"I had actually never seen 'Jersey
Shore' before I wrote this, and that's the truth," said Joseph
Gordon-Levitt to me the other day at an interview during South by
Southwest.
We were talking about "Don Jon"
(nee "Don Jon’s Addiction"), which he wrote, directed, and starred in.
The movie concerns a meathead lothario hailing from New Jersey who loves
his family, the church, and his sweet ride. But his real passions are
trolling cheesy nightclubs for that perfect 10 and trolling the Internet
for that perfect porn video. And yes, he and his buddies tend to sport
the same overgelled hair stylings and douchtastic duds favored by the
Situation and company.
Though Gordon-Levitt might not
have watched the MTV reality show, plenty of his friends who read early
drafts did. "It kept coming up after friends of mine had read it. I
figured I should watch this show, and I did. I couldn't really get into
more than one episode of it."
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Don Jon (Relativity)Instead,
he maintains that the East Coast tough guy is something that's been
around for a long time. "This is an archetype thing that predates
'Jersey Shore' -- starting out with 'Rocky' or 'Saturday Night Fever,'"
he said. "He's really as American as a cowboy."
Gordon-Levitt had been developing
ideas to do a movie about a Don Juan-like character for some time, but
the exact form of the movie didn’t take shape until he starred in
another indie comedy.
"It wasn’t until I worked with
Seth Rogen and his whole posse on the set of '50/50' that I decided that
it should be a character-based comedy," he said. "And that's when I
thought, all right what would that version of Don Juan be? My first idea
was this machismo guy with a gym body and shiny hair, and it instantly
made me laugh and that's where it came from. When something makes you
laugh, you don't ask why."
Don Jon finds that his love of the
ladies and love of the nudie videos collide when he meets Barbara
(Scarlett Johansson), a knockout in a red dress who in her own way
objectifies men just as much as Don Jon and his posse do women, only
through the prism of the impossibly high ideals of romantic comedies
instead of skin flicks.
"Hollywood romantic comedies and
porn are largely about meeting expectations. There are certain clichés,
you always see them. Jon details his checklist of what he wants out of a
porn video. And then he later details the checklist of what you see in
every romantic comedy. And it's the same thing, the love at first sight,
the first kiss, the breakup, the make-up, the expensive wedding, and
they ride off into the sun. These are all these things that you expect.
You start looking for that in relationships. You start trying to
experience those things, but those things aren't real. Those things are
sort of forced and overly simplistic. Real life is much more complicated
than that, and much more unique than that, and actually much more
beautiful than that if you can appreciate it for its unique beauty in
every moment."
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