- Please welcome the one and only, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
(upbeat lively music)
Oh my God! I'm really excited.
- Hi, everybody!
(audience cheering)
- Thank you for having me.
- Oh my gosh! I'm so excited. - Me too.
- I've loved you my whole life.
- That's how I feel about you, Drew.
Honestly, it's really true.
- Thank you. - Yeah.
- It's not easy.
I remember saying to my daughters,
they were in the back of the car and we were talking
about someone, and I said,
"You know, it's hard to grow up, at all,"
"let alone in front of everybody."
I had done TV movies, feature films,
commercials, before ET.
I'd already been at it for years.
- [Joseph] Yeah.
- And you had too before "Third Rock".
- [Joseph] That's true, yeah.
'Cause I started working when I was six,
and I started Third Rock from the summer when I was 13.
- So how did you learn boundaries?
'Cause even as a parent now,
when my kids were young and people will be like,
"Well, you know, boundaries."
And I was like, "No".
I didn't have any as a kid, I wasn't in a job that did,
my parents didn't.
- My wife and I talk about boundaries a lot,
that it's important to give lots of playroom,
but it's also important that the boundaries don't move.
We read this study.
It was a really interesting thing
where they conducted this study with rats, right?
And they put a wall around them,
and then they had another group of rats
that didn't have a wall.
And the rats that didn't have a wall bunched closer together
and were kind of much more nervous,
and didn't play as adventurously,
as the rats who had a wall.
Because if you know where the wall is,
if you know where the boundary is,
then you're free to play within those boundaries,
if you don't know where the boundary is,
then you're kind of uncertain the whole time,
you don't know where the boundary is.
- The walls do make you feel safer.
And I love that analogy, it will forever live with me.
- Thank you. - Oh, good.
- That's so perfect. - I'm so happy.
(audience applauding)
I am happy.
- Well, there is a story about a casting director.
- [Joseph] Oh, yeah.
- And I was wondering if you'd tell it
because it seems like it was a moment
that may have changed your life.
- Yeah, it really did.
This is a story about the very first audition
I ever went on.
It was for a Red Lobster commercial.
(Joseph laughing)
And I had to go in and sing and I got in there and froze,
couldn't do it.
And once I had kind of finished tumbling my way
through the song, the casting director looked me
right in the eye and said, "That was great, thank you."
And what I love about this is
that he didn't have to do that.
And it would've destroyed me at six years old,
and I probably never would've gone
on another audition again 'cause I would've been traumatized
and I wouldn't have become an actor.
But because this guy took an extra couple of minutes
in his day to be kind, now I get to be here
and doing this and talking to you.
(audience cheering)
I don't know him.
I don't know who it was, but I'm so grateful to that guy.
- Where is he? - I don't know.
Help me find him.
- I would love that. - I know, right.
- If you're that man, if you're the man
who set the example of how we should all treat each other
and changed the trajectory of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's life,
making all of our lives better, please find us.
- Yeah. - The drewbarrymoreshow.com.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Red Lobster commercial.
He was the guy.
You changed his life and you changed all of our life for it.
Thank you for sharing that story.
- Yeah. - May we all remember it
because how we treat each other
has the most tremendous effects on the rest of our lives.
Which leads me directly to asking you about Steven Spielberg
- And working with him. - Yeah.
- May I ask what your experience working with him was like?
And you were about to go into directing yourself?
- That was the thing.
Yeah, I was about to direct my first feature film, Don John,
when we shot "Lincoln", when I got to work with him.
And so, obviously, I have the opportunity
to observe one of the greats.
- Yeah.
- I was just watching him like a Hawk the whole time.
And one of the things that I noticed was,
he didn't have a shot lists.
And at one point, I actually worked up the courage
to say like, "Hey, Steven, do you have a shot list?"
And he was like, "Well, no. Here, lemme show you."
"I like to just watch what you guys do first."
"And then I figure it out."
I'm like, "You just figure it out,"
"these Spielbergian cinematic shots that you make."
He hasn't listed them, he hasn't story boarded them.
He can just kind of whip them up.
He watches what the actors do and he's like,
"The cameras should go here."
He can just see it.
- Now, switching gears a little bit.
"Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber",
I am five episodes in.
- Oh, nice. - I'm so into it.
- Oh good. - Oh my God!
- How do you like it?
- Tell me how you play someone so insatiable?
It's so good.
- Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber,
he made the fastest growing start-up in history.
There's something really admirable about that.
- [Drew] He changed the world.
- Yeah, the question is, what was the cost,
and who had to pay that costs?
Because a lot of the folks, especially, the drivers
who are working with Uber or for Uber,
the employees of Uber, they really kind of got a bad deal.
And why can't we reward companies
who do great things but don't have to step on people,
even if they're a little bit less successful?
(audience applauding)
(upbeat lively music)