Joseph Gordon-Levitt Character Quotations

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.

When I'm on set, I do whatever I can to find my focus. One thing that stays pretty consistent for all my jobs is, I listen to a lot of music while I'm working. Because when there's all this stuff going on, for me to be able to put on headphones and listen to music helps me keep my focus,. A big part of creating a character for me is finding the general palette for what kind of music I'm going to be listening to.

I love her [Kimberly Peirce]. Incredibly intense is a good way of describing her. Brutally honest. Really sharp. She's a director for actors. That's what she's best at, sitting down with an actor and just getting to the heart of what a scene is. And getting to the heart of not just what the scene is and the character is, but what you are, and how to build that bridge between the "me" and the character, and those emotions.

I suppose the longer anyone spends on earth, the closer we all get to becoming superfluous characters.

The cool thing about my character was that it's not that digital. I get to put hours of prosthetic makeup on and see a different creature altogether. I've seen how he looks and it's really cool.

I just love to act. It's my favorite thing to do in the world, and what keeps it interesting, to me, is the creative challenge. So, different kinds of characters, that's what I just love to do.

But I would encourage anyone who has a crush on my character to watch it again and examine how selfish he is.

Every director is different. And all the movies are very different, and the characters are very different.

He [Mark Webb] is very savvy, technically, he's shot so many videos, he knows how to get what he wants. The surprise, of course, is that he's also an extremely humanistic story-teller. He's obsessed with story and character, and not just making it look right, which is a double-thred that's rare in directors.

I find the voice is what I look for first and foremost with just about every character I play.