TIFF 2016 Interview | Joseph Gordon-Levitt on ‘Snowden’ and the Future of the Internet

Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t afraid of the future, but he’s a little more cautious about it nowadays. 

The star of Snowden, the new biopic about infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden, premieres this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it tells the story of a man who took a stand against widespread online surveillance on American citizens. It’s the latest in a long line of provocative based-on-a-true stories directed by Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon, W.), and it bears the unmistakable stamp of a storyteller who wants you to question authority, and consider the negative ramifications of living our lives online.

But Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t just play Edward Snowden. In real life he also founded and owns HitRecord, an online production company that brings artists together using the power of new media, to bring projects to life that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. It’s an endeavor that symbolizes a great deal of optimism about the internet, and the place it will continue to have in our lives.

I sat down with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Los Angeles a little more than a week before Snowden’s big debut at TIFF 2016, to talk about the production, but also to pick his brain about the impact Edward Snowden’s revelations will have on our future, and how we can all help the internet evolve into a more empowering place.

Snowden opens in theaters on September 16, 2016.

Open Road Films

Crave: Here’s my thing with a movie like Snowden… when you’re making a political movie, especially one [about events] that happened so recently, it seems like there’s a danger you’re not going to get the context. Historical context, social context. We’re still reacting to Snowden. Was that a concern when you were making it?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Well, you know, this movie is more than a political statement. I mean you’re right, there are the politics inherent because the character is politically polarizing, but this is a drama about a guy, ultimately, and I think the story’s fairly universal. All dramas hinge on a character who changes and this story shows a nine-year span of this guy’s life. He begins one way, he ends another way. That’s a drama.

He begins, my interpretation of the drama, is he begins one kind of patriot and he ends a different kind of patriot. There’s one kind of patriotism where you just believe that everything your country does is right no matter what, without asking any questions. There’s another kind of patriotism which is only possible in a free country like the United States, where you do ask questions. You hold the government accountable.

This is what’s so great about the United States of America. This is why I’m so thankful to have been born and raised here. This is at the heart of the founding of this country, is the founders made sure that the people would be able… would have the power and the right to hold the government accountable. Not everybody in the world has that privilege. There’s lots of other people who live other places who don’t have those rights. So to me this is a drama about that, and that’s not of the moment. That’s as old as the idea of democracy, which goes back to ancient Greece.

But it is taking place at a certain time, a very tumultuous time, and you’re working with a director who has been exploring America’s relationship with its own government a lot. What sort of conversations did you have with Oliver Stone? Did you only talk about the drama, or did you talk about what Snowden’s journey means?

Oh well sure, Oliver can’t have a conversation without getting into politics. He’s obsessed with it. And this is why I think he’s sort of the perfect filmmaker to tell this story, and maybe the only one who could do it right. I don’t know if there is really another American filmmaker who makes movies at this scale, makes movies on a big a scale that are intended to entertain a broad audience, who is willing to stand up and say “Hey, I love my country but this thing that the government is doing is not right and we should look at it.” I don’t think there is another filmmaker who does it as pointedly and as courageously as Oliver Stone does.

Open Road Films

Well certainly not as directly. Allegorically, a lot of people are willing to… even Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies have a lot of social commentary.

Yeah but very indirectly. There’s no explicit, there’s nothing explicit in it.

That depends on who you think Bane represents.

Well just that, so it’s a representation. There’s metaphors. Oliver Stone is willing come out and [say it]. Look, obviously I love Christopher Nolan movies and I find them very meaningful, but Oliver Stone, again, he’s really the only one who will directly say it.

Is it comfortable working with him? You said you can barely have a conversation with him without it turning to politics, and I know a lot of people in social situations who go, “Oh god, we’re going to talk about politics?”

Oh! [Laughs.]

“I’m going to get judged for everything I voted for.” Is it easy working with Oliver Stone or is it intense?

He’s wonderful to have a conversation with. It is intense! That’s for sure. He’s an intense guy. But no, I mean it’s fascinating to have conversations with him, especially if you like movies. He knows everything about movies. It’s funny, if you go to his house, I remember noticing he has a ton of books – I always think that’s telling, when someone has a lot of books at their house – and he has a lot of books about movies, but he has WAY more books about history. He really knows his history, and I always find someone who’s knowledgable like that, who’s well read like that, to be… it’s always great to have a conversation like that.

