when I'm playing a farce for an audience that's laughing versus where my mind is when I'm immersed in this heavy, realistic drama, there's two totally different places.And I love the variety.I feel lucky I get to do both.
But one won't work for the other, and the other won't work for that one.
In professional baseball, most teams have a highly valued utility player.Somebody who can play multiple positions on the field.If you play any fantasy sports, you're probably familiar with this idea.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt's like a utility player for film.Swiss army knife, a chameleon, whatever you want to call it.He can navigate the different acting approaches needed for different genres.
It's a mindset that doesn't seem to treat any one theory or process as dogma. which is in contrast to an industry where there seems to be an endless fixation around method acting.
— Do you think people misunderstand the use and the purpose of method acting?
— I think that there's a sort of idea around method acting that it's crazy, and that we're crazy.
— While he's out doing this, are you getting ready for the role?
— Yeah, my own quiet way, yeah.— What's your own quiet way?— I spend many months in listless rumination.
— How did you put it, going method? It's really just a way to stay incredibly focused and committed and concentrated.It's a way to kind of shut everything else out and to prioritize what's important.That's really another way to describe going method.
More recently, so much ink was spilled around the alleged conflict in acting styles and HBO's succession between actors Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong.
Brian Cox says he's concerned his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong is going to burn himself out due to his intense method acting approach.
Cox brought up another brilliant actor to make his point.
It's nothing new, and honestly probably all of it, or most of it at least, is manufactured drama.To me, a lot of our most famed method actors just seem like pretty normal people who just really care about their work.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings his style of acting to his scene work with all kinds of actors, including some of the most mythologized performers in our business, like Daniel Day-Lewis.
I like to just be adaptable and I don't have much of an attachment to any particular approach.Not only project to project, but even day to day or take to take, because sometimes what was working isn't working anymore.
Find some other way to make it happen.But you mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis, and I heard you also mentioned the word method.
I only kind of even really know what that word means, because I haven't read any of the books or studied it in any of the classes that really teach what that means.
What I found about Daniel actually is as committed as he was, and he was extremely committed, he wasn't overly precious or weird about it.
I've also experienced actors who I think take this notion of quote unquote method, and they take it to a place where Now you're doing something that's more about you and less about making a great scene happen here.
That kind of zealotry happens with any, I guess, sort of, well, it can happen with anything.People get really, really enthusiastic and just go super far with it.I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thing.
But Daniel wasn't, in my experience, overzealous with his commitment to the role.
You drafted half the men in Boston.What do you think their families think about me?The only reason they don't throw things and spit on me is because you're so popular.I can't concentrate on British mercantile law.
I don't care about British mercantile law.I might not even want to be a lawyer.
It's a sturdy profession. and a useful one.
Yes, and I want to be useful, but now, not afterwards.You ain't wearing them things, Mr. Slade.They never fit right.The missus will have you wear them.Don't think about it.You're delaying.That's your favorite tactic.Be useful and stop distracting.
You won't tell me no, but the war will be over in a month.
One time we were sitting there and waiting for them to make an adjustment, maybe the lights or something like that.And I did strike up a conversation with him. And it wasn't that I was playing his son and he was playing my father.
It wasn't so contrived as that.It's not like... He needed to continue to pretend like he was Abraham Lincoln or that he refused to acknowledge that we were on a movie set.Of course not.
And he was perfectly happy to talk to me and we sat and shot the for a minute or two.I say all this to say is like sometimes he gets brought up as like, whoa, that's, that's really extreme.Is that really necessary?And like, in my experience,
100%, 100%, and no more than necessary.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt holds his own opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln.
And then, over on the total opposite end of the spectrum, he's able to play the straight guy against comedy legend Eddie Murphy, who defined a generation with his comedies like 48 Hours, Coming to America, Beverly Hills Cop.
I'm really glad that in our current era of poptimism, it's possible to appreciate the tremendous craft that's in studio comedies like Beverly Hills Cop, and in the comedic rhythms and character work that Eddie Murphy brings to his movies.
My big brother was a huge Eddie Murphy fan, so we would watch his stand-up, we would watch him on Saturday Night Live, we would watch his movies, whether it was Beverly Hills Cop or trading places or coming to America.
All these movies have like a very, very dear place in my heart.So when I got the opportunity to, you know, be Axl Foley's new sidekick, I was like, yes, please.
