The Conversations: Leading Men of Hollywood
Norton [opens his journal]: After seeing Shadowlands in 1993, I wrote, "Anthony Hopkins is a marvel. I feel like I need to thank him personally for the performances he gives. I could watch him endlessly. And if I could stop being totally entranced and pull back for a second. I could learn all I need to know from watching him."
Hopkins: I don't know what to say
Norton [closes his journal]: I feel when you're young, there's this impulse to create characters who have intensity. It's the Young Man's Disease. As I work more, though, the performances that knock me out are very naked, very vulnerable.
Hopkins: I used to go for that intensity, too. I always wanted to be in movies, and I mostly watched American movies because Americans were the best at it - Cagney and Bogart. Then I was making The Lion in Winter, and Katharine Hepburn said to me [imitates Hepburn], "Don't act. You've got a good head. You've got a good voice. You don't need anything." But I couldn't take that in until years later, after I had acted up storms.
Moderator: Why do you two make evil so charming?
Hopkins: Well, Hannibal Lecter is one of those creatures from the dark side of the human personality - which is always attractive. He's self-governing, and he may tap into our desire to become like machines: to have no pity, to have no conscience. People are terrified to look at that aspect of themselves and admit there's something attractive about it.
Norton: On American History X, people said, "Isn't it immoral to play a skinhead with such charisma?" But if you don't believe the sexiness of that swastika is a part of what makes a kid want to put it on, you're in denial. There's an erotic attraction to being as powerful, a guy who can control a situation from within a cell. What is Lecter's accent, anyway? it was from nowhere. It wasn't English or American.
Hopkins: I knew a woman from Baltimore who had great Anglophile pretensions. I asked who to read that speech about [he assumes Lecter's voice] Clarice with her cheap shoes.
Norton: You know, you sound like Hepburn, which is just that Anglophile pretension. So Hannibal Lecter is really Katharine Hepburn?
Hopkins: Ha-ha-ha
Photographs by Norman Jean Roy
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The other conversational pairings included in this article are Dylan Mc Dermott and Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards and Kevin Spacey.
Edward Norton hosted the ceremony that honors Anthony Hopkins with the Modern Masters award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. To read about the event, click here
If you have new information on Edward Norton (and you can provide a verifiable and reputable source), please email me- Susan
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