"Get Joe rolling and it's only a matter of minutes before the conversation is ping-ponging between Buddhism and Fellini, French poets and Russian clowns. But his brightness is so shiny and childlike, as he swivels around in an ergonomic chair at his house in the Los Angeles hipster playground of Silver Lake, that even his eyelids seem to grin. 
Start him talking about his new movie, Inception, the mystery-shrouded summer thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, the auteur behind The Dark Knight and Memento, and the 29-year-old actor appears to hover in a Tasmanian Devil funnel of static electricity. 
"He never loses his sense of enthusiasm—truly boyish enthusiasm for the fun thing we're doing," Nolan says. "When you work on big movies, everybody gets jaded, myself included, and you have to remind yourself: If we were 10 years old, this would be pretty damn exciting. Joe never seems to forget that." So, yes: Joe.
He started by playing a beaten-up gay hustler in 2004's Mysterious Skin, paying his own way to Kansas to visit the places where the characters lived. Then he played a Chandlerean teen gumshoe in Rian Johnson's Brick, an accident-haunted and brain-damaged bank janitor in Scott Frank's The Lookout, and a tormented Iraq War veteran in Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss.
Last year he radiated dork charm as Tom, Zooey Deschanel's delusionally romantic officemate, in (500) Days of Summer, a role that landed him a Golden Globe nomination. Whenever the camera caught Joe in the crowd at the ceremony, he looked as though he'd geared up for the red carpet by chugging a quart of bliss juice.
When Christopher Nolan and his stunt director approached Joe about the role in Inception, they told him it would hurt. "I wanted to paint a grim picture of it," Nolan says. 
"The worse I made it sound, the more Joe would grin." There would be pain. There would be wire work—jumping and fighting in a Fred Astaire-ishly spinning room. Joe would need to wear elbow pads, knee pads, torso pads. Avoiding injury would require relentless training. "They were basically saying, 'This will be really hard', " Joe recalls. "And I said, 'I will do anything at all, and I will never complain once.' Chris just sort of smiled and said, 'Get it in writing.'" 
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a clip from Hitrecord.org "Morgan & Destiny's Eleventeenth Date - The Zeppelin Zoo"Really, though, it's more accurate to say that his drug of choice is the Internet—in particular a website called hitRECord.org. Joe launched the site about five years ago, and it has expanded into a hive of creativity, with more than 7,000 participants collaborating to make songs, images, stories, and short films.
This is what gets Joe fired up. "The most valiant thing you can do as an artist," he says, "is inspire someone else to be creative."
He has instigated a spate of short films—some starring friends like Gugino and Channing Tatum—and he does a lot of the shooting and recording and mixing right here in his black-curtained cavern. 
Through hitRECord he wants to attract ideas from people all over the world and make original movies without a whit of Hollywood interference. A psychoanalyst might observe that the kid who kept hearing no from Hollywood has sublimated his annoyance by conjuring up an alternative salon where everyone always hears yes. "If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job," he says. " Source: www.details.com
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