The career stuff is for business people.
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt
On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.
Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive, and you never know - the cliche is, I guess, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.
I never intended to only do dark, serious things.
The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.
I mean, movies in general tend to sort of portray time, space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you, and you're always you.
The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.
I have a really terrible sense of direction.
It's a pretty intuitive process, picking the projects that I want to get involved with.
One thing that stays pretty consistent for all my jobs is, I listen to a lot of music while I'm working.
When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
I like making little videos and little records. I've always loved video cameras and four-track cassette recorders, still cameras, anything.
The media's about to become a lot more effective.
The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.
Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else.
A lot of the motivation for doing the 'Make 'Em Laugh' on SNL was because I had just finished shooting 'Inception,' where there were zero-gravity scenes and I got into really good shape and was training and did all these stunts. Coming off of that, that instilled me with the confidence to do 'Make 'Em Laugh.'
Making checklists of things you're looking for in a person is the numero uno thing you can do to guarantee you'll be alone forever.
Sometimes what someone else does is really not what you expected them to do, which to be honest, sometimes doesn't work.
Comedy takes a very specific technique, specific skills.
Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.
Press is basically a created story. It's all just stories.
My personal belief is that everything is always happening all at once.
I hate cars.
As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.
Normally, it's difficult for me to watch a movie that I'm in.
When I'm on set, I do whatever I can to find my focus.
There's no royalty in America, so people deify actors.
I was studying for the SAT's and learning lines.
Quality isn't about where the money came from or which company gets to put their name on the thing. What matters is who made the movie and why they made it.
To be honest, I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form.
I didn't really like doing commercials.
Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy.
I don't blame folks for not wanting to put me in their movies or whatever. I understand if their audiences had an association with me.
I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.
Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.
I just like to do work that inspires me, and I don't pay any attention to whether it's a high- or low-budget movie.
I stopped getting nervous a long time ago, so any time I do get nervous, which is rare - about work, anyway - I always take that as a really good sign.
I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe.
I was a sort of serious little dude - snobby.
Movies are different from real life.
I think some of the best actors ever were little kids.
I think that anybody who says 'This is the one way to go about being an actor' has probably not done a lot of professional work before.
When I was 20, I went to Paris and tried to meet French women. It didn't work.
When I was a teenager, if anyone recognized me for anything I did, it would ruin my day. I couldn't handle it. It was some sort of neurotic phobia. I guess I was paranoid that people would treat me differently, or in an unfair way, because of my job.
I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.
If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.
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.
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.
