Have Faith
Some movie stars put up with press intrusion as the price of fame. Not Ed Norton: he's never waned anyone he doesn't know to know him. "Being a blank slate," he says, "is everything I've ever tried to achieve as an actor. That's the highest compliment. When I look at Dustin Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis, I know nothing about them as individuals, and I don't really think of them as such. It's a definite achievement to sustain that for a long period of time - an empty enough vessel, a blank enough slate - that you can continue to pull that off."
For a long time he refused to answer any questions about his acting or personal life: it wasn't anyone else's business. "When I serve up my own private experiences as fodder for the cheap drama of the press it leaves me with a very hollow feeling," he says. "I've given up something that is part of what makes my own life and it's just not worth it. Too much familiarity can diminish your capacity to be an empty vessel people can fill up with different things."
He still keeps silent about himself, but allows some discussion of how he gets into a role. He now allows that refusing to speak was as much a pose as discussing motivation and those difficult teenage years, but he still seems slightly baffled by his skill. To Norton, the best acting comes when he feels himself in what he calls "the zone...it's a difficult thing to describe, but it's a very floating feeling that you can't wait to re-experience again, because you found something. You were transported to a different emotional place where you began to exist within the context of the character's motivations and expectations."
He's talking about what psychologists call "flow", the point at which your brain settles into a steady rhythm and is deeply engaged. It's the kind of feeling you get reading a great book or watching a classic film or hanging out on the best kind of day at the beach with your closest friends: that feeling of looking at your watch and wondering where all that time went.
And what this flow gives Norton is an ability to inhabit his characters, a talent that had him first noticed for his bravura performance in Primal Fear as American psycho Aaron Stampler, a Bible-bashing madman. He was found at an open casting session after the previously-slated lead Leonardo DiCaprio pulled out. Oscar nomination number one.
That was followed by Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (lovelorn geek), Rounders (card sharp), The People vs. Larry Flynt (lawyer), and the two which have underlined his status as probably the greatest young male actor of his generation: American History X (Oscar nomination number two for a frightening take on a neo-Nazi skinhead thug) and Fight Club (disaffected yuppie). "I've always tried to do movies that are very good for me each time, so I think people are able to interact more with the characters than with me," he says. "I've never stopped doing anything. And people are never coming up to me with any kind of presumption of knowing me.." You could have seen him in Saving Private Ryan- you didn't because he turned down the eponymous character eventually played by Matt Damon.
Edward Norton was born on August 18, 1969 in Boston, moving to Columbia, Maryland, where by all accounts he had a happy and settled childhood. Norton's first wish to act came when he was five, when his babysitter took him to see a musical version of Cinderella at his local drama school. He took up lessons, hoping to be cast as one of the mice. He wasn't, but had been bitten hard by the desire to act. He stopped acting in high school because it wasn't cool. When he was 16 his teacher took his class to see a one-man show by English actor Sir Ian McKellen in Washington, D.C. "It blew my mind," Norton remembers. "I sat on the bus thinking, you have to reconsider this whole thing. You have to take this very, very seriously. You could do this for life."
After just four films, the movie that catapulted him to mainstream attention was last year's Fight Club, where Norton plays the yuppie with everything and nothing. He meets soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who shows him the underground world of fight clubs, where men are real men and the blood flows thick and free at the end of every fight.
He and Pitt got on like a house of fire. "Edward and Brad sat on the stairs of a dilapidated house, strumming and singing and grinning to each other," wrote Craig McLean, who visited the set for The Face magazine, "buddy-buddy tight. Edward had the scrawny body of a 15 year old; Brad has been carved from wood; both look like they smell." Norton said at the time, "Brad and I got to this point of virtual symbiosis in terms of each other's rhythms." This sounds pretentious, but those who know Norton say his mind whirrs keenly, and he thinks more deeply than most. And though Pitt will always be prettier than Norton, you can see why they get on well: both are private to the point of utter reclusiveness, both play roles that confound expectation, and they share a healthy contempt for the celebrity juggernaut. Norton is so private that he never once confirmed or denied a three-year relationship with Courtney Love.
Fight Club met with mixed reaction. A few critics loved it; most trashed it. It made just more than half it's US $63 million budget back in the States. The film's darkly black and often brutal depiction of violence proved to be too much for many people.
But Norton believes Fight Club will prove to be a future classic, railing against film critics for not getting the point. "I said to Fincher [the film's director] one time that none of the movies that made us want to make movies, Dr. Strangelove or Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, those movies were much more box office flops than Fight Club was.
"If you want to talk about the sort of zeitgeist film that sort of pissed everyone off, the establishment and the critics and the parent, people eviscerated those films when they came out. If you look at the list of critical responses to Raging Bull, all the same critics who had it on their 10-best list... the best film of the '80s was skewered when it first came out. I think when some movies are too dense and too on-point in what they're railing at, they make people uncomfortable and I think it's a very good thing."
Norton came along just at the right time, when the ashes of high-concept movies finally blew away in the winds. He's probably the leading figure of the new generation of actors who would rather appear in films with depth than an all-action blockbuster driven by ruthless producers working to a well-trodden formula.
