Joseph Gordon Levitt Quotes

• It's fascinating to watch a show develop from a script to a 22-minute comedy. I try to learn as much, and ask as many questions, as I can without being annoying.
• The whole concept of celebrity pisses me off. 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.
• Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. 'Brick' was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In 'Brick,' the world is born from the words.
• To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse; we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.
• Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels. Actors were poor. Celebrities used to be kings and queens. Then the United States abolished monarchy, and now there's this coming together of show business and celebrity. I don't think it's healthy. I don't want to sound self-important, but all these celebrity shows and magazines - it comes from us, from Hollywood, from our country. We're the ones creating it. And I think it works in close step with a lot of other bad things that are happening in the world. It promotes greed, it promotes being selfish and it promotes this ladder, where you're a better person if you have more money. It's not at all about the work itself. Don't get me wrong. I love movies. But this myth of celebrity has nothing to do with movies.
• At the heart of the movie, to me, is there's these two characters that can have one horrible, traumatic experience but react to it in opposite ways and it shows how different people see things differently. Well, today, there's a president in my country that doesn't understand that and he thinks that if you don't see it exactly his way, you're wrong and evil. And that's not the way the world works. There can be one event but everybody who sees it sees it a little different or sees it a lot different and that's what the movies about and that's what damn Dubya needs to understand. Or let him not understand it and go about his ways and go back to his ranch and never bother us again.
• 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.
• I don't blame the people for the fact that so many movies are bad. I think there's a corrupt, perverted, lazy and sloppy attitude that's pervasive in the movie business. The whole entertainment business is kind of crumbling around us.
• One of the hardest things about playing a soldier is kinda acknowledging that I've never done, and might never do anything that brave.
• The Lookout was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Partially because both Brick and Mysterious Skin were four to five week shoots, and The Lookout was nine or ten. So there's the marathon aspect, as well as the fact that Chris Pratt is having a harder go of it than either of the other two characters ever did. You know, waking up in the morning is difficult for him. Putting a sentence together is difficult for him. Getting dressed properly, driving a car, all these things. He can do them fine, but it's just much harder than it is for a normal person, so I had to try to make it hard for myself somehow. So it was challenging.
• My freshman year (at Columbia) was the longest break I'd had from acting since I was six years old. 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. A lot of people have told me Mysterious Skin meant something to them. And that meant the world to me.
• What does it mean, HIT RECORD? Different things. It can be a noun, a musical recording that sold a lot of copies. It can be a verb, to hit record, to start recording, to make a record, be it musical, visual, textual, or anything else. That moment when you hit the REC button, when the tape starts rolling, or the camera clicks, or even when somebody writes something down, it always makes my heart beat a bit harder. What do you suppose could change if we all started to HIT RECORD?
• The only thing I want to do is stuff with people who care about what they're doing. 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.
• One of my favorite movies when I was sixteen was Sling Blade. That whole year actually, right when I turned sixteen, was this spike in indie movies where Pulp Fiction had just come out and made a hundred million dollars, so all the studios said, 'Shit, let's go out and find independent movies,' or they started making their own 'independent movies,' and that one year there was Sling Blade, Swingers, Fargo, The Usual Suspects, Big Night, Trees Lounge - these are the ones that I can think of off the top off my head. That particular year had cool movie after cool movie, and I had just turned sixteen and I was so stoked to be able to drive and go see them.
• It's a really smart, faithful adaptation of the book. The book is such a tight page-turner. The character I play is an extreme guy. He's a killer. He wants to be Jesse James. He grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and wants to be that. Then he meets Mickey Rourke's character, who's named The Black Bird and he wants to partner up with him and be a criminal and kill people. He's a psychotic and very bad guy:

joseph gordon levitt