Is this the face of a Lothario?

Directorial debut

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has now entered the ranks of first-time feature directors with Don Jon, an edgy romantic comedy he has starred in and also written.

But in a way, it’s the culmination of a directing education that stretches back to his appearance in Robert Redford’s 1992 big-screen adaptation of the fly-fishing-brothers-in-Montana tale, A River Runs Through It.

“The cinematographer came up to me and said, ‘You have to hit your mark exactly,’ ” Gordon-Levitt said, recalling how, at 10, such an admonition would have had him fixating on the coloured tape on the floor he was meant to stand on, thoughts of dialogue and motivation out the window. Then Redford approached him: “Bob said, ‘I never hit my mark.’ ”

Gordon-Levitt, whose professional acting career had begun four years earlier, and included more than a dozen appearances on commercials and television, would later realise that Redford was showing him how a director helps a child actor give his best performance. “He was putting the priorities back in line for me,” Gordon-Levitt said. “It was like, ‘Yeah, it’s important to try and be in the right place, but let them worry about making the shot technically look right. Your job is to focus on the acting.’ ”

Since then, Gordon-Levitt has absorbed directing tips from all manner of gifted filmmakers. Steven Spielberg, who directed him in Lincoln, taught him that a relentlessly upbeat attitude will spread to a cast and crew. “You’d think: ‘Oh. Steven Spielberg. He must be a little blasé about it by now,’” Gordon-Levitt said. “But he has so much fun, all day, every day.”

The director Gregg Araki showed him that with a labour-of-love project, like the haunting 2005 drama Mysterious Skin, meticulous preparation is crucial. Christopher Nolan, who directed him in The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, shared important technical know-how, like never ever use a tow rig for scenes in cars because the images will end up looking distractingly phoney. Nolan also had another lesson to impart: a little encouragement goes a long way. On the London set of The Dark Knight Rises, Gordon-Levitt told Nolan he’d just finished the first draft of a script he planned to direct as well as star in.

“He didn’t laugh at me,” Gordon-Levitt said. “He just said, ‘Great,’ and then started asking me very detailed questions like, ‘What are you going to shoot it on?’”
Recalling this exchange, Nolan said, “Joe’s smart, the kind of guy to wear a lot of hats.” Don Jon received promising notices at the Sundance Film Festival in January (when the title was Don Jon’s Addiction).

Not only was the movie included in many “best of” Sundance lists, but critics hailed Gordon-Levitt’s ability to transform his lead character — the brash New Jersey gym rat Jon Martello, who loves scoring babes, bragging about his conquests and stoking his Internet pornography habit — into the warm centre of what unexpectedly evolves into a funny-sad coming-of-age tale.

“Self-assured” is how Variety’s Peter Debruge characterised the actor’s filmmaking abilities.“One of the things you get from him as a director is a very clear vision,” said Tony Danza, who plays Jon’s oafish father in the film, adding that Gordon-Levitt’s clarity of focus as a youngster was best explained with an anecdote from 20 years ago. At the time they were both appearing in an update of the 1951 classic Angels in the Outfield. One day, Danza asked Gordon-Levitt to join him on one of their regular inline-skating excursions around the Oakland Coliseum, and “He told me, ‘No, today I’m going to follow the director around and try and figure out what lens he’s going to use.’ Even as a 12-year-old, he was a serious kid.”

Since 2009, he’s been on a winning streak, appearing in more than a dozen features (50/50, Looper and Premium Rush, to name a few). He’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice.

Yet, wind back about 10 years and you’d find Gordon-Levitt at a different stage of popularity. In the final season of 3rd Rock From the Sun, the NBC sci-fi comedy that put him on the map, he asked to be let out of his contract so he could enrol at Columbia University. He enjoyed his book-toting civilian status until, as a 21st birthday present to himself, he bought a copy of the editing software Final Cut Pro. He promptly fell in love.

“It was like, ‘I could be writing this essay, or cutting this little video I’m starting to make,’ ” said Gordon-Levitt, who dropped out of Columbia and returned to his native Southern California to start acting again. Though he’d been gone only two years, he was treated like a has-been at auditions.

“It was a weird part of his career — people didn’t see him in that movie-star way they see him now,” said Araki, who was shrewd enough to notice that not only were Gordon-Levitt’s acting skills intact but that in enlisting him to play a gay rent boy in Mysterious Skin he’d also be giving this still-youthful veteran a chance to turn his image on its ear.

What it means to be desirable is just one of the many themes Gordon-Levitt explores in Don Jon. Another is grief, and Gordon-Levitt admitted that he drew a character’s roiling, unpredictable emotions from what he went through after the 2010 death of his older brother, Daniel. Always close, the two founded HitRECord, a website that invites artistes from many disciplines — writing, animation, direction, editing — to collaborate on projects.

Indeed, Gordon-Levitt’s project after Don Jon is HitRECord on TV, a variety series. In part, it will spotlight live-action and animated shorts produced through the site. Gordon-Levitt will host. Will it also follow a traditional variety show format? Will there be sketches, cameo appearances, a bit of dance?

“We’re going to have all those things,” Gordon-Levitt promised, then offered up The Muppet Show, of all things, as a template. “It’s like a variety show, but it’s not a traditional variety show because they’re all Muppets. This will be a variety show, but the difference isn’t Muppets but that it’s all collaboratively made.”

Somewhere down the line, though, he also plans to make a documentary about Daniel, a professional fire-spinner known as Burning Dan, using the videos, taped conversations and photos that his brother stockpiled on HitRECord. One of Daniel’s favourite things, said Gordon-Levitt, was to turn on a small digital recorder and just let it run “for hours and hours and hours” as he talked to people.

“To make all sorts of stuff out of this material,” said Gordon-Levitt in a low, earnest voice. “It will be a lifelong project for me.”