This sounds like a dream.For a long time, there's been a pendulum swinging back and forth when it comes to critical reception towards genre filmmaking.
dating all the way back to French critics of the French New Wave who elevated Hollywood directors like Howard Hughes, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock.
It's been going on for a long time, and the pendulum has swung back again towards respecting the craft of elevated genre and commercial filmmaking, with the critical and financial success of projects like Top Gun Maverick and even just last week with Twisters.
So it's interesting to hear how Joseph Gore and Levitt brings his craft to these kinds of big commercial movies.
Artistically, you are approaching a Beverly Hills Cop movie differently than, I don't know, Lincoln.It's an action comedy starring Eddie Murphy franchise, big Hollywood spectacle movie.
But you might think that, okay, so we're all the way over on the end of the spectrum that has nothing to do with realism.But in fact, a lot of what makes the Beverly Hills Cop movies good.
And I think actually a lot of what makes a lot of Eddie Murphy's performances so great is he manages to keep a certain believability and humanity, even as he's being so spectacularly funny.
And throughout the various shooting days, he would often sort of be pulling everyone else back and saying like, yeah, that might be funny, but... That's not believable.We have to keep this also real.
The audience still has to have some amount of belief that this is really happening and these people are real people, not just cartoons.
And I think a big part of why Beverly Hills Cop movies work so well is they do have a heart and a humanity and a good chunk of reality in them in addition to the laughs and his unique brand of comedy.
And that's what I was focused on while we were shooting.
We cannot do this.I can't do this.This is a bad idea.I think you're being a touch negative right now because you men are trying to kill us, Bobby.And you're a helicopter pilot.And I'm pretty sure that's a helicopter.Shall we?
This ain't Spirit Airlines.Let's go, let's go.This is supposed to be like riding a bike.You're supposed to get right in there and know how to do this.You was trained, you can do this.Get going, man, we gotta go.
I'm trying to concentrate.
I think the comedy that I'm probably best at doing is the stuff that comes from a more grounded human place.I'm less the incredible wit who can think of the perfect punchline.My brain doesn't seem to work as well that way.
But that dose of real humanity was actually something he, Eddie, really liked.And it was a big part of why we got along and why our scenes turned out really well together is I wasn't trying to just like think of the jokes.
I would more just try to be real.And that reality, I think, gives him the the bedrock that he needs often to do his brilliant thing and really land the phony.
After the break, we'll be back with more from Joseph Gorin-Levitt.First, on the reality of an actor being just one small element in a larger, collaborative medium.
But then also on the potential for storytelling to transmute our physical reality into something bigger, grander, and infinite.
The truth about making a movie is it's not the actor's medium.What the audience is seeing is what the director put together.The actors, we get to come and sort of provide ingredients for the director.
Then the director goes into post-production where they're editing and putting music and everything else. And they take the ingredients that we all sort of gathered while shooting, and they make the movie that the audience sees.
So it's not to undersell how, of course, crucial acting is to movies, but a lot of what the director is doing is maybe a little more invisible to audiences.And it's so much what you end up seeing.
And I'm always really trying to understand what the director wants, how the director sees it. and then trying to give them those ingredients.At a certain point, I got to direct a movie, and that, I think, really changed how I approached acting.
I came to understand some things that I don't think I understood before, things that aren't even necessarily so sexy, you know, the realities and the sort of illusion of moviemaking.
Say we're in a scene and I'm holding this glass of water, I'm holding one right now.If it's a nice close-up, the camera won't see that I'm holding this glass.
Now the director has to come over to the actor and say, do you mind holding that glass up higher?And I remember this.I remember directors asking me to do this and feeling like, what, what is this?This is so phony.
They're asking me to do something so phony, how could they be asking me to do that?But that's because I was orienting my understanding of acting in my experience as an actor as opposed to the audience's experiences as a viewer.
Nowadays, if a director asks me to hold my glass a little higher, I just do it.And yeah, does it take me over a few pegs on that spectrum between perfect realism and not realistic at all?Yeah, it does.
But that's sometimes the reality of making a movie.It might feel weird as an actor, but it won't look weird to the audience.And so appreciating those kinds of discrepancies, I think, really changed me.
You know, what I find so interesting just about you as a person from what I've learned is just like, I get this sense that you're, you seem very optimistic, earnest, and even romantic about life.
