Most child stars don’t make it. Once they find fame and fortune they tend to walk down some dark paths. Perhaps its finding fame too young, perhaps it’s due to people always saying yes and not learning limits. Whatever the reason, it happens far too often and the list of child actors making it is slim.

But once in awhile someone breaks though. And after watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick, Mysterious Skin, and now The Lookout, I know he’s the real deal and someone who is going to have a long career.

In The Lookout Joseph plays a popular high school athlete who gets into a brutal car wreck. Afterwards he’s left with brain damage and he’s struggling to have a normal life. As he tries to maintain, he takes a job as a janitor at a bank where he ultimately finds himself in a difficult situation. And yes…I’m trying to be vague.

Ultimately the entire film rests on Joseph’s shoulders as he’s in almost every frame of the movie. Thankfully his performance was great and extremely believable.

Below is the interview I did recently with Joseph (in roundtable form) and he talks about why he took the role and the challenges that went with it. He also gives updates on what he’s working on as well as all the normal stuff.

And if you’d like to listen to the interview click here – it’s an MP3.

Also here is the link to the trailer.

The Lookout arrives this Friday at theaters everywhere.

some slight spoilers are discussed

How much research did you do into conditions like short term memory loss?

Well, I did a fair amount of research.  I did some reading.  My favorite book I read was called ‘The Man With the Shattered World’ which was about a veteran coming back from World War II.  The guy in that book suffered an injury far more severe than Chris Pratt’s.  But, the more fruitful preparation I did was just hanging out with different people who had been through similar things to the character.  They were all different.  What I kind of figured out was they all were individuals and trying to put any of them in a box or a category was about as fruitless as trying to put anybody in any box or category based on any label that you can put anyone under.  That led me to really want to make the character not just a stereotype. Not, ‘okay, here’s the disabled young man’ but to make him a person.

How much are you like this guy in real life?

Plenty. I get lost all the time.  My sense of direction sucks. I remember time real well.  I think everybody’s mind works really differently.  I remember time real well and remember space pretty poorly. 

What did you like about the character?

What I like is that he doesn’t give up.  He doesn’t’ quit.  I think that’s kind of the most charming thing about him.  Even though it’s really difficult for him to do a lot of the things that we just take for granted, like waking up in the morning, like following a conversation and driving to work; things that we can do without thinking about them, he has to focus on them real hard.  And, by the end of the day he’s exhausted.  He has to work really hard but he doesn’t quit.  He continues to try and that’s really admirable.

When you talked to some of these brain damaged people, what did they tell you about this sort of trapped element?

You know we didn’t really talk that much about it and I wasn’t really that interested in talking about it.  We talked, here and there a little bit but mostly we just hung out and talked about music or girls or anything else I would normally talk about with a buddy.

What did you get from hanging out with these people that helped you play the character?

It just sort of osmodically seeps in that way. I don’t know.  It’s hard to describe because I don’t really know exactly how it works when I’m trying to come up with how to play a character but reading and speaking explicitly about specific character traits I think can often lead to being too self-conscious whereas just hanging out with somebody, just getting a feel for them and then thinking of them, that’s kind of more what I did in this particular case.

Did you put yourself into a self-imposed isolation to get your head around this guy and did you have trouble getting out of that?

Yeah, I was pretty depressed afterwards.  I really was for a few months.  It didn’t really stop until I took another job.  It was a bit lonely.  We were up in Winnipeg.  I was with people all the time and I made really good friends with the people I was working with but I didn’t speak much with other people I was close with.  I’m not sure why.

Before the accident, this character had a lot of friends in high school….

That’s what makes the character so interesting.  I almost had to come up with two characters.  There’s the guy before his accident and there’s a guy after his accident.  You can see flashes of his old self come through now and then.  Scott Frank, the director and I talked a lot about the balance between when to see the little flashes of his old self.  I actually did a lot of work even though there’s only a few scenes in the movie where you get to see younger Chris before his accident but I did a lot of work thinking about that other guy because that’s who the present guy is always thinking about.

What about your physicality?  I loved the way you walked.

Oh thanks.

That was really good.  Did you get that from talking to somebody?

