Joseph Gordon-Levitt Rewatches 500 Days of Summer, 10 Things I Hate About You & More | Vanity Fair

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 [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 [Music] we're actually watching this i haven't watched this in a long time have you always been this selfish y

es can i say a word about larissa olenek who's a wonderful person and a fantastic actress and it's just making my heart happy to see her because i haven't seen her in a long time makes me want to call her you know just because you're beautiful that doesn't mean 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 i defended you when people called you conceited i helped you when you asked me to i

i learned french for you and and then you blow me off so you 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 and um back in the game 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 stay 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 and in that moment 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 well 10 things i hate about you is a high school movie here's a a very different high school movie called brick [Music] no i gave you chair to see him eating not to see you fed bye very well what accelerated english mrs kasper's tough teacher tough but fair brick is a tiny movie made by a film

maker named ryan johnson big successful director now at that time it was 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 rountree was and is shaft shaft and he came in and did this i just want to 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 because 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 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 ca

mera is here you would never normally shoot a scene between two people with the camera this low ryan 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 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 it's beca

use the filmmaking goes together so well with the writing i 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 uh 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 on this movie than probably any other movie i've ever done usually learning lines isn't that hard especially if the writing is g

ood 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 things you 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 500 days of summer [Music] okay

expectations versus reality this is what was written in the scripts 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 you're like oh that's cool and then you see it and you're like wow that's exactly what i would have hoped for and that doesn't always happen when you try new things they really just nailed it [Music] when we would shoot the expectations version a

nd the reality version oftentimes they'd be the exact same camera angle so it's just the next take mark webb the director being clear-headed 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 going to be that's not usually what happens when you're acting in a movie you don't know exactly what it's going to look like or how it's going to turn out or what the director is doing with the came

ra because oftentimes the director doesn't even know exactly because they're going to 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 and keep it clear and distinct between the two versions that the audience has seen [Music] 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 zoe's eyes uh mark w

ebb did this really powerful thing with costume and production design and cinematography and the color blue and and zoe'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 zoe has it really makes the eyes pop on screen [Music] and i might as well just pat mark webb on the back again for that what just happened there coordinating a camera move

with a edit that's going to happen in post-production that takes real foresight to pull off something as graceful and elegant as as that you have to have really planned it and sort of watched it in your mind before you even shot it we're going to talk about looper [Music] if you haven't seen looper you might be a little confused starting to watch this to see that my face looks weird looper that involves time travel where there's the same man uh exists in two points in his life there's the younge

r 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 ryan 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 fi

x that you will not get him to look like him and ryan's saying takazu 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 somebo

dy 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 favor 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 ryan 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 uh 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 walki

ng back to his mark he didn't even say it to me he kind of said to himself sounds like me and uh and i just turned to my cell phone rest 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 in that way all right listen i know there's 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 out of my way don't you just take your little gun over 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 ryan 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 gonna do this is it one actor playing old joe and young joe or is it two actors or what when he told me i wanted to be two actors you play the young

er 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 is 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 ryan so right the gravity and the confidence with which he c

an 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 deserve to be called that moving on the next movie we're watching is don john [Music] i don't watch too many m

ovies don john 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 i used to watch him 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 m

ovie 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 but now i don't really see the point this character checking out his female companion um 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 objectific

ation 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 love at first sight the first kiss to break up the makeup the expensive wedding i'm gonna drive off into the sunset everyone knows it's fake but they watch it like it's real life that montage of dolling in on on the face of the person watching the screen we do the same exact thing in in the movie dulling in on 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 oh 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 yeah 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 hurts yeah

not she's too skinny everyone knows beautiful he's just such a real man a lot of don john 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 um yeah so when she says he's just such a real man sort of trying to get at that this shot always makes me laugh this shot is a shot you see in so many movies the steadicam shots circling around the two p

eople kissing you know what i get it it looks beautiful and sometimes a kiss does feel like that we put those extra lights in the arcade game so that the lights would flare and we even put i think um 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 500 days of summer movie if what you expect a kiss to be is violi

ns and fireworks and a steadicam 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 that movies are movies and it's 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 and what we see o

n screen coming off at don john uh the next time in my career where i wore that much gel in my hair was super pumped [Music] my parents never wanted to get us cable because they thought 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 he thought it was like history because you know it is okay right so my my dad and corey and me were sitting there watching this like history lesson i

just started getting the dirty dozen like my dad did me but sure okay but de niro escapone more movies within movies well a movie within a show here's travis kalanick talking about the untouchables i want to point out that um i don't think travis kalanick ever actually uh talked like this with this gesture this is from another iconic figure in the late uh 2000 teens got sort of incorporated into the travis county character for me the point is that worked you crack a guy's cranium open between t

he 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 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 going to go well it's something we've got to change [Music] thanks for watching