But then with, with talking about craft, it feels like you're extremely practical.And those things, uh, Are those things at odds with each other?It almost feels like to be romantic about the craft of acting, you can't be practical.
You have to be kind of, I mean, that's how people kind of assume that you might think about acting.
Oh, I could be romantic.You want romance?Let's go.No, I really could.Where I feel like I get less practical is if we're starting to talk about stuff that's not on the job.
because being an artist is about so much more than a career or a job or any given movie or anything like that.When I think of big, big questions about, you know, our very existence, what does it mean to be myself?
Or what does it mean to be a human being?Or what's the point of any of this?Or what is a soul?Or what is an identity?Or things like that.
I tend to look through that lens of art, or creativity, or acting, or storytelling, or whatever you want to call it.Maybe just because that's what I know best.But also because I...
I really think that's a valid and sensical way to look at those big questions.If you start asking me what's a, I don't know, just as an example, what's a soul?Do we have souls?What does it mean to be soulful?
I guess I'm sort of practical in that I tend not to find much resonance in like the supernatural explanations of what a soul might be. But I do believe very, very strongly and very deeply in a certain kind of magic of story or character.
And what I mean by that is somebody's soul is who they are, what their character is, what they communicate to other people, people who
who feel their impact in an indirect way because they heard some story secondhand or they, you know, read a book or saw a movie that this person wrote or acted in.Here's another example.So my brother died 15 years ago, right?And
Do I believe that his soul is still with us?Well, yeah, absolutely.Again, not in any kind of supernatural way, not in maybe the Judeo-Christian definition of soul or other various definitions of what a soul is, but I remember him.
I remember what he did.I could tell stories about him.I do tell stories about him.To my kids, for example, who never got to meet him in the flesh,
All of those things, all of those stories and all of those impressions that he made, that's what makes up his soul.That's why he still does exist in a way even though his body's dead now.
So all of these thoughts and notions to me intertwined directly with what it means to make a movie or tell a story or create a character and act.It's what it means to be a human.
I love that.I mean, just as a non-religious person, I always love the idea of art as being a religious experience.
Yeah, very much so. I think, especially as a dad, I've come to be more and more interested, not in traditional religion, I guess.So I'm Jewish.I identify pretty strongly as a Jewish person, culturally, ancestrally.
I guess you could even say ethnically.I don't know.It's complicated what it is to be a Jew.
The religion part of it has never been something that I connected to very strongly, but there is something about people getting together on a regular basis and telling a story.
And telling not just a story for the sake of a bit of distraction or entertainment or a laugh, but telling a story about What the hell are we all doing here?Why are we here?What is important?What does it mean to be a good person?
How should we be treating each other?These kinds of things.
I sometimes worry that contemporary entertainment doesn't address those things enough because everyone making contemporary entertainment is competing for eyeballs and the best way to get eyeballs is to keep it fairly light, you know.
But I really like movies that do challenge.Also, I really do love those moments where we as a family can appreciate something greater than ourselves or be grateful for how good we have it.
That kind of thing, which really does have a lot of overlap with what religion is supposed to be, right?So, I don't know.I wonder sometimes if that's one of the
the tasks of our generation, especially as we head into this really strange time where technology is making entertainment more and more and more and more pervasive and accessible and stimulating.
And we have to figure out how we can, in this modern world, and largely, I guess you could say secular world, find those moments of sanctity for ourselves, our families, our communities. that are lacking.
Thanks for being on our show.
Thank you, man.It was a fun conversation.I look forward to hearing how you put it all together.
Yeah, thanks.Appreciate it.Right on.That's the show for this week.Thanks to Joseph Gordon-Levitt for taking the time to talk.You can watch him opposite Eddie Murphy now in Beverly Hills Cop, Axl F.
And don't forget, you can listen to more American Masters Creative Spark wherever you get podcasts, including on the iHeart app.American Masters Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you.
This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner, and by artist Cheriskis.Our executive producer is Michael Kantor.Original music is composed by Hannes Braun.This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for American Masters Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Taya Pechik Irvalino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Mark Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Tarina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
Thanks.We'll see you in a couple weeks.
Hey there, it's Sophie again.I hope you liked this episode of American Masters Creative Spark.If you're a fan, head over to their feed for new episodes every other Thursday.And make sure to keep listening to our feed.
Like I said, we have Mark Cuban up next on October 8th.You won't want to miss it.