Open Road Films

Did he recommend books or movies in preparation for this role, to get you into the right mindset?

Sure. You know, the movie we actually sat and watched together right before we started shooting, we were at the hotel, was Paths of Glory, the [Stanley] Kubrick movie with Kirk Douglas. Which is indirectly related but it’s a military movie. There’s really a military flavor to Oliver Stone’s telling of the Snowden story, and it’s no coincidence that this is the guy who made Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. But a lot of people don’t know this, and I did not know this before doing this project: Edward Snowden enlisted in the U.S. army in 2004.

I actually learned that from the trailer!

Yeah! I didn’t know either. And he really has that mentality, and if you think about what he did, it takes a certain kind of person to risk their life to fight for what they believe in. Whether you agree or disagree with what Snowden did, you have to admit he did put his life on the line. He didn’t just talk the talk, he really walked the walk.

The converse of that, all the people who did the things that Snowden exposed, they thought they were doing the right thing. They thought on a world stage it was necessary to collect all of this data. When that came out, obviously it wasn’t that long ago, were you shocked or was there a part of you that was just like, “I assumed they already were spying on me?” That was my first reaction…

I’ll tell you what I found shocking, and maybe I shouldn’t be shocked about this, but I found it shocking that they lied about it. There’s this hearing that happened, a hearing before congress. This was a few months before Snowden made his disclosures…

It’s in the movie, isn’t it?

It is in the movie, yeah. The Director of National Intelligence, who is named James Clapper, was called to testify before congress and he was asked, is the NSA collecting millions of records of American citizens? And he said no. It was a baldfaced lie. That to me is shocking. And again, maybe I shouldn’t be shocked that someone is lying in Washington D.C. but to me that’s scary. When government officials like that are lying on that scale, under oath, that’s when our democracy is slipping away from us.

So yeah, I didn’t know that. In 2013 I hadn’t heard that story. In 2013, I’d maybe heard Edward Snowden’s name but I hadn’t taken the time to really look into it and so I didn’t know about that. I didn’t know about a lot of the things, and so it wasn’t until I really started looking into it more for myself that I was shocked by a few of those things.

Open Road Films

I was watching the movie and it struck me that there was an attitude towards the internet, which has changed the world, but there is a lot of anxiety and paranoia about it on a governmental level. But then you’ve got HitRecord, which is very positive about it.

Thank you.

I admire the concept behind it so much, I think it’s clever and interesting, but how do you reconcile those two ideas: that the internet is this huge scary place and is the world even better off without it… and also it’s a wonderful place to be creative?

[Laughs.] It’s a great question. And that’s I think sort of the question of our time, right? Every powerful technology can be used to our benefit or it can be used to our detriment, and we’re the ones who are going to decide this. I like to be optimistic. I tend to think that overall this incredible new technology will have a more positive impact on humanity than a negative impact.

But I’ll admit that before working on this Snowden project I never really stopped to think about the potential downsides of the internet. I just saw it as, “Wow, this is the most incredible, miraculous thing! We’re all coming together, we’re all connected, we’re have access to all this knowledge!” I never really thought about how it might be leveraged in a negative way. And so I think it’s important to just keep your eye on both. We have to be realistic. I think it’s good to remain optimistic. Like, Oliver is very pessimistic. Oliver really thinks that, like, this new technology will be our doom, you know? And he and I respectfully disagree on that.

I think it can still be a good thing, and I know Snowden thinks that too, and he and I have talked about it. Actually he contributed to a HitRecord project all about this exact question, and it was cool to hear him speak optimistically about it. The HitRecord project was, we just put out a challenge, saying like, “Do you think today’s technology is good or bad for democracy?” and lots of people answered the question lots of different ways and we made a series of short films about this in partnership with the ACLU, but Snowden contributed, which was cool. And his answer was, it had both sides. He acknowledged the downsides and he obviously used mass surveillance as an example of how it can be used negatively, but ultimately he was optimistic and he said “Ultimately I think what technology can provide us is greater liberty, and that’s what democracy is all about.”

The converse of that, then, is that there’s so much information that it’s sometimes hard to know what to do with it.

So true.

Open Road Films

An important piece of information can just be a drop in a well, and we forget about it in a day. That’s what I wonder about. What’s the solution to that? There’s a line Snowden says a couple of times in your movie, where he says his greatest fear is that nothing will change.

Yeah.