I got it from walking next to somebody.  One of the guys in particular, I tried to snap his walk up directly.  And, I did ask him about it actually.  He said that that part of how he got hit affected the part of the brain that helps you balance and so he doesn’t go up on his toes when he walks so much as his whole foot would hit the ground at once.  It’s a little, subtle thing that you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for that sort of thing.

You seem to be drawn to unconventional teenaged roles..

Well, Chris isn’t a teenager.

Well, young roles.

I just am drawn to good stuff.  It’s not so much whether it’s conventional or not.  The Lookout is quite conventional in a number of ways.  It’s a classic heist.  Does it break with convention? Sure, but I think that’s what makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others. 

Well it still breaks with tradition like Mysterious Skin did and Brick.  You seem comfortable in that kind of work.

Well, they broke with some traditions and followed other traditions, both of those.  There’s the oldest tale in the book, the hooker with the heart of gold and the same with the detective story but, then deviate in ways and I think that’s part of what makes an interesting script; what traditions it chooses to follow and what traditions it chooses to break with.  If there’s a good piece of writing and a filmmaker that inspires me, then that’s the kind of part I want to try to get.  I don’t so much think about ‘well, what are people going to think of this?’ Or ‘Is it going to obey the proper rules?’ I just try to concentrate on whether or not I think it’s good.

Have you ever had an incident in your life that spun you off in a total different direction?

I have those every day.

You are just going all over the place and don’t know where you are going every day?

[big smile] I try not to. 

What was your initial reaction to Scott’s script and what drew you to him as a filmmaker?

The script drew me to him as a filmmaker.  My initial reaction was I was just damn excited.  There’s very few good scripts.  I read a lot of scripts and most of them suck and this one, I was immediately up and pacing around and thinking about things and feeling things and then I met him and we immediately started talking about it.  He started telling me how he wanted to shoot it.  He started telling me about how he wanted to put guitars in the score.  We started talking about issues of responsibility and forgiveness and I could tell that he was really excited with what he was doing and in love with this baby of his that he’d been working on for so long and that’s the kind of thing I want to be involved with and, luckily, I was able to audition for him too and was lucky enough to get the part.

Did you have a different relationship with Jeff than you had with Matthew while you were shooting?

That’s interesting, yes.  I think I really bonded with Jeff in rehearsal.  It was ‘hi, how are ya’ and that was all cool but once we started going over the stuff, the scenes themselves, that’s when I really started to feel like I was getting to know him.  Matthew, I think I got to know at the bar [laughs], inebriated.

Who was the better drinker, you or Matthew?

Matthew. 

What about working with Isla?

The sweetest girl.  The thing about the set was it was a pretty masculine thing; a story about a guy who was a jock and his roommate’s a guy and it’s a bank robbery with a gang full of guys and there’s guns.  It’s a pretty manly movie and so, when Isla would come it was such a gentle and lovely relief just to be able to have a female around.  It meant so much and she, in particular [laughs], I think she did it on purpose, just for kicks but I would do my best throughout the day to try to not be too articulate, to try to not let my mind go into too intellectual a place but she’s so sharp and I think just to mess with me, she would draw me out whether it be through a sarcastic remark on through an observant observation about somebody, she would draw me out and I would find myself talking how I didn’t mean to be talking, and she called me on it and say, ‘Joseph, you’re not retarded enough.’

Did she go to the bar with you?

No, she wasn’t around enough.

What was it like shooting in Winnipeg? At another press junket a journalist who was from Winnipeg said it was a strange place to live.

It was cool to me, I mean I was working all the time. I have a great time. There’s tons of hockey there which is perfect, because I was playing a hockey player, and I think they’re about as enthusiastic about hockey in Winnipeg as anywhere in the entire world. There are minor league rinks on every corner.

What do you have next?

There’s another movie called Killshot; a ride in a blue Cadillac with Mickey Rourke.  We shoot up 7-11 stores and then there’s another one called Stop Loss made by Kimberly Peirce of Boy’s Don’t Cry about soldiers coming home from Iraq.

Do you play one of the soldiers? That’s definitely a different thing from what you’ve done, what was the feeling there?

It’s hard to be a soldier.

Did you go to boot camp for it?

Yeah, we did a simulated boot camp.

What was that like for you?

It was really rewarding and enlightening and very hard.

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