“The crazy thing about that shot is there’s no makeup, there’s no prosthetics and there’s hardly any visual effects on it, actually,” Gordon-Levitt revealed. “It’s just a slow motion shot. They just had the really crazy idea to take this really powerful air gun and shoot a strong blast of air at my face and shoot it in slow motion.”
A gun and a bullet were later edited in, “but really, my face was moving like that,” he said. “It actually made it pretty easy to act scared…I was trying my best not to flinch but it was hard. They were pointing a powerful thing in my face! And it went off!”
Interestingly enough, bulletproof skin is one of the superpowers that can be obtained by taking Power in the film. However, Gordon-Levitt isn’t interested in developing that, obtaining super strength or even invisibility.
Instead, he’d choose “the power of empathy.”
“And what I mean by that is, being able to actually see through somebody else’s eyes and hear through someone else’s ears and see and touch, taste, smell someone else’s senses,” Gordon-Levitt explained.