Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes
Actor, Director
It's less about what you do and more about who you are doing it with.
To be honest, I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form.
Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy.
The movies I watch and the music I listen to and the books I read - those are important to me. It's very important to me, and I don't know what I would do without those things.
The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.
If you're going to put yourself above everybody else, you might end up alone.
The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.
When I was 20, I went to Paris and tried to meet French women. It didn't work.
I never intended to only do dark, serious things.
When I was a teenager I loved acting, but I really just loved it for myself. I didn't like the fact that anyone else saw the work I was doing. When I moved to New York, I started to realize that I wanted people to see the stuff that I was doing, and I wanted it to mean something to them.
I was just watching baby videos of me and I was obviously an exhibitionist.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
I didn't want to just work within Hollywood when I started a production company. I wanted to be able to collaborate with great artists from all over the world.
Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them.
There's something really appealing about the simplicity of black-and-white images.
Ummm... well, the only thing I want to do is stuff with people who care about what they're doing, which sounds obvious, but it's really not.
The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.
Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else.
Hollywood has the idea that movies have to be dumb. But especially movies for or about teenagers have to be really dumb!
I was such a big Dustin Hoffman fan when I was young.
A lot of the motivation for doing the 'Make 'Em Laugh' on SNL was because I had just finished shooting 'Inception,' where there were zero-gravity scenes and I got into really good shape and was training and did all these stunts. Coming off of that, that instilled me with the confidence to do 'Make 'Em Laugh.'
That is very different from how it used to be in the 20th century. Media was very one way. There's a small little industry. It broadcasted its message and everyone else in the world just had to listen. Now the internet is allowing what used to be a monologue to become a dialogue. I think that's healthy and actually restoring a more natural way.
The Internet is allowing us to get back to what's really more natural, which is that storytelling is a shared thing. It's our natural way to be communal.
The only thing I want to do is stuff with people who care about what they're doing.
Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whether by the fire or at a tavern, and tell stories. One person would chime in, then another, maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process.
I don't blame folks for not wanting to put me in their movies or whatever. I understand if their audiences had an association with me.
A lot of people, most people who are working, they do it for money. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. It so happens that I made a lot of money already, so I don't have to worry that much about it. I wouldn't fault anybody for doing it for the money, but it doesn't interest me right now.
Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels.
While I'm not a celebrity, it's such a weird concept that society has cooked up for us. Astronauts and teachers are much more amazing than actors.
My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail.
Quality isn't about where the money came from or which company gets to put their name on the thing. What matters is who made the movie and why they made it.
I was studying for the SAT's and learning lines.
When I was a teenager, if anyone recognized me for anything I did, it would ruin my day. I couldn't handle it. It was some sort of neurotic phobia. I guess I was paranoid that people would treat me differently, or in an unfair way, because of my job.
When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'
I like making little videos and little records. I've always loved video cameras and four-track cassette recorders, still cameras, anything.
There's no royalty in America, so people deify actors.
I didn't really like doing commercials.
I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.
The media's about to become a lot more effective.
If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.
Movies are different from real life.
I think that anybody who says 'This is the one way to go about being an actor' has probably not done a lot of professional work before.
Normally, it's difficult for me to watch a movie that I'm in.
One thing that stays pretty consistent for all my jobs is, I listen to a lot of music while I'm working.
I have a really terrible sense of direction.
As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.
I was a sort of serious little dude - snobby.
It's a pretty intuitive process, picking the projects that I want to get involved with.
I think some of the best actors ever were little kids.
When I'm on set, I do whatever I can to find my focus.
I stopped getting nervous a long time ago, so any time I do get nervous, which is rare - about work, anyway - I always take that as a really good sign.
There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.
Comedy takes a very specific technique, specific skills.
I hate cars.
I just like to do work that inspires me, and I don't pay any attention to whether it's a high- or low-budget movie.
Press is basically a created story. It's all just stories.
I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe.
I mean, movies in general tend to sort of portray time, space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you, and you're always you.
My personal belief is that everything is always happening all at once.
Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.
Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive, and you never know - the cliche is, I guess, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.
On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.
I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.
Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
Sometimes what someone else does is really not what you expected them to do, which to be honest, sometimes doesn't work.
The career stuff is for business people.
Making checklists of things you're looking for in a person is the numero uno thing you can do to guarantee you'll be alone forever.