And now his directorial debut, Keeping the Faith, is due for release. It's by no means as fluffy as its genre title 'romantic comedy' might sound - again, Norton confounding expectation. Norton and Ben Stiller play a priest and a rabbi, respectively, who fall in love with their childhood friend, Jenna Elfman, whom they meet up with after 16 years. Not only is it funny, it also works on a dramatic level, with Catholic/Jewish inter-faith co-operation adding depth. Norton, of course, is brilliant.
"The thing I liked about the script," he says, "is that it was this funny balancing act, it was a comedy on the broadest levels and had lots of classic screwball to it, but it still balanced. There's some great screwball conventions in it, and romantic comedy post-Annie Hall, post-When Harry Met Sally - the obstacle to romance has become neurosis."
Norton offers an insight into his motivation, warming to his theme of how every romance seems to end with a session on the psychiatrist's couch. "I think a lot of our generation's films are very ironic now. Irony and cynicism tend to be the tone. You get characters who deflect their vulnerability with ironic detachment and it's definitely the stamp of the times. One of the things I like about this was that it had no irony, there wasn't anything cynical or ironic about the fact that they were a rabbi and a priest. They really were, and I hadn't seen it before, and there's not too many things you can say that about."
The tagline for the film is "If you have to believe in something, you might as well believe in love." It sits well with Norton's choice of films and approach to acting: he has to believe in a role before he can take it. But it's not that he follows the old actor's saw, that it's easier to show emotion if you can relate it to something in your past history, a la Strasberg's Method Acting. He is, in the truest sense, acting, becoming someone else.
"I usually don't find I can pull on my own emotions," he says. "Sometimes, obviously, some extension of things you've felt can spin up, but it's much more of an imaginative process for me. Many people project onto actors the idea that they must be finding a particular emotion within themselves - from their own deep well.
"I've just never bought that or found it a useful tool. I've always subscribed to Stella Adler's maxim that an actor's greatest gift is his imagination. I find the most effective thing I can do is project myself into the given circumstances by using my instinct or empathic talent for understanding how other people express their emotions. It's an almost clinical ability to observe these emotions - to soak them up like a sponge and then turn them round and represent them."
Flow, detachment: this, then, signposts Norton's talent. Not for him the approach that all acting is easy, or typecasting himself in each film. He picks roles that fascinate him, all different, and he's a different person each time. Imagination is the key: he doesn't so much act as dream himself into a character.
"It's certainly how I found my way into Derek [the eventually repentant skinhead of American History X] because I've never experienced that kind of frustration and rage or violent tendency that he has. I've always been fascinated by anger, anyway - how someone can hide it for a long time, but it simmers away until it just explodes, making you realize how long that person's been holding back."
Equally, though Primal Fear director Gregory Hoblit suggests that there has to be a dark side to him. Norton is known by his friends as being stable and self-effacing: he neither drinks nor does drugs, and has been known to help old ladies across the street from time to time.
"There's clearly a very alive-and-well dark side of Edward Norton," says Hoblit. "I mean, you don't have to be Charlie Manson to have a dark side. Edward is no choirboy. You don't bring that kind of depth and richness to the work unless you've got it."
But Norton still argues that his acting derives from the imagination. "I think it's always dangerous, with any artist, to try and draw too many connections between the life and the work," he says.
"On a purely personal level, one of the really great thrills of acting is that it lets you be an experimental dilettante. You can pursue an enormous diversity of people, lifestyles, worlds of experience, all without the consequences of actually making those choices in life. It's like having a secret key that lets you into any door."
Norton, it seems, couldn't care less for the old celebrity rules of never saying anything controversial and just smiling prettily into the lens - but then, why should he? He's justly famous and will be for a long time, but he's no celebrity. He'll never be a celebrity.
"A lot of these Gen X quote-unquote movies and comedies that have come out in the last 10 years have this banal, low energy aimlessness, you know, this kind of slacker angst-ridden thing and I always just sit there bored because there's nothing dramatic about it," he says. "Sometimes there's some wry wit to it, but it never takes the issues.
"The thing I loved about Fight Club was it was existential, it was about a generation of people feeling numbed and then overwhelmed by the pace of modernity and the value system they were expected to engage in and it took it to this completely surreal place of madness. It was this chronicle of a person going completely insane and it took it into the great nightmarish, metaphoric kind of place, and to me that's what drama should be about and I loved it. It was ironic and very lacerating, not just characters talking about their own aimlessness, more a real needle in the eye of everything."
He saw things in Fight Club that he really believes in. That's how you have to approach things with Norton, obliquely, sidelining him and sneaking up while he's not looking. After Keeping the Faith, he's got The Score coming up (with Robert De Niro) and Motherless Brooklyn, where he plays a detective with Tourette's Syndrome.
But back to Fight Club, for as clear a statement of Norton's values as you can get. This Gen-Xer will never sit around in a haze of smoke accepting things as they are. "There's a speech that's straight out of the book where Brad says, 'I see some of the smartest people in my generation working as gas-station attendants, and clerks or slaves with white collars, working in jobs we hate to earn money to buy shit we don't need.' Those are sentiments that I feel. This script was the first thing that was like a fist angrily slamming on the table and saying, we're sick of this."
And you can picture Norton waiting tables in New York and sick of it, waiting for his big break, dreaming of the future where he could find his way into different people, different situations, different lifestyles...
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