Joseph Gordon-Levitt Revisits Scenes from His Career

And now there's a camera pointed at me

while I watch myself kissing somebody

on camera which is very weird.

I'm feeling very strange right now, to be really honest.

Hey everybody, I'm Joseph Gordon-Levitt,

and I'm going to be revisiting some scenes

from throughout my career on VHS.

[upbeat music]

This is the earliest one, and it's the one

you all want to hear about, isn't it?

10 Things I Hate About You.

[VCR clicking] [upbeat music]

[VCR whining]

♪ This time ♪

We're actually watching this.

I haven't watched this in a long time.

Have you always been this selfish?

Yes.

Can I just say a word about Larisa Oleynik,

who's a wonderful person and a fantastic actress

and it's just making my heart happy to see her,

'cause I haven't seen her in a long time?

Makes me wanna call her.

You know, just 'cause you're beautiful,

that doesn't mean that you can treat people

like they don't matter.

That's also not true.

If you're beautiful, you can treat people

like they don't matter.

I really liked you, okay.

I defended you when people called you conceited.

I helped you when you asked me to.

I learned French for you and then you just

blow me off so you can.

Yeah, kissing and making out and stuff like that

on camera, I guess it sounds like a cliche, but it's true.

It's really not very romantic because I don't know,

to me what romance is, is an intimate moment

shared between two people, and when you're doing this

on camera, there's a hundred people standing around.

[upbeat music]

And I'm back in the game.

[funky music]

So that's one of those lines that is really hard to do

because it's completely unrealistic.

When I was this age, all I wanted to do was like,

the kinds of movies that would play at Sundance or something

because you wouldn't have to say lines like that.

You just stayed truer to what's real,

but then a lot of the audience doesn't get what's happening.

So if you can help an audience out and say

what you're feeling, it makes audiences feel great,

and people still talk to me about that line

even though in real life, no one would ever say that,

but in that moment it could happen,

but he wouldn't say that.

He would just feel it, but if he felt it,

then there would be no moment for the audience to go, yeah!

I'm very grateful to get to be in, you know, a movie

that people still love and talk about all these years later.

That's incredible.

[VCR clicking]

Well, 10 Things I Hate About You is a high school movie.

Here's a very different high school movie called Brick.

[VCR clicking] [upbeat music]

[VCR whining]

No, I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.

Fine, and very well put.

Accelerated English, Mrs. Kasprzyk.

Tough teacher.

Tough, but fair.

Brick is a tiny movie made by a filmmaker

named Rian Johnson, big successful director now.

At that time, he was a completely unknown dude in his 20s,

his first feature for absolutely no money.

Like, we're probably spending more money to produce

this Vanity Fair video than was spent to produce Brick,

and Richard Roundtree was and is Shaft,

Shaft, and he came in and did this.

I just wanna applaud him for doing that

because he didn't have to do this.

He's kind of a legend in his own right.

It just goes to show that he's doing it 'cause he loves it.

Kudos to Richard Roundtree, aka Shaft.

No, and no more of these informal chats either.

You got a discipline issue with me, write me up

or suspend me, and I'll see you at the parent conference.

Brick is not about reality at all.

Brick is this kind of crazy, highly stylized world

which largely is happening through the language, right?

We're speaking in this really heightened way,

but also, they would do little things with the camera

to kind of reinforce that heightened other worldliness

like, look how low the camera is here.

You would never normally shoot a scene between two people

with the camera this low.

Rian Johnson and his DP, Steve Yedlin,

who's always been his DP, the two of them

went to film school together, they've shot

every movie together, this is just early example

of how they love to kind of bend rules

and fuck around with the camera,

but again, people are talking in Brick in ways

that you wouldn't normally hear.

So it's just all kind of coming together.

It's part of why this movie works so well

is 'cause the filmmaking goes together

so well with the writing.

Can't have brass cutting me favors in public.

Just letting you know now so you don't come

kicking in my homeroom door once trouble starts.

