INT: Levitt/Daniels

Despite their significant age gap, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and
Jeff Daniels share a remarkable and comparable fortitude for acting.
Having started acting at the ripe age of seven, Gordon-Levitt
has made a fine transition from TV to noteworthy Indie films.
Better known for his adorable alien role in “3rd Rock
from the Sun”, he has also earned acclaim for A RIVER RUNS
THROUGH IT, 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU and MANIC.
In addition to commendable theatrical performances,
Daniels’ impressive career catapulted from a long list of
outstanding roles in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, THE BUTCHER’S WIFE and
DUMB AND DUMBER to name a few. Gordon-Levitt
and Daniels joined creative forces and transformed into disabled
characters to collaborate in their latest crime thriller THE
LOOKOUT.

Based on their friendly banter, Gordon-Levitt and Daniels
displayed an eminent camaraderie and mutual respect that existed
both on and off screen. Portraying damaged characters who are
victims of unfortunate circumstances; they are faced with the
challenge of outsmarting outlaws on a bank heist in their upcoming
flick. I had the pleasure of
meeting the talented stars to talk about the preparation for their
respective roles, the attraction to the script and their acting
careers. Daniels was extremely polite and engaging whereas Gordon-Levitt
had an adorable face and boyish charm that could rightfully melt any
girl’s heart. Check out what
they had to say about THE LOOKOUT.

Have you been back to
Brooklyn
lately, Jeff?

Jeff Daniels: I haven’t. But I liked working there; it’s
a nice place. I took the train every day to work, the 2 train. No
limos, no budget. ‘It would really help us if you took the
train.’

I saw you on the street
the other day.

JD: In a fog, I bet.

You were wearing this
black hat. I didn’t want to bother you.

JD: The hat from the Lookout! I’m doing a play right now
and it… I just have blinders on.

Speaking of blinders,
how was the experience of playing a blind character?

JD: [laughs] Very good.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Next table we do he’s going to sit
down and say, ‘I’m doing a play, I have blinders on…’ [looks
expectantly around the room]

JD: I really enjoyed it because I didn’t know how to do it.
The script was well written; the character was well-written, really
good story, a passionate writer/director who couldn’t wait to make
his first movie. I had never done blind before. I had never done the
aging crystal meth guy. There were a lot of specifics to him and I
didn’t know how to do it.

How did you figure it
out?

JD: First you say yes and then you figure it out, because
then you’re challenged, then you’re motivated, then you’re
into it. As opposed to, ‘Oh, you want me to do that thing I did
before, but this time for you.’ I went to the Michigan Institute
for the Blind, in Kalamazoo, Michigan – I live in Michigan – and
they were very helpful. Very helpful not only in the externals, like
how to walk and how to read Braille, all the external stuff that
actors have to do to make it look it authentic so that you don’t
have to think about it, but also in what it does to your psyche.
Your mental and emotional stuff. That was all very helpful.

Is it very technical
playing blind? Do you get caught up in the small details?

JD: You do all the research so you can forget it. It becomes
second nature. Plus, when I had the sunglasses on, I just closed my
eyes. When you go for the glass there isn’t just reaching for the
glass, you sneak up on it. So you have to do it the way they taught
you, otherwise you spill the coffee.

Did you have any
accidents on set doing that? Did you ever spill the coffee?

JD: The kitchen scene was a disaster.

JGL: The tomato sauce.

JD: I was getting pissed off. I had to take the tomato can,
find the [can opener], put it in there, vroom, and by the way
don’t cut yourself because you’re blind, and pour it over here.

JGL: And you had
to talk.

JD: And do some
schmacting at the same time. Joe was very patient with me?

How is it now going
into a stage play?

JD: It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Mainly because
the play is so difficult, and the dialogue is so difficult. There is
no easy, simple way to do this particular play. I tried to find a
way to do the mule on the trail thing that actors do so they can
work eight times a week; I’m going to pretend I’m in pain so I
can go to lunch later with a friend of mine, and you can’t. It’s
pain, pain, pain, curtain call.

