Joseph Gordon-Levitt can trace back some of his most important, life-changing moments to a T-shirt from 32 years ago.

Long before he appeared in a movie at the Sundance Film Festival, proving to the world (and himself) that he was more than just a comedic child star, and years before he premiered his first directorial effort there, or broke hearts with Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, or used it to unveil his homemade, crowdsourced storytelling platform HitRecord, Gordon-Levitt first heard about the festival by way of a souvenir from the Sundance Kid himself.

“There’ve been lots of momentous occasions at Sundance for me,” says the actor, now 41, who returns to it this weekend with the musical drama Flora and Son. “But, you know, the first time I ever heard about Sundance was when I was 10 years old, and I was in A River Runs Through It, directed by Robert Redford. I remember he gave me a Sundance T-shirt—and I didn’t even know what it was.”

That was in the summer of 1991, the year Redford’s long-running Utah film gathering rebranded itself with the name of his charismatic outlaw from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Over the next few years, the festival would rock the entertainment industry by launching outsider filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, and Paul Thomas Anderson—and countless others in the decades to come.

Gordon-Levitt idolized the festival as a teenager, dreaming of acting in a film that had Sundance’s hardscrabble indie cred, and Redford’s T-shirt gift was the start of that fascination. “I don’t think he thought that I would know,” Gordon-Levitt says. “I was just a kid.” That kid also had no idea how crucial the festival would become for him and his career. What follows below are just some of those memories. 

“What would be cool is if I could find that shirt,” Gordon-Levitt says. 

2001 — Manic

Gordon-Levitt became a household name as one of the baffled aliens posing as humans in the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, but in 2001, the show was ending after six seasons, and the then 19-year-old was at a crossroads.

“I was very glad to be on 3rd Rock From the Sun. I loved the show, but it was very different from the movies I was watching at that age,” he says, citing Reservoir Dogs, Sling Blade, Swingers, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape among his favorites. “All I wanted to do was be a part of those kinds of movies.”

They weren’t all Sundance alums, but the festival was considered the ultimate platform for that type of indie drama. It was the antithesis of high-gloss of Hollywood, a proving ground for unknown or overlooked talent. “All I wanted to do was go act in Sundance movies,” Gordon-Levitt recalls. “And no one thought that I could do that. They knew me as the kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun and 10 Things I Hate About You, and even my agents would give me condescending smiles and say, ‘What you need to do is get on another sitcom and you’ll make a ton of money.’ Or ‘Here’s another light romantic comedy.’ I didn’t want to do any of that.”

What he booked instead was a role as an explosive, volatile boy who is incarcerated with other struggling kids in a psychiatric ward in the drama Manic, costarring Don Cheadle and his future (500) Days of Summer collaborator Deschanel. “I was finally going to Sundance in a Sundance movie,” Gordon-Levitt says. “It was my first time and it really just lived up to everything that I had hoped that it would be.”

He wanted the “indie” experience—and he got it. “It wasn’t at one of the bigger, nicer venues. Manic was shot on digital camcorders, which at that time was still kind of new and relatively low quality. There was a subsection for these micro-budget digital movies. But just being there was just so meaningful to me.”

IFC Films bought the movie, but it wasn’t a huge sale, and it didn’t get a massive release. What it did was show that Gordon-Levitt had potential, proving something to the industry and also his own representatives. “That’s all true,” he adds. “And maybe even more importantly to myself.”

2005 — Brick and Mysterious Skin

After Manic, Gordon-Levitt enrolled in college and still found himself struggling to find work, but that film’s Sundance debut gave him a calling card he didn’t have before. “It changed everything for me,” Gordon-Levitt says.

After watching it, he says, casting director Shannon Makhanian recommended him to two filmmakers—Rian Johnson, now known for Knives Out and The Last Jedi, and Gregg Araki, best known for the Gen X cult-favorite The Doom Generation. They decided to give Gordon-Levitt the lead roles in their new films, and both projects returned him to Sundance in 2005.

In Araki’s Mysterious Skin, Gordon-Levitt played a young prostitute who is grappling with a traumatic, abusive past, and in Johnson’s neo-noir Brick, he was the hard-boiled high school version of Humphrey Bogart, trying to solve the murder of a classmate.

“When Manic played, it was almost more of a personal turning point than it was a career turning point. I still couldn’t get any roles in the kinds of movies that I wanted to be in for years,” he says. “Brick and Mysterious Skin, that’s when things started to happen in industry terms. Sundance 2005, when both of those movies played, was the beginning of the industry seeing me as something more.”

Brick entered the festival with surprisingly low expectations, even from Gordon-Levitt’s team. 

“You know, Brick is an unusual movie, even for Sundance,” Gordon-Levitt says with a laugh. “It’s written in this highly stylized way by this kid named Rian that no one had ever heard of. I remember my agent and manager at the time trying to manage my expectations. They’re like, ‘Well, it’s really cool, but it’s very, uh, you know…out of the box, and we don’t want you to get your hopes up about how audiences are gonna receive this.’ They clearly watched it and were like, This isn’t gonna go anywhere.”

But it was an audience favorite at the festival, winning a special jury prize. “I remember watching Brick for the first time, going in with those kinds of expectations. Then sitting in the audience, they were clearly in it. They were laughing in the parts that were funny, they were quiet in the parts that were dramatic. You could feel that energy during the suspenseful parts. It clearly played.”

2009 — (500) Days of Summer and Sparks

Just as Manic won him roles in Mysterious Skin and Brick, those two movies led to him earning major parts in two other films—2007’s The Lookout, directed by Scott Frank (who would go on to cocreate The Queen’s Gambit), and 2010’s Inception, the literal mind-bender from The Dark Knight filmmaker Christopher Nolan.