That's the trick of Brick, I guess,

because the language is all so stylized,

how do you bring any sense of real feelings to it?

I probably did more rehearsal and repetition on this movie

than probably any other movie I've ever done.

Usually learning lines isn't that hard,

especially if the writing is good, because if the writing

is good, then you're just saying what you would say,

but in Brick, with such kind of heightened

unnatural language, it's this kind of

lyrical, strange poetic thing.

So you just have to brute force commit it to memory,

and that just came from repetition.

Once it becomes muscle memory, then you can bring

whatever feelings you want to bring to it

because you're not having to focus

or think about the lines you're saying.

You can really just feel the feelings.

[funky music] [VCR clicking]

500 Days of Summer.

[VCR clicking]

[VCR whining]

Hey, how you doing?

[Tom] Good, how are you?

Good.

♪ Write a song write a song write a song ♪

Okay, expectations versus reality.

This is what was written in the script.

So, it's such a good idea from a writing perspective,

and it's also just so well executed

from a filmmaking perspective.

So this just is one of those moments where you read it

in a script and you're like, oh, that's cool,

and then you see it, and you're like, wow,

that's exactly what I would've hoped for,

and that doesn't always happen when you try new things.

They really just nailed it.

[pleasant music]

When we would shoot the expectations version

and the reality version, oftentimes they'd be

the exact same camera angle.

So it's just the next take.

Marc Webb, the director, being clearheaded enough

and communicating well enough about what exactly

he was planning so that we were all on the same page

and saying like, okay.

He knew exactly what this was gonna be.

That's not usually what happens

when you're acting in a movie.

You don't know exactly what it's gonna look like

or how it's gonna turn out or what the director's doing

with the camera, because oftentimes the director

doesn't even know exactly 'cause they're gonna kind of

shoot a bunch of stuff and then cut it together later.

It's really down to the director to make sure

to keep us well enough informed that we could do that

and keep it clear and distinct between the two versions

that the audience has seen.

♪ No one's got it all ♪

♪ Power to the people ♪

♪ We don't want it ♪

♪ We want pleasure ♪

Notice she's got a lot of blue in her dress

and then there's this blue and white wallpaper.

That's very intentional.

It's all keyed off of Zooey's eyes.

Marc Webb did this really powerful thing

with costume and production design and cinematography

and the color blue and Zooey's very blue eyes,

and if you track the color blue throughout the movie,

you'll notice it, and when you surround an actor

with the color of their eyes especially like when you have

these striking blue eyes like Zooey has,

it really makes the eyes pop on screen,

♪ And the TV's try to rape us ♪

♪ And I guess that they're succeeding ♪

♪ And we're going to these meetings ♪

♪ But we're not doing ♪

and I might as well just pat Marc Webb on the back again

for that, what just happened there,

coordinating a camera move with a edit

that's gonna happen in post-production.

That takes real foresight.

To pull off something as graceful and elegant as that,

you have to have really planned it and sort of watched it

in your mind before you even shot it.

We're gonna talk about Looper.

[VCR clicking] [upbeat music]

[VCR whining]

If you haven't seen Looper, you might be

a little confused starting to watch this

to see that my face looks weird.

Looper, it involves time travel where there's the same man

exists in two points in his life.

There's the younger man and the older man,

and I played the younger man and Bruce Willis

played the older man, so I wore hours and hours

of prosthetic makeup every day to look

a little bit like Bruce Willis.

Kazuhiro Tsuji, the phenomenal makeup designer, told Rian

and me that it was impossible to make me

look like Bruce Willis, and he brought out charts.

He brought out photos of Bruce and of me and pointed out

like, look the distance between the bottom of his nose

and the top of his lip.

It's just not the same.

I can't fix that.

You will not get him to look like him,

and Rian saying to Kazu,

he doesn't have to look exactly like him.

He just has to suggest it.

It's okay.

It's a movie.