Joe, what kind of prep
did you do for your role in this?

JGL: Probably similar to Jeff’s. I hung out with guys that
had been through it. I did some reading also about what,
technically, traumatic brain injury is, but more fruitful was
hanging out with guys and letting it seep in. And learning that you
can’t put any of them in a box and no two of them were alike.
These were all individuals, and hanging out with them, talking with
them, was like talking to a person – which led me to not want to
make the character a simple stereotype but instead make him a whole
human being where one of the things about him was that he was in
this accident, but there are plenty of other things about him.
He’s a unique individual.

Do you find that you
keep aspects of the character in between takes or do you snap in and
out of character?

JGL: That’s a hard one to answer because I don’t know how
to answer it really.

JD: It depends on the scene, doesn’t it?

JGL: It definitely depends on the scene. It also depends on
the character. This character… I guess it’s more of a mood. You
stay in the right mood.

How do you do that?

JGL: I would
always have my eye on making sure I was in the right mood once I got
to work. I didn’t sleep a lot. To me music is a big part of it,
choosing what music to listen to. Movie sets are just logistical
nightmares with a million distractions all the time, so keeping
focus is half the job. Put on headphones and listen to music. Any
time I create a character, picking what music defines that character
is a big part of it for me.

Is
that music that defines it for you or music that the character would
be listening to?

JGL: Sometime
there’s an overlap, but they’re not necessarily the same.

Both of you guys played
disabled folks. Were you afraid of crossing the lines of pathos at
any point?

JD: The thing that I found, and I think Chris [Joe’s
character] was coming to was, ‘I’m normal, what’s your
problem?’ That’s what the blind guys that I worked with said.
‘I’m fine. I’m probably better off and happier and have fewer
issues in my life than you do. I just can’t see.’ You get this
onslaught of positivity from these people – not all, but a lot of
those people. I think Chris was still struggling to overcome that.

JGL: I think it would be easy to fall into that trap. Chris
is sad, and he’s guilty and regretful and ashamed of this accident
that he caused…Even though the story of THE LOOKOUT seems really
sad, it’s actually a really fun movie to watch. It’s this
entertaining, snappy heist, and there are a lot of laughs. People
laugh at him [gestures to Daniels] all through the movie, and they
even laugh at me sometimes. We wanted it to be fun, it’s not a
movie about being disabled at all – it’s a bank heist.

What was it that you
saw about that story that made you want to be in the movie?

JGL: For me, as always, it was the script. I think good
writing is hard to come by. I think writing has been under
emphasized in our business, unfortunately, in favor of marketing
gimmicks and special effects. But Scott Frank really knows how to
write, and it’s a rare gem to come by. And then I met Scott, and
he’s just an inspiring guy. We immediately started talking about
all sorts of things, details he wanted to put in the movie and the
camera and the music, as well as larger issues of that the movie
could make you think. If I can creatively connect with somebody and
I have some material that inspires me, that’s all I care about.

Is it all because of
special effects and marketing or does a lot of it have to do with
audience demographics that have changed a lot in the last fifteen
years?

JGL: You know I don’t believe that. I hear a lot of people
say that it’s the audience’s fault and that the audience wants
to see bad stuff, but I don’t believe it. They want to see good
movies.

Joe, this weekend in
the New York Times there was a profile of you with the headline
‘From Alien Boy to Indie Darling.’ Are you at the stage of your
career where you’re sick of having this teen actor thing around
your neck?

JGL: I’m really proud of Third
Rock From the Sun; I think it’s great.

But do you feel like
you might still get pigeonholed into that teen magazine thing?

JD: Joe won’t allow that. He just won’t allow that.
I’ve seen it and he won’t allow it. That won’t happen.

