If you follow Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career at all, you probably are not surprised by the news that he is set to direct and star in his first feature length film. In running the online collaborative production company HitRECord, he has been experimenting with short films for quite a few years at this point, many of them going on to be featured in film festivals around the country.
Now, according to Deadline, JGL is finally moving forward on directing and starring in an untitled comedy from a screenplay that he wrote about “a modern-day Don Juan, and his quest to become less of a “selfish dick.’” It will co-star Scarlett Johansson.
“I spent a year working with Chris Nolan, Rian Johnson, Steven Spielberg, and I did my best to pay attention,” JGL told Deadline. “I’ve also been making short films for a long time now, I’ve directed a ton of them, and that is a huge part of why I feel comfortable and confident in this. … This is the first time I finished a feature film I thought was good enough to make into a movie … I wrote myself a helluva role, one that people wouldn’t necessarily thought of me for.”
He said that he now may have to step down from his cameo in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, but said that the director was “so cool and encouraging” about the potential schedule conflict, saying that JFL struck him as “the kind of guy who would want to direct.”
Either way, it will be interesting to see if he can pull off having written, directed, and starred in a feature film. I am saying with a resounding yes that he will.
