Joe Skinner (Voiceover): Can you imagine having the same job since you were basically in Kindergarten?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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 ten.
Pop-Tarts Commercial (Man): Bing bang boom. We’re out of here…
Pop-Tarts Commercial (Gordon-Levitt): Hold on, Mr. Rushing-Out-The-Door. You haven’t had your breakfast yet. Oh, I know. Tick tick tick. Look, you got time for Kellogg’s Pop Tarts. That’s my boy. Now you’re cooking.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): At 13 years old, Joey Gordon-Levitt was starring opposite Christopher Lloyd and Danny Glover in Angels in the Outfield.
Angels in the Outfield Trailer (Gordon-Levitt): Dad. When are we going to be a family again?
Angels in the Outfield Trailer (Narrator): A boy searching for a future.
Angels in the Outfield Trailer (Dad): I’d say when the Angels win the pennant.
Angels in the Outfield Trailer (Gordon-Levitt): God, if there is a God, maybe you could help them win a little…
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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: Axel 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.
Celebrity Jeopardy: His films include A River Runs Through It, The Juror and Angels in the Outfield. From the hit series 3rd Rock From the Sun, please welcome Joey Gordon-Levitt.
Celebrity Jeopardy (Trebek): …Holden Caulfield, the hero of this Salinger novel, hates movies, phonies and his classmate, Ernest Morrow. Joey.
Celebrity Jeopardy (Gordon-Levitt): What is Catcher in the Rye?
Celebrity Jeopardy (Trebek): Right.
Celebrity Jeopardy (Gordon-Levitt): I’m so excited!
Celebrity Jeopardy (Trebek): You read it.
Celebrity Jeopardy (Gordon-Levitt): That’s my favorite book.
Celebrity Jeopardy (Trebek): Good for you.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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, is completely something else. My daughter’s 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 “shhhh” and a pretend faucet is turned on. It’s water. That I think is a lot of acting and you can just make reality whatever you want to. It’s magic.
Joe Skinner: I am 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 starting with you with 3rd Rock From the Sun, we were both around that age. And then I’m like, “Okay, I’m in college now. Like, what’s the… I love this, movie Mysterious Skin. It’s so exciting to me.” And it’s like, oh, wait, this is not 3rd 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. I think that’s really interesting.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I’m glad you brought up that movie. That’s certainly one of my favorites. It was really, Mysterious Skin, was in a lot of ways where I got to become an adult as an actor.
Mysterious Skin (Gordon-Levitt): Your face looked like you’d been erased, and you were just empty inside. And you just fell face first on the floor, bam. When we pulled you up, your nose was bleeding.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): The Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I knew from Angels in the Outfield and 3rd 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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. Why 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.
Joe Skinner: Have you found that acting has been a way for you to connect with others?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 100%. I often think of this role I played in my 20s. I played an American soldier who was, you know, 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. Your brothers out there.
War scene from Stop-Loss.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I won’t claim that I really know what it’s like to be in a firefight because I’ve never been in one.
War scene from Stop-Loss continues.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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? 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.
Joe Skinner: Have you found, since you’re a relatively recent parent, have you found that acting has helped you in that arena, too?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Oh, 100%. Yeah. (Laughs) 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.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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.
Uta Hagen Archival: 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.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): It was all about trying to understand the given circumstances of where a character’s 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.
Uta Hagen Archival: If you know where you’re going, where you came from, what surrounds you, and how that influences your behavior, you get freed. Then all the wonderful work, psychological work you do on character and on the movement of the scene, can take place. Otherwise it can’t.
Joe Skinner: 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…
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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. 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.
The Lookout Trailer (Gordon-Levitt): Once upon a time I had the perfect life. Now I have to write everything down just to make it through the day.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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.
The Lookout Trailer: Any problems this week.
The Lookout Trailer (Gordon-Levitt): Nope.
The Lookout Trailer: Any crying? Raging. Taking your meds?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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.
7500 (Gordon-Levitt): 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 you 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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 operator is 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 want to 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, you know, I did 3rd Rock From the Sun.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Alissa): Hi, I’m Alissa.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Gordon-Levitt): Yeah, I know, I know, I mean, I’m, I’m Tommy, that’s my name, Tommy.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Alissa): Didn’t we have class together all year and we’ve never met?
3rd Rock From the Sun (Gordon-Levitt): No, we have not never met. I’m Tommy.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Alissa): Yeah. So we’re trying to get these fruit flies to mate, huh?
