It’s all fright on the flight for Joseph
JOSEPH GORDONLEVITT has reasons to be grateful to the Tv comedy 3rd rock From The Sun . . . millions of them. When the actor, now 39, was a teenager he appeared in 139 episodes of the hit show. ‘So, I made some money,’ he told me, noting that the windfall allowed him a dozen years to work with film- makers on low- budget independent pictures.
‘I didn’t start acting in movies that paid me until my late 20s,’ he said — which enabled him to work on early efforts, such as sci-fi tale Looper, by director rian Johnson (who went on to make the Star Wars film The Last Jedi and the recent Knives out murder-mystery).
Another close collaborator is Christopher Nolan, who knows how to shoot classy films that make money. Gordon- Levitt made Inception and Batman film The Dark Knight rises for the director.
So, in a way it didn’t surprise me that the actor chose to work with German-born writer and director Pat r i c k vollrath when Gordon-Levitt made his first film in several years following the birth of his two children.
‘I took two years off acting to be a dad and I knew that when I came back, I wanted to do something that really challenged me,’ GordonLevitt said from his home in Los Angeles.
vollrath’s film 7500, about hijackers who enter the cockpit of a German passenger plane, did just that, and is one of the most compelling movies of the year.
He turns mainstream film-making on its head by using a hand-held camera in an immersive technique.
Sometimes he would focus the camera on an actor’s face for ten, 20 . . . up to 40 minutes at a time, in order to capture one particular, perfect expression that developed. And there was only one set — the cockpit — for filming on 7500, which is available now on Amazon Prime.
‘He encourages you to go off-script and improvise. The only thing we rehearsed were moments where there is violence,’ Gordon-Levitt told me.
And it works, because for 90 minutes I felt I was in that cockpit, too.
‘When you see the name of an actor who was in a Batman movie, you think: “It must be one of those Hollywood action movies where the hero beats up the bad guys,” ’ he said. ‘This isn’t that movie.’
vollrath, who made a superb oscarnominated short film called Everything Is Going To Be okay using the same technique, has created an edge-of-your-seat drama that doesn’t treat the audience like fools.
But Gordon-Levitt does like to lighten up every now and then.
‘Not all the movies I do are deadly serious. I like big popcorn movies, too!’ he says.
His next film, Project Power with Jamie Foxx, is ‘super-fun’. ‘It’s cops, crime and thrills.’