One of my kind of marks of success as an actor

for myself is, do I seem different on screen from myself?

It's probably why Looper's my, maybe my favorite

performance of mine because it's the most different.

Now granted, sort of cheated with the prosthetics,

gonna look different.

I get that thrill the most of like, wow,

it's really like, it's somebody else.

It's not me.

I did a lot of work to try to do my version that wasn't

an imitation of Bruce Willis but had sort of the spirit

of Bruce Willis and if I had to pick a favorite

just acting wise, this is up there for me.

So the young man communicated to the older man

where he wanted to meet by carving the name

of the waitress into his arm.

So that's why he showed him

that scar and that bloody bandage.

That is quintessential Rian Johnson cleverness.

He just told this really pretty intricate complicated story

in the span of three seconds with two images and no words.

You know, there's another girl

who works here on the weekends.

Jen?

Right.

Less letters.

That'd be better.

I had a moment of validation.

It wasn't during this scene.

There was another scene later in the movie where

we were yelling at each other and I don't know if Bruce

did this on purpose or he did it unintentionally

but it was kind of the highest compliment he could pay me.

It was right after they said cut.

He was turning away and walking back to his mark.

He didn't even say it to me.

He just kind of said to himself, sounds like me,

and I just turned to myself and went, fucking yes.

I think, knowing him, that was really his ultra-generous way

of paying me a compliment, but it was very kind

to do it in that way.

All right, listen, this is a hard situation for you

but we both know how this has to go down.

I can't let you walk away from this diner alive.

This is my life now.

I earned it.

You had yours already.

So why don't you do what old men do and die.

Get the fuck outta my way.

Why don't you just take your little gun out

from between your legs and do it,

boy?

That line right there where he calls me boy,

that to me is capturing the essence of a lot

of what this movie is about for me.

Rian had showed me this script, I don't know, years prior,

I think to when we got to shoot it.

I asked him like, so how are we going to do this?

Is it one actor playing old Joe and young Joe,

or is it two actors or what?

When he told me, oh, I want it to be two actors.

You play the younger one and we'll get an older actor

to play the older one and we'll do makeup on you

so that you look at least something like the older one.

I was like, well, that sounds fun.

He's like, look, you know, I think the world of you

as an actor, but there is just a difference

between an older man and a younger man that he wanted

to have that real difference between the two actors.

When Bruce says that to me right there, he calls me boy,

it just proves Rian so right.

The gravity and the confidence with which he can do that,

he can call me boy, I just, I don't think that even

if we had done some kind of special effects

and I was playing myself or whatever,

I don't think a young man could call another young man boy

even with all the age makeup or whatever effects

in the world to convince the audience

that this is an older man.

I don't think he could have that same spirit and gravity.

He earned it and I deserved to be called that.

Moving on, the next movie we're watching is Don Jon.

[VCR clicking] [upbeat music]

[VCR whining]

[romantic music]

[Jon] I don't watch too many movies.

Don Jon is a movie about movies.

Most of the movies it's about are

adult entertainment movies, but it's also very much

about Hollywood movies, romantic comedies,

and sort of the similarities between the two.

[Jon] I used to watch 'em a lot when I was a little kid.

Okay, I mean, so we might as well point out

my dear friends who did me the favor to appear

in these movie posters, Emily and John and Chan and Annie.

I spent probably way too much time coming up with these

and had a lot of fun designing these movie posters.

So Hard, So Fast 3D and Special Someone,

the one for the dudes and the one for the ladies

because Hollywood movies are reductionist and unhealthy.

[Jon] But now I don't really see the point.

This character checking out his female companion.

Don't hate me, please.

This is a lot of what the movie is about is a guy

that objectifies women but also objectifies himself,

objectifies his friends, objectifies his family,

his spirituality, his car, and many other things.

It's sort of a movie about objectification.

So we're not just doing a gratuitous shot of a dude

checking out a woman's body.

It's what the movie is talking about.

