I love popcorn movies and movies that really make you think... this is both
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the pilot of a hijacked plane in the tense thriller 7500. He talks to LAURA HARDING about being stuck in confined spaces
JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT is sitting in front of his large and impressive-looking drum kit.
“This is my quiet room,” he says with a laugh. “It’s the only place where I can guarantee no interruptions.”
This is because he is father to two young sons, both under the age of five, with his tech executive wife Tasha McCauley.
The little ones are the reason we haven’t seen Joseph around for a little while. He took a break when he became a new dad, but now he’s back again and keen to flex his acting chops.
He plays a pilot whose plane is hijacked in the tense but thoughtful thriller 7500.
The film is shot entirely in the cockpit of the plane, with Joseph largely alone and much of the drama of the hijacking taking place beyond his re-enforced locked door, as he watches in horror on a video screen.
“I took a couple of years off acting when I had kids and I really wanted the first thing back to be a creative challenge,” he says, “something that I wasn’t paying attention to when I’ve got my career building and I’ve got to factor in my momentum and all that.
“I just wanted to focus on the art of it and find something that would really challenge me and treat me as an artist and this movie very much did.”
It is directed by first-time film-maker Patrick Vollrath, who also co-wrote the script, and Joseph said it was the German’s intense style that helped him dive into such a complex headspace.
“It has a lot to do with how Patrick shoots, it’s incredibly immersive.
“I’ve never done anything where I had the chance as an actor to be so fully immersed in the character and the reality.
“Because of the improvisational style and the way he shoots, it really allowed me to go there and it was challenging because we are portraying an extreme story.
“But I like a challenge, both as an actor and sometimes as a movie viewer as well.”
It sounds like a lot to take on for a first job back after years away from your craft, but for 39-year-old Joseph, who has been working since he was a child star from hit 1990s sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun, via hit films such as Inception, Looper and (500) Days Of Summer, that was the point.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve acted in a lot of different movies and
I really want to find something I’ve never done before and this really did that.
“And I think movie viewers will have the same thing. I love a good popcorn movie but I also really love a movie that will challenge you, make you feel things in a really powerful way, and this does that.”
For Patrick, who penned the film with co-writer Senad Halilbasic, he wanted to explore the mindset of people who might perpetrate the kind of hijacking we see in 7500.
He says: “At the time I started writing there was a lot of young people leaving Austria or Germany and they joined Isis and we had a lot of 16, 17, 18-year-old boys mostly, who joined this terrorist group.
“I really wanted to tell a story about them, I wanted to explore why they did it and what motivates them and then I really wanted to tell a story about how to react to a terrorist attack and how to break a circle of violence and how to not take revenge.
This was the basic idea that let me start working on this.
“I really wanted to put a human face to terrorism, I wanted to start with the point where you just see the people how media presents them, often in low resolution pictures, and started to make him a human being and a troubled human being, a misguided human being, but still a human.”
The fact that the film is all confined in one space, often with just a solitary character, seems particularly fitting for the times we are currently living in.
It was shot a few years ago, but with so many changes to our daily lives, not to mention the way future movies will have to be made, it almost looks like it could have been made now.
“It’s funny because in this moment I
A lot of us are feeling claustrophobic... Staying at home during a pandemic, facing isolation. And 7500 takes advantage of that claustrophobic feeling...
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as seen in new movie 7500