“Oh no, Snowden released all this stuff about mass surveillance! But then the Kardashians did something really weird and now we’re distracted and we’ve moved on.” Is that the danger of the internet, do you think? And how do we even fix that?

Well for one thing, things have changed. We’re now examining the Snowden story… you’re right to say that we don’t have a generation of hindsight, but even in three years of hindsight we can see that the tides have turned post-Snowden. The USA Freedom Act was passed that ended one of the mass surveillance programs that Snowden blew the whistle on, his first leak which revealed that all the phone calls in America were being collected, the metadata was being collected. That program was ended. Now that’s just one of many programs so it’s not to say it’s all done, but that was the first time that the power and reach of the intelligence agencies had been limited, as opposed to expanded, in decades. You know, the former Attorney General has admitted that Snowden performed a service for the country. Even the President has admitted that in certain respects, the government was overreaching. There has been change even in the short amount of time since he did what he did. So that’s one thing.

Your question though is a really good one. With this superabundance of information and stimuli, how do we stay on top and find anything meaningful? Well, that’s up to us, right? I don’t know that… I mean, maybe technology is going to help and maybe there will be artificial intelligence filters that help filter out the noise somehow. I don’t know. That’s a little more… that’s probably further down the line. For now I think it’s just worth us all thinking about it for a sec. It’s so new, man. We’re the first generation to ever get this! When I was a kid, I remember growing up and having thirteen channels, and that’s what you could watch!

I remember when the internet was a thing at the library that wasn’t that good.

There was that. There was that phase too. It’s really up to us to kind of develop a new culture. This a lot of what HitRecord is about for me. The technology has advanced but in many ways the culture is sort of lagging behind the technology. In many ways we still treat the internet the way that we used to treat TV except that it’s millions of channels instead of just thirteen channels. But the internet is fundamentally different than TV and we shouldn’t treat it that way. We shouldn’t just consider ourselves spectators and couch potatoes. We can participate and be creative and productive with each other in whole new ways that we’ve never been able to do before. A lot of what we do on the internet doesn’t take advantage of that because we’re not used to that, because we grew up watching TV so that’s what we’re used to doing. But I think the next generation, who didn’t grow up with television, I’m excited to see what they do.

It’s going to be really weird.

[Laughs.] I think it’s going to, yeah, it’s going to blow our minds.

Open Road Films

My last question: we’re talking about all these wonderful potentials, but again, if we flip that back, all that potential is looking at us. You just made a movie about Edward Snowden. You’ve talked to Edward Snowden. Has the idea that the government might have you on a list somewhere affected you and the way you use the internet, for example? Like, “This guy’s been on the phone with Snowden. We’d better monitor everything Joseph Gordon-Levitt does.”

Mmm-hmm…

“Oh, that was a good pitch for Sandman… that’s a shame that didn’t happen…” Has that affected you in any way?

[Laughs.] Honestly not really. Not in that way. I think that doing this movie though has made me more thoughtful about the way the internet works in general, and not just because of knowing that the government has access to snoop on all of us. Because the government isn’t even the biggest snooper, you know. The private companies are doing at least as much snooping and we’re giving them permission to do it! So that’s like one thing. I know back when I used to join a new internet thing and I would check the box to agree to the terms of service, I never used to think twice about what I was agreeing to. And having done the Snowden movie, I do try to think about it a bit more.

Which isn’t to say that I’m capable of reading all that legal language. Only a lawyer would be able to really read those contracts, and that’s, I think, something we should change a culture. We should demand that these companies explain to us what we’re agreeing to in plain language and not just give us this legalese that you couldn’t possibly decipher. Because most of us don’t… like I say, I never thought about what I agreed to when I signed up for my email account or my Facebook page. I never thought about that. Now I ask myself, well what is this company really after? How does this company make money? These kinds of questions are worth thinking about because it’s how the internet works and what our new culture is built on top of.

We’re offered a lot of free things on the internet. Nothing’s free. That stuff’s not free. There’s money being made. But most of us, and myself included, I never thought about, “How IS that money being made?” Post doing this movie, I do think more about that and I think the more we all kind of think about that and have these conversation, the more we’re going to be able to sort of control our own destinies, and how the internet evolves, and whether it’s working to the benefit of all of us or just to the benefit of a few of us.

Thirteen Must-See Films at TIFF 2016:

Top Photo: Open Road Films

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved, Rapid Reviews and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.