JOSEPH Gordon-Levitt is sitting in front of his large and impressive-looking drum kit.
"This is my quiet room," he says with a laugh. "It's the only place where I can guarantee no interruptions."
This is because he is father to two young sons, both under the age of five, with his tech executive wife Tasha McCauley. The little ones are the reason we haven't seen Gordon-Levitt around for a while. He took a break when he became a new dad, but now he's back again and keen to flex his acting chops.
He plays a pilot whose plane is hijacked in the tense but thoughtful thriller 7500. The film is shot entirely in the cockpit of the plane, with Gordon-Levitt largely alone and much of the drama of the hijacking taking place beyond his reenforced locked door, as he watches in horror on a video screen.
"I took a couple of years off of acting when I had kids and I really wanted the first thing back to be a creative challenge," he says, "something that I wasn't paying attention to when I've got my career building and I've got to factor in my momentum and all that.
"I just wanted to focus on the art of it and find something that would really challenge me and treat me as an artist and this movie very much did."
It is directed by first-time film-maker Patrick Vollrath, who also co-wrote the script, and Gordon-Levitt said it was the German's intense style that helped him dive into such a complex headspace.
"It has a lot to do with how Patrick shoots, it's incredibly immersive. I've never done anything where I had the chance as an actor to be so fully immersed in the character and the reality.
"Because of the improvisational style and the way he shoots, it really allowed me to go there and it was challenging because we are portraying an extreme story. But I like a challenge, both as an actor and sometimes as a movie viewer as well."
It sounds like a lot to take on for a first job back after years away from your craft, but for 39-year-old Gordon-Levitt, who has been working since he was a child star from hit 1990s sitcom Third Rock From The Sun, via hit films such as Inception, Looper and (500) Days Of Summer, that was the point.
"I've been doing this for a long time, I've acted in a lot of different movies and I really want to find something I've never done before and this really did that," he says.
"And I think movie viewers will have the same thing. I love a good popcorn movie but I also really love a movie that will challenge you, make you feel things in a really powerful way, and this does that."
Vollrath, who penned the film with co-writer Senad Halilbasic, says he wanted to explore the mindset of people who might perpetrate the kind of hijacking we see in 7500.
He says: "At the time I started writing there was a lot of young people leaving Austria or Germany and they joined Isis and we had a lot of 16, 17, 18-year-old boys mostly, who joined this terrorist group.
"I really wanted to tell a story about them, I wanted to explore why they did it and what motivates them and then I really wanted to tell a story about how to react to a terrorist attack and how to break a circle of violence and how to not take revenge. This was the basic idea that let me start working on this.
"I really wanted to put a human face to terrorism, I wanted to start with the point where you just see the people how media presents them, often in low resolution pictures, and started to make him a human being and a troubled human being, a misguided human being, but still a human."
The fact that the film is all confined in one space, often with just a solitary character, seems particularly fitting for the times we are currently living in. It was shot a few years ago, but with so many changes to our daily lives, not to mention the way future movies will have to be made, it almost looks like it could have been made now.
"It's funny because in this moment I think a lot of us are feeling claustrophobic," Gordon-Levitt muses. "Staying at home during a pandemic, facing isolation. And 7500 I think takes advantage of that claustrophobic feeling, of being a whole movie all set in a cockpit.
"I think that claustrophobia serves as a great metaphor for out planet actually. Our world is getting smaller as we get more and more connected and we are all coming from different backgrounds, different places, different perspectives and we have to figure out how we are all going to get along in this shrinking home, Earth.
"We can't leave, we can't go anywhere else and that is a lot of what this movie is about, how people approach each other in this tiny space. They bring their prejudices, at first they label each other but eventually, hopefully, they find human commonalities that Patrick is talking about and I think the claustrophobic feeling really underlies what the story is about."
It almost seems a bonus that people will be watching the film in their confines of their own home, as cinemas around the world remain closed.
"I think the experience of watching this movie at home is in a way ideal," Gordon-Levitt says. "I like watching movies at home but I have my rituals – I don't have my phone, I turn off the lights, I make sure that it's loud and I can really immerse myself in a movie-watching experience.
"Even if I'm home, even if I'm just watching on my computer, I use headphones because I like really getting into a movie and that is what a cinema does automatically, it forces you into that immersive experience because you've driven somewhere, you've gone somewhere, you're in a room with other people.
"I think this movie would be frankly an odd one to put on in the background but I think it will be a powerful, emotional experience to watch at home."
:: 7500 is out now on Amazon Prime Video.
