Joseph Gordon-Levitt Reveals Logic’s Process for Creating HitRECord Collab

Hey what's up guys? We're hanging out in the Young Hollywood studio with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Or Joe. You can just call you Joe.

You could. Yeah. You can call me José. Giuseppe. José. Joseph.

You look the same as you did years ago.

That's very nice of you to say, I think.

You just have good genes. When I was 17, people thought I was 11 and that was hard. But then I guess you could play a bunch of different ages at that age, which is

Yeah, I guess. You can play a bunch of different It's not so easy when you're trying to like talk to girls and you're 17 and they think you're 11. You're like, hey, I can drive, okay? Okay?

Oh my gosh, you're great at acting, obviously we all know that, but you're a great producer and director too.

Oh, thank you.

If you haven't seen Don Jon, that's one of my favorite movies.

Really? Oh, you were about to say it's your favorite movie and then you

I don't want to be like too much. I don't know what it means if that's my literally my number one favorite movie, I must say something weird about me. It's one of my favorite movies. It's one of my favorite movies. Because the character you created is like so specific and detailed, Don Jon, it's such a good movie.

Thank you.

And you get to use your producing and directing skills with HitRecord, which is such a cool company.

Thank you, thank you.

Break it down for us a little bit.

Well, HitRecord is is been a thing that I've cared very, very deeply about for many years now. It started as this tiny little hobby. It's grown and grown. And the idea is that it's it's a community of people online that are creative but instead of just posting things that they make on their own, it's a place where people come to make things together. And that feels really nice because often times on the internet it feels sort of like a popularity contest, you know, you're like, oh, hey world, look at me and the thing I made, you know, and it's uh it's different when you come to HitRecord. It's more like, hey, okay, cool, what are we doing? Like, let's let's make something together, you know. We made a whole TV show this way that won an Emmy once. Uh it was called HitRecord on TV and we've we've done lots of different music before, but this is the first time that we've had a music project that was led by an artist like Logic. He started just a little bit of the song. He spent like a half hour in his studio bus kind of like starting a song and then said, okay, now you guys play on top of it. If you're a fan of the rapper Logic, I mean, he's like, you know, he's about to put out a novel. He wrote a novel. He seems really smart. Yeah, he's really smart and just the way that he writes his raps is like it's not even really right to call it writing. He just like kind of loops a beat and then just listens to it and he starts saying stuff that's not even words. He starts just saying gibberish but that's to the rhythm of the song and then slowly but surely kind of starts putting words down to it and he's holding his phone and he'll write something down quick if he likes it and kind of just iterates on top of that. It was really cool to see that.

Yeah. When you're not acting, what do you do for fun? I mean, I guess that's really fun for you, but what else do you do for fun?

That's the thing. I have this really lucky situation. I mean, so HitRecord didn't start out as work at all.

It's like your passion project, right?

At the beginning of HitRecord, it was it was just because I couldn't get a job acting. That's actually what it was. And like I knew that I wanted to be creative, but when you're an actor waiting for someone to cast you, like you're kind of stuck. And so HitRecord was just this thing I would say to myself of like, I got to push the button. I'm going to take that round red button and I'm going to hit it. And that's when I I taught myself how to edit, I started making little videos and writing stories and recording songs and and that's what it was. It was just the stuff I would do when I wasn't working for the fun of it. And then it grew. This community online started to grow and then eventually it became a production company and now it's this whole collaborative media platform and it's grown and grown. And now we're doing a song with Logic. Um, but uh

You can tell you're really passionate about this just by the way you talk about it and you light up. That's a great thing.

Yeah. It is. I'm I'm I consider myself very lucky. Like you asked me what I do for fun. That is that's what I do for fun. Yeah.

Well, after people watching you on TV and movies for years, they probably think they know everything about you, but what would be something people would be surprised to know about you? Like do you get carsick? Are you afraid to fly?

I do get carsick. How did you know? I get carsick. I always wish that I could read in the car. I feel like that's a superpower. When I see people reading in the car, I'm like, oh man, if I could read in the car, I would I would be such a literate person.

Right? You could study your lines in your limo.

No, I'd like read things. Like, first of all, come on. But I mean I'm not a well-read person actually relatively to like I have friends that they've they've read a lot and I always feel bad because A, I can't read in the car. But B, like I've read a lot of, you know, scripts and sides for auditions. I've spent so much time reading scripts of movies that I didn't end up being in because they didn't give me a part or whatever. And I mean if I stacked up all those scripts over the years and years that I've been doing this and instead I had been reading great books, I would be a very well-read person.

Well, thank you so much. It was so great to meet you.

Thank you. Great to meet you.

Good luck on all your success. You guys have to check this out. Band together. Stuck in my head. It's on the HitRecord YouTube channel.