Gordon-Levitt’s return to Sundance came in 2009 with the big(ger)-budget Fox Searchlight movie (500) Days of Summer, which reunited him with Deschanel in the story of a whirlwind romance that isn’t the love of either of their lives but still changes them both in meaningful ways. The bittersweet rom-com was like a victory lap at the festival for Gordon-Levitt, who had tried so hard for so long to find a place at Sundance. Now he was a returning favorite.

“I remember being backstage, and I was dressed all schlubby, Sundance-style, in jeans, and I think I was wearing an Obama shirt. Zooey was in some gorgeous designer vintage dress, and we were having that moment. It’s exactly what you think it is. Everyone loved it and it was thrilling. But I do think it’s worth pointing out, in our culture we put a lot of emphasis on those moments—the world telling you you’re good. But those moments are fleeting. The moments that bring real joy for me, when I think of (500) Days of Summer, are not that night at Sundance when the world loves the movie. It’s workshopping the scenes and rehearsing and then shooting and doing take after take until we got it right. It’s the creative process itself.”

Gordon-Levitt had started to realize he just liked making things, even more than showing things. 

Also that year at Sundance, he debuted his first directorial effort, the short film Sparks, starring Carla Gugino as a suspected arsonist and Eric Stoltz as an insurance investigator. The visual effects were created with homemade paper craft, giving the sinister story a playful, almost innocent twist. 

“It was based on an Elmore Leonard short story, and I had recently acted in an Elmore Leonard movie called Killshot,” Gordon-Levitt recalls. “Killshot was how you would normally do an Elmore Leonard short story. [Sparks was]: What if you did an Elmore Leonard short story in a much weirder way, with a bunch of cardboard cutouts and things like that. We had a great time. I’m still proud of Sparks.”

2010 — The Launch of HitRecord

Sparks had been created under the banner of Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord project, which he launched with his brother, Dan, as a unique kind of production company powered by the people. It was designed as a collective, open to anyone who wanted to collaborate, a crowdsourcing playground that made music, stories, and illustrations—sometimes weaving them together into movies.

Sundance gave HitRecord studio space in the basement of a Park City, Utah, shopping mall to set up cameras, computers, editing bays, and other filmmaking tools. The idea was to not just make films for Sundance, but to make one at Sundance. A reporter stopped by on day one to see it all in motion. (Disclosure: I was that reporter.)

“Probably something you don’t know was we were scrambling to have internet,” Gordon-Levitt reveals more than a decade later. “We set up this whole big thing, and we had been planning forever, and it was this momentous launch of this endeavor. And it was all based on the idea that we would be able to collaborate on different art projects with people at Sundance who wandered into our space, and anybody else in the world who wanted to participate online on our website.”

But the connection was dead. “It still wasn’t working, and still wasn’t working, and we were launching that day—and it still wasn’t working. And my producing partner, Jared Geller, ended up running a long, crazy cable from some other store down into the basement. It all started working seconds before you and I started our interview. Jared gave me the thumbs up, and I seamlessly transitioned to be like, ‘Come! You can see this website that we built!’”

The result of their week-long effort: Morgan M. Morganson’s Date With Destiny, an old-timey tale full of neologisms. 

Gordon-Levitt and HitRecord would return to Sundance over the years as the collective grew and a TV series was launched. But he also was turning his attention to a bigger solo-directing effort.

2013 — Don Jon

This film about a Jersey guy brimming with toxic masculinity was Gordon-Levitt’s feature writing and directing debut. He starred as the title character, with Scarlett Johansson as the woman of his dreams, who still can’t match his distorted, X-rated expectations.

“That’s what I always wanted,” he says. “Direct a movie that plays Sundance. It was a life goal. Funny enough, I remember loving the experience of watching the movie, but one of the things I remember most afterwards is talking to my mom about the movie. Don Jon deals heavily with the objectification of women—and men as well—but this is something that my mom always raised my brother and me to be quite focused on. And I made a movie about that, but in a roundabout way. It satirizes it and brings that objectification right into your face.”

“The movie is playing at Sundance, where I wanted it to play, and it played well in front of a big audience, and all that external validation was there. But actually, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of that night is a conversation I had just with my own mom,” he says.

Years would pass before his next big Sundance experience, but that one would involve the story of a mother too.

2023 — Flora and Son

Gordon-Levitt’s latest film, Flora and Son, is set to debut on opening weekend of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Eve Hewson stars as a single mom in Dublin whose struggle to earn a living while raising a troubled boy has withered most of her other hopes and dreams. She still clings to music as a passion, and Gordon-Levitt plays her online guitar teacher.

The musical is directed by John Carney, the filmmaker behind the 2007 Sundance musical hit Once. “He strikes a balance between bringing that kind of magic that only a musical can bring, but on the other hand, grounding it in real, human, heartfelt life in a way that I think is pretty unique,” Gordon-Levitt says. “Getting to finally do some music in a movie is momentous for me in a new and different way. Even though it’s kind of a humble musical—that’s more my style.”

Despite his long history at Sundance, Gordon-Levitt says the annual gathering means more to him than just a platform to show off work. He thinks of it as an inspiration, and quotes something he once heard from that guy who gave him his first Sundance T-shirt. 

“I would just echo Mr. Redford in trying to direct our focus back to the creative process itself,” Gordon-Levitt says. “Ultimately that’s what the spirit of Sundance is, in my opinion. And the creative process itself is something that people can have—you can have, I can have, anybody can have—whether you get into Sundance or you don’t get into Sundance. It doesn’t have to all be this elite clique of the industry. It can be anybody, everybody.”