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Movies & TV

TIFF16: Joseph Gordon-Levitt blows the whistle in Oliver Stone’s Snowden

SNOWDEN directed by Oliver Stone, written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans and Melissa Leo. An Elevation Pictures release. 134 minutes. Friday (September 9), 9:30 pm at Roy Thomson Hall Saturday (September 10), noon, Roy Thomson Hall


If you’ve seen the trailer for Snowden, you may have noticed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt comes across a little different than usual.

As the American security contractor Edward Snowden, who became a fugitive when he blew the whistle on the United States’ illegal surveillance of its own citizens in 2013, Gordon-Levitt lowers his voice to match Snowden’s even baritone. But the effect goes beyond his voice it’s startling to see Gordon-Levitt in the first scenes of Oliver Stone’s film disappear behind Snowden’s darting eyes and angular physicality.

“I’ve always been a big fan of performances where the actor kinda becomes a chameleon,” Gordon-Levitt says in an interview ahead of Snowden’s world premiere at TIFF this week. “You don’t see the actor, but you see the character and the story. [And] when it comes to playing Edward Snowden, he’s known all around the world. People have seen videos of him, they’ve heard him speak, so I think it would be strange to watch a movie about him where the actor playing him doesn’t sound anything like him.”

This isn’t the first time Gordon-Levitt has transformed himself.

In 2012’s Looper, he donned prosthetics and used a whispery delivery to play the younger version of Bruce Willis’s time-travelling avenger. The following year he built himself up to play a self-obsessed bodybuilder in his directorial debut, Don Jon. And last year he assumed a sleeker, more athletic form to play Philippe Petit in Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk.

At 35, after more than three decades in front of TV and movie cameras, it seems like he should be a bigger star. But he’d rather be an actor.

“He’s one of the few guys on earth to successfully transition from kid sitcom actor to mainstream adult actor who’s, like, respected and in no way the shitty sitcom version of himself,” Seth Rogen told me in 2011 when he and Gordon-Levitt brought their cancer comedy 50/50 to TIFF. The two reunited on last year’s Christmas comedy The Night Before, in which Gordon-Levitt played an orphan trying to repress his annual trauma for a Christmas Eve blast with his buddies. Even his comedies have a little more heft to them.

Talk to Gordon-Levitt for three minutes and it’s clear why he wanted to make Snowden. It’s an issue he clearly cares about, told by a filmmaker he admires.

snowden_01.jpg

“If you look at American directors – and I mean people making grand-scale Hollywood movies that are meant to entertain a broad audience – there isn’t another filmmaker who is so willing to stand up and say, ‘I love my country, but this thing that the government is doing is not right. It goes against the principle of what I love so much about my country, and we should be taking a look at that,’” he says.

“No one does that as pointedly and as courageously as Oliver Stone. So if you’re going to make the Edward Snowden story, he’s really the only one who could do it.”

I should point out that Gordon-Levitt has worked with Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, both of them the type of director he describes. And I should also say that he doesn’t intend to slight them. But he’s right: Spielberg can only consider the present in the abstract, as in the 9/11 allegories of War Of The Worlds and Munich or the process drama of Lincoln – in which Gordon-Levitt played the eponymous president’s son. And Nolan, with whom Gordon-Levitt made Inception and The Dark Knight, is too cerebral a filmmaker to find the emotional through-line that drives Snowden. 

Gordon-Levitt says he was good to go as soon as Stone reached out to him about the project, even before there was a finished script.

“I was incredibly excited, just being such a fan of his movies,” Gordon-Levitt says. “But the next thing I had to admit to myself was: I don’t know much about Snowden at all. I had heard his name, but when I asked myself, ‘Wait – what was it again that he did, exactly? And why did he do it?’ I couldn’t answer those questions.”

That meant diving into research, and in this particular case Gordon-Levitt had an edge.

“A few months before we started shooting I went to Moscow, and I sat and talked with him for about four hours. Actually, with him and with Lindsay [Mills], who’s played by Shailene Woodley in the movie.”

So how did that go? How did a man so famously concerned with privacy feel about being studied up close?

“The funny thing is, Edward Snowden is always trying to take the focus off himself personally and put the focus on the issues that he’s bringing up,” he says. “But you know, I’m an actor… so obviously I was going to focus on him personally, all the little human details that I could observe.”

Such as?

“He’s really quite warm,” Gordon-Levitt says of Snowden. “He’s really polite, he’s got great manners, which you don’t always necessarily expect from someone who’s good at computers. The stereotype of someone who’s good at computers, of course, is that they lack social grace. He’s sort of an old-fashioned gentleman type. And he’s really, really, really passionate about what he believes in. I mean, obviously he risked his life for what he believes in. 

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“I think, frankly, he’s not exactly comfortable with a movie being made about him and the focus being put on his biography, on nine years of his life and his relationship with his girlfriend, but I think he also accepts that this movie could stimulate the conversation around these issues that he cares about, so he’s willing to put up with it.”

Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour, despite its strong reviews and the Oscar, didn’t get Snowden’s message out to the mainstream in the way he’d hoped. Will an all-star dramatization with breathless espionage and flashy visuals sell it better?

“That’s just it,” Gordon-Levitt says. “I loved Citizenfour, and there is a ton of great information in it – but what people emotionally connect to is not information, it’s not policies, it’s not technology. What they connect to is other people, and this is a movie about a person.”

Gordon-Levitt’s commitment to telling Snowden’s story speaks to his habit of throwing his support behind the projects and the people he believes in. It’s something he started doing  a decade ago when he transitioned from teen comedies to complex adult stories about teenagers in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin and Rian Johnson’s Brick. Around the same time, he launched the crowd-sourced production company HitRecord with his brother Dan, who died in 2010. The company continues with Gordon-Levitt as its public face and constant proponent, encouraging young filmmakers and artists to collaborate on projects. 

There won’t be any HitRecord events at TIFF, he says – a red-carpet premiere tends to demand one’s full attention – “but really, anybody in the world can always contribute to a HitRecord project any day.”

Right now, his focus is on Snowden. And he thinks Toronto is as appropriate a place as any to show it to the world.

“This story is just about as important to Canada as it is to the United States,” he says. “The way these programs work, at least the way I understand them, is that the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand all work in tandem. This is just as pertinent in Canada.” 

Watch for our review of Snowden, coming Friday.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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