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After taking a couple of years’ break from acting when he became a father, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanted to return to the fray with something that would really challenge him.
Gordon-Levitt is 39. He has been acting since he was 4. As a child, he started out in commercials before becoming a television star in 3rd Rock from the Sun. As an adult, he has made his mark in such varied left-field projects as Inception, 500 Days of Summer, Looper and Snowden. He wanted to make a film that would mark that spot in his life.
‘‘There were, you know, voices in my head saying ‘well, you’ve got to consider your career and your momentum’, ‘you’ve been gone’, blah blah blah,’’ he says.
As fortune would have it, the script that came spinning into his radar was German director Patrick Vollrath’s 7500 ,an almost suffocatingly intense drama about a plane hijacking.
Gordon-Levitt plays Tobias, an American pilot, locked into the impregnable half-room of the cockpit with his German captain and two of the terrorists. People in Iraq have been terrorised for years, they say – now they will get a taste of how that feels.
What is going on in the rest of the plane is anyone’s guess. A closed-circuit camera is trained on the vestibule, so Tobias can see the heavyset man who appears to be the group’s ringleader beating furiously against the cockpit’s locked door. Behind him is a closed curtain.
Tobias’ job is to keep the plane from crashing. He must stay calm. He must also try to negotiate with Vedat (Omid Memar), the youngest member of the terrorist team, who is holding a knife to his throat.
Vedat is hyperventilating with fear and horror as the reality of the plan that seemed so glorious in the conspiratorial shadows of the dark web begins to hit home. He doesn’t want to die. He probably doesn’t want to kill anyone, but he is so distraught he might do anything. Why is he there? The film is simultaneously a nail-biting thriller and an excavation of big questions about blame, guilt and racism.
Vollrath started his career in film as an editor. This is his first feature. What gave him sufficient traction to get his script to an A-list American actor was the fact that he had been nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for his short film Everything Will Be OK. Gordon-Levitt watched it and was struck by the intensity of the performances.
‘‘A brilliant short film, very powerful, very honest and realistic,’’ he says. ‘‘Then, when I spoke to Patrick, he told me how they made it. It’s very different from how movies are usually made.’’
Vollrath doesn’t follow any of the shooting conventions. In most films, Gordon-Levitt explains, an actor has to hit marks on the floor determined by the camera angles, then say the same lines the same way in each take so the different angles can be cut together seamlessly. Vollrath doesn’t do any of that.
Instead he uses long takes – he tells me in a separate interview that the longest one on 7500 lasted 45 minutes – in which the cinematographer follows the actors wherever they go. Improvisation is part of the process. In 7500 this all happens in a space no bigger than a bathroom. Reading the script, Gordon-Levitt saw that it was exactly the kind of challenge he wanted. And so it turned out.
‘‘I can say it was the hardest acting job of my life,’’ he says. ‘‘The approach was all about the actors really feeling this terribly tragic, intense situation in as true and immersive a way as possible. And feeling those feelings was brutal.’’
Vollrath’s story, in which he says he wanted to explore how we meet and deal with violence, is unarguably difficult fictional territory. Any drama in which the threat comes from Islamists may be seen to reinforce the sort of bigotry that makes every person of colour a crime suspect and nudges alienated kids such as Vedat towards welcoming extremists.
As Gordon-Levitt and I speak on the phone, people are protesting in every state of the United States and countries around the world following the police killing of George Floyd; racial profiling is a hot-button issue.
Gordon-Levitt grew up in a politically liberal household attuned to such issues. He has also received, along with many rewards for his acting, an award from the American Civil Liberties Union for furthering diversity and free speech on the sharing platform HITRECORD, which he founded to bring artists together as collaborators. He ticks me off roundly when I mistakenly use the phrase ‘‘Islamic terrorism’’.
‘‘I know I’m being nit-picky, but I do think language is powerful,’’ he says. ‘‘And I really understand when Muslims take issue with calling the kind of extremist criminal behaviour Islamic, so I would just point that out.’’
Quite rightly, I say. A bad slip of the tongue on my part. ‘‘I’m not trying to point the finger at you,’’ he adds quickly. ‘‘I’m just clarifying because we’re having a public conversation right now.’’
So did that plot worry him? ‘‘No,’’ he says. ‘‘First of all, I wouldn’t say the movie is exactly about that. You’ve brought up the fact that the whole story is set in this very tight space and for me that is a central metaphor. This movie is about much more than a simple hijacking. To me, it’s about our state of affairs right now. Planet Earth is feeling more and more like a tight and claustrophobic space. We are all more and more connected with each other and people come from different backgrounds, different places, different cultures. We’re trying to figure out how to live together and how not to destroy each other.’’ And mostly, he says, we’re not doing too well at that.
‘‘There’s still so much strife, oppression, injustice, misunderstanding, bigotry and hatred and resulting violence and anger – and I think the movie is exactly about that.’’
He knows people assume that because he’s done some action movies, he’s going to be the hero beating up the bad terrorists.
‘‘And this movie couldn’t be further from that. It humanises every character. That’s not to say hijacking a plane is OK, but I think it’s always worth asking, ‘Why is that person doing that?’ And when you humanise a character, that’s exactly the question you ask.’’
It isn’t the kind of question that gets asked on the news, either. ‘‘This is the kind of thing storytelling can do.’’
And it’s a challenge thrown out to all of us.
7500 is now showing on Amazon Prime Video.