[Jon] Love at first sight.

The first kiss, the breakup.

[Theatergoer] I felt that.

[Jon] The makeup.

[Male Actor] I'm scared.

[Jon] The expensive wedding.

Then they drive off into the sunset.

Everyone knows it's fake, but they watch it

like it's real fucking life.

That montage of dialing in on the face of the person

watching the screen, we do the same exact thing in the movie

dialing in on the man's face watching pornography.

So there's a real kind of connection here

between how people watch rom-coms and how people watch porn.

Ah, she was the most important thing to him.

He gave up everything for her.

It was just meant to be.

I love movies like that.

I know, great.

This movie takes place in New Jersey

but we shot most of it in LA, and I have to point out,

I grew up going to this movie theater

in the San Fernando valley.

So it was fun to shoot here.

I think I saw T2 here when I was like nine.

He's just such a real man.

She's so beautiful too, always.

Her?

Yeah.

Nah, she's too skinny.

Wanna know who's beautiful?

He's just such a real man.

A lot of Don Jon is about these

sort of gender norms, you could say,

what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman

and how we can get tripped up on adhering too closely

to conventional ideas of these concepts, and yeah.

So when she says he's just such a real man,

sort of trying to get at that.

[elegant music]

This shot always makes me laugh.

This shot is a shot you see in so many movies,

the steady cam shot circling around the two people kissing.

You know what?

I get it, it looks beautiful, and sometimes

a kiss does feel like that and we put those extra lights

in the arcade games so that the lights would flare

and we even put, I think, fireworks sound effects going

with the lights, just to kind of make fun of, you know,

they're coming out of a movie theater,

kind of make fun of how movies can manipulate your senses,

and this gets back to the expectations and reality

from the 500 Days of Summer movie.

If what you expect a kiss to be is violins and fireworks

and a steady cam circling around you,

you might be disappointed when you actually kiss somebody

but here's the good news.

Kissing is actually way better than this

if you pay attention, not to, hey, is this matching up

with what I saw in movies all my life,

but it's just so important to understand

that movies are movies and it's not what life is.

It's a lot of what plagues our culture and society

and world, I think, is us getting mixed up with believing

too hard in what we see on screen.

Coming off of Don Jon, the next time in my career

where I wore that much gel in my hair was Super Pumped.

[VCR clicking] [upbeat music]

[VCR whining]

My parents never wanted to get us cable

'cause they we would just like watch MTV all day

or something, but then eventually they caved

when I was like, seven, and the first weekend we had it

my dad found The Untouchables, 'cause he thought

it was like history.

Because, you know, it is.

Okay, right, so my dad and Corey and me were sitting there

watching this like, history lesson.

I'd start again on The Dirty Dozen

like my dad did me, but sure.

Okay, but Deniro as Capone.

More movies within movies.

Well, a movie within a show.

Here's Travis Kalanick talking about The Untouchables.

I wanna point out that I don't think Travis Kalanick

ever actually talked like this, with this gesture.

This is from another iconic figure in the late 2000 teens,

got sort of incorporated into

the Travis Kalanick character for me.

The point is, that shit worked.

You crack a guy's cranium open between the soup

and the fish dish, you know, you make

an example of somebody, people start to fall in line.

That is what needs to happen here.

Disloyalty.

Loyalty is not what leadership ought to be about.

Shouldn't demand loyalty with threats.

Can earn loyalty by doing good things

that benefit lots of people.

Beating someone's head open with a bat

or crushing your competition with arguably

unethical business tactics,

that's not what makes for a healthy world.

I just think this scene really kind of got that dark drive

towards power that so many people have.

To me, Super Pumped is about actually a lot more

than Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber.

It's about a lot more than even Uber itself as a company.

It's about this drive to power, this drive to win,

and this drive to make money at all costs.

If you put money above all, things are not gonna it go well.

It's something we've gotta change.

[lively music]

Thanks for watching.