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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is leading a double life. The busy actor, who most recently starred opposite actress Zooey Deschanel in the acclaimed 500 Days of Summer (his performance earned him Golden Globe, People’s Choice and Independent Spirit Award nominations), has a long, impressive résumé that includes Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (his feature film debut), Spike Lee’s World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna and Christopher Nolan’s new film, Inception, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard, due to be released in July 2010.

Off-screen, Gordon-Levitt is equally busy running hitRECord.org, a website he created as an outlet for filmmaking and a creative community where actors, producers, writers, artists and directors can team up to refine each other’s work.

“But it’s not an exhibition site, like YouTube,” stresses Gordon-Levitt, who was recently named by The Huffington Post as one of the top-10 “Game Changers” in entertainment because of hitRECord’s creative model. “You don’t just show off your work. Rather, it’s a place where all sorts of artists can get together and collaborate on a project.”

The actor started hitRECord.org as a “new model” and complement to his more traditional movie career. “Instead of going the usual way with a production company in Hollywood, I wanted to open it up to anyone in the world who wants to collaborate with me on projects,” he explains. “There are so many great artists out there who may not have the Hollywood connections or agents and so on, but now with all the cheap digital technology, they have access to tools to make movies or record music.”

Gordon-Levitt is a big fan of Final Cut Pro, which he uses along with Macs and Pro Tools in his own home setup. “But some people do great work with almost no equipment, while others have pretty professional setups,” he points out. “So we run the gamut on hitRECord, and it’s a great blend of people and different levels of equipment. And it’s the collaborative process that’s important, not what equipment you have. So that attitude to creating stuff was the genesis of the whole site, which has evolved and grown a lot over the past five years.”

The result has one foot in the traditional filmmaking world and the other in this new approach to collaboration. “The idea is that people can now create something great in their home office or living room, and anyone can join this community,” Gordon-Levitt adds. “And we can collaborate on anything—short films, music, spoken word, photography, graphic art, writing—that you can upload to the Internet. And then if I can use my position in the traditional industry to take something we’ve done and turn it into a moneymaking production, then we split the profits, with half going to all the contributing artists and half going back to hitRECord.”

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