His web connects them all! Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rian Johnson are teaming up once again. Except this time instead of Gordon-Levitt starring in a film helmed by his longtime friend and collaborator, Johnson is going to produce a film helmed by Gordon-Levitt via his T-Street Productions company. The star will be Gordon-Levitt's Dark Knight Rises co-star Anne Hathaway, and the film is reportedly a thriller about artificial intelligence, according to Deadline.
There aren't many other details available about this film yet, but the movie is shaping up to be a big collaboration within the Rian Johnson stable of players. The filmmaker's Poker Face star Natasha Lyonne shares a "story by" credit on the project with Gordon-Levitt and Kieran Fitzgerald, who co-wrote the script with the director. Fitzgerald co-wrote Oliver Stone's 2016 film Snowden, in which Gordon-Levitt played the titular role. They're not kidding when they say Hollywood is all about making connections. You never know with whom you may end up co-writing the next big sci-fi cinema experience.
The last time Gordon-Leavitt directed a feature film was his 2013 comedy Don Jon, in which he co-starred with Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore. Don Jon premiered at Sundance to largely positive reviews (though not at The A.V. Club, where we gave the film a C+; A.A. Dowd wrote that "On page and screen, Gordon-Levitt mostly fails to transform his bulky title protagonist into a multi-dimensional figure"). That movie was produced by Ram Bergman, the producer behind all of Johnson's films. In 2019, Bergman and Johnson formed T-Street Productions, which is now producing Gordon-Levitt's AI film. And so we've come full circle on Rian Johnson, not unlike the movie Looper, directed by Rian Johnson, produced by Ram Bergman, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