3rd Rock From the Sun (Gordon-Levitt): Yeah.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Alissa): Well, that’s kind of cold, isn’t it? I mean, they just met.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Gordon-Levitt): What?
3rd Rock From the Sun (Alissa): 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.
3rd Rock From the Sun (Gordon-Levitt): Well, if my life span was only for, like, a day, I think I’d be okay with it.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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 – (rhythmic sounds) and they laugh 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.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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.
Media Archival (Stephen Colbert): Do you think people misunderstand the use and the purpose of method acting?
Media Archival (Lady Gaga): I think that there’s a sort of idea around method acting that it’s crazy and that we’re crazy.
Media Archival (Charlie Rose): While he’s out doing this are you getting ready for the role?
Media Archival (Daniel Day-Lewis): Yeah, in my own quiet way. Yeah.
Media Archival (Charlie Rose): What’s your own quiet way?
Media Archival (Daniel Day-Lewis): I spend many months in listless rumination.
Media Archival (Jared Leto): 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.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): More recently, so much ink was spilled around the alleged conflict in acting styles on HBO’s Succession between actors Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong.
Media Archival: Brian Cox says he’s concerned his Succession costar Jeremy Strong is going to burn himself out due to his intense method acting approach.
Media Archival (Brian Cox): You’re dealing with all this material every day. You can’t live in it, you know, eventually you get worn out.
Media Archival: Cox brought up another brilliant actor to make his point.
Media Archival (Brian Cox): Like to me, Daniel Day-Lewis got worn out at 55. He decided to retire because he couldn’t go on doing that every day, you know, it was too consuming.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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. You mentioned Daniel Day-Lewis, and I heard you also mentioned the word method. Again, 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 like, 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.
Lincoln (Gordon-Levitt): 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.
Lincoln (Day-Lewis): It’s a sturdy profession. And a useful one.
Lincoln (Gordon-Levitt): Yes, and I want to be useful. But now, not afterwards.
Lincoln (Day-Lewis): I ain’t wearing them things, Mr. Slade. They never fit right.
Lincoln (Slade): The Mrs. will have you wear ‘em.
Lincoln (Gordon-Levitt): You’re delaying. That’s your favorite tactic. You won’t tell me no, but the war will be over in a month.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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. He was perfectly happy to talk to me. And we sat and shot the [censored] for a minute or two. I say all this to say is like sometimes he gets brought up as like, whoa, that’s really extreme. Is that really necessary? And like, in my experience, 100%, 100%. And no more than necessary.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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 a 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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 Axel Foley’s new sidekick, I was like, yes, please. This sounds like a dream.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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 Gordon-Levitt brings his craft to these kinds of big commercial movies.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Gordon-Levitt): We cannot do this. I can’t do this, this is a bad idea.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Murphy): I think you’re being a touch negative right now because see men are trying to kill us, Bobby, and you’re a helicopter pilot, and I’m pretty sure that’s a [censored] helicopter. Shall we?
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Murphy): This ain’t Spirit Airlines. Let’s go, let’s go. This [censored] is supposed to be like riding a bike. You’re supposed to get right in there and know how to do this [censored]. You was trained. You can do this. Get going man we got to go.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (Gordon-Levitt): Just shut the [censored] up. I’m trying to concentrate.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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, like, 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’s 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 bedrock that he needs often to do his brilliant thing and really land the funny.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): After the break, we’ll be back with more from Joseph Gordon-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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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 I don’t think I understood before, things that aren’t even necessarily so sexy. You know, the realities of, 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, like, “do you mind holding that glass up higher?” 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 like 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.
Joe Skinner: You know what I find so interesting just about you as a person, from what I’ve learned, is just like, I get the sense that you seem very optimistic, earnest and even romantic about life. But then with talking about craft, it feels like you’re extremely practical around those things. 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. I mean, that’s how people kind of assume that you might think about acting.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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 really think that’s a valid and sensical way to look at those big questions. If you start asking me what’s… I don’t know, 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 feel their impact, in an indirect way because they heard some stories 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 is… His body is dead now. So all of these thoughts and notions to me intertwine 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.
Joe Skinner: I love that. I mean, just as a non-religious person, I always loved the idea of art as being a religious experience.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 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… You know, 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. But, 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 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.
Joe Skinner: Thanks for being on our show.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Thank you man. It was a fun conversation. I look forward to hearing how you put it all together.
Joe Skinner: Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Right on.
Joe Skinner (Voiceover): 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: Axel 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 Artis Curiskis. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