JGL: I think I’m lucky that Scott Frank and some others
that I’ve worked with in the past few years had their mind on
what’s important, which is not ‘What magazine can we put you
in,’ but what part you’re going to play. When you make it about
the work and not the other stuff, then I think that it all works out
fine.

Where’s the line
between the celebrity stuff and the work stuff? Can you get rid of
all the celebrity stuff and still have a really great career in the
business, as it is these days?

JD: [raises hand] Yeah. It’s kind of freeing in a way, I
must say.

JGL: Making good movies is not a short cut but it works fine.

JD: Being around for a while I can say that having chops goes
a long way. Nicholson told me on TERMS [OF ENDEARMENT], ‘This is
the pro game.’ When you’ve got a 100 million dollar movie, or
you’ve got THE LOOKOUT and you’re carrying the whole movie,
it’s two seconds left and you’ve got to hit the three pointer.
It’s what we do every day. [Joe] had to do that every day, and if
you’re just a celebrity, just a hunk coming off a really popular
television show where you’re photographed in gauze, you can’t do
that. The people around you can see that you don’t have it. For as
much as they want to make him into something like that, it’ll
eventually go away and they’ll find somebody receptive to that.

Scott Frank said that
one of the biggest challenges in this film was the weather, that it
was extremely cold.

JD: It was cold.

JGL: I liked how cold it was. It allowed me to focus – like
I was saying, keeping your concentration on a movie set and staying
in it is at least half the battle. We’d have our jackets on and be
waiting, and then when it was time to roll we’d take our jackets
off and be fucking freezing. It’s not hard to be in it when
you’re really cold.

JD: The fewer things you have to act, the better. That’s
the difference between stage and film. If it’s supposed to be cold
and you’re out there and it’s ten degrees in Winnipeg, oh good.
I don’t have to shake, I don’t have to make believe cold. You
use it. It all makes it easier.

What do you guys have
coming up next?

JGL: I did a movie called KILLSHOT, where I play a
sociopathic killer in a Cadillac with Mickey Rourke, and I did
another one called STOPLOSS, about soldiers coming home from Iraq.

Your grandfather was
blacklisted in the industry because of his politics. You’re doing
this movie, which deals with how soldiers are treated by the
military, which could be very controversial, and has political
overtones. Do you think it’s important to be political in
filmmaking?

JGL: That’s a tough one to answer. I think any good story
should speak about the whole world, and it’s up to the audience to
make that inference.

JD: If being political means asking questions, getting to the
end and having questions and throwing that in the faces of the
audience so that as they’re walking out they’re asking
themselves, then yes.

JGL: One of the things I like about THE LOOKOUT is that
people do disagree about certain things. They’ll talk about Luvlee
a lot. Did she really care about him or was she just using him? I
like movies that make people ask questions that make people wonder.

You couldn’t really
tell if Luvlee was good or bad but other than that she cared about
you.

JGL: That speaks to Isla Fisher’s talent as an actress. It
would have been easy to play that character simplistically, but it
was her finesse that makes it more mysterious.

Jeff, you have MAMA’S
BOY coming up. Who do you play in that?

JD: Diane Keaton’s love interest. It’s John Heder and
Diane and me. Lot of fun. Comedy. Loved working with both of them,
but because of the whole Woody Allen connection and THE PURPLE ROSE
OF CAIRO, I loved working with Diane.

Did you compare Woody
war stories?

JD: Not really.
How deeply do you want to go into it? She would mention him –
‘Oh that’s something Woody would say.’ It’s strange because
we had a walk and talk from the car to the door on our date
(and she doesn’t think she’s an actress; they’re doing
an AFI tribute to her in a couple of weeks and she says, ‘Oh I’m
not an actress. I’m a personality. I turn it up, I turn it down,
that’s what I do. La dee da.’) and you’re walking to her door
and you find yourself doing Woody! [begins a series of impressive
Woody-like gestures and then slaps his own hand] Stop it! Stop it!