Joseph Gordon-Levitt ignored Christopher Nolan's warning and directed himself in Don Jon
Christopher Nolan cautioned Joseph Gordon-Levitt against both starring in and directing his first feature. Gordon-Levitt did it anyway. Don Jon, a comedy-drama about a New Jersey ladies' man whose screen habits wreck his idea of intimacy, cost about $5 million and earned $41 million worldwide in 2013.
Gordon-Levitt started making notes for the film in 2008, with Rian Johnson reading drafts and reviewing several cuts. He credited the short films he had directed for his collaborative media group HitRecord with teaching him what he needed. Shooting began in May 2012, and the film premiered at Sundance on January 18, 2013, where one Entertainment Weekly editor ranked it among the best films of the festival and others described it as a lighter take on the 2011 drama Shame.
Jon Martello is a bartender who loves his gym routine, his spotless apartment, his 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle, Sunday church with the family and a steady stream of hookups, yet finds real encounters disappointing next to pornography. He falls for Barbara, played by Scarlett Johansson, an affluent woman who wants a serious romance shaped by the movies she adores. She steers him into a night class and away from cleaning his own flat, which she considers beneath him. When she discovers his browsing history, she ends things.
The turn comes through Esther, an older classmate played by Julianne Moore, who is grieving a husband and son lost in a car crash fourteen months earlier. She challenges Jon's claim that he is not hooked and suggests he go a week without the videos; he cannot. Their frank, emotional relationship teaches him that he had focused only on himself, and for the first time intimacy feels like connection. His sister, silent for most of the film, finally tells their parents that Barbara simply wanted someone she could control.
The ratings board first gave the film an NC-17. Gordon-Levitt trimmed the most graphic clips to secure an R, worried the harsher rating would make people think the movie was about pornography rather than about relationships. Critics were broadly positive, with an 80 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes, although opening-weekend audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it just a C+.
Source: Don Jon
