This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity. See part six here.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Well, they’re two very different things. Don Jon would have been very difficult because we didn’t have anything extra, we just shot what needed to be in the movie. With HitRecord, there’s tons of stuff because people are constantly making different versions of things and remixes that end up in the show. We can only put a fraction of it into our half-hour episodes, so there’s tons of stuff that we can make extra content with.
I know one of the key takeaways for me is that marketing often comes in at the end of the process, but if marketing can be at the beginning of the process and give that license to creative people, I think everything changes.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Yeah, I really like to think and this goes for the show and for the movies too. There tends to be a divide between the art, and then there’s the marketing. I always find that a little funny because marketing is the first thing that the audience sees. You know when we’re writing our movies they’re like, “What’s the first shot?” It's gonna make a really big important impression on the whole experience the audience has with this movie, but the first image they really see is the marketing. So it really is a part of the art to me.
We’re living in a day unlike say 10 years ago, where you can talk directly to 4 million followers whenever you want and that was invaluable to the marketing of HitRecord. But we’re also living the time when you could indiscriminately say anything that popped into your head if you wanted to. I know that you don’t but, I wondered how do you and how should we think about creating an actual quality conversation through these new media?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Wow that’s a really good question. I guess for us it’s having a purpose and this maybe goes against what is most popular on social media. I feel like the most popular stuff is when famous people are breaking down those barriers and saying “Hey, I don’t have a private life, I’m just going to put my whole private life up on social media.” I don’t want to do that, but I find that people get excited when you’re not just selling them something and your only purpose isn’t just to try to make money, but your purpose is something other than that -- something meaningful.
Maybe that’s a kernel that, like it really does have to do with an individual. My Twitter account is called HitRecord Joe, and then we have the HitRecord account. Obviously, way more people subscribe to the HitRecord Joe account than the HitRecord account and because people connect with people. I guess that sounds obvious, but that’s I think a big part of why HitRecord has been successful in doing these kinds of collaborative processes. It’s not like we are Mountain Dew and we want you to design our new can because there’s no human being there. Mountain Dew isn’t a human being, so people don’t aren’t as interested in contributing to Mountain Dew’s collaborative effort.
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Please see part eight of the interview here.