Edward Norton Interview
After his Oscar-nominated performances in Primal Fear and American History X, and his star turns in Rounders and Fight Club, Edward Norton would be the last person anyone would expect to star in a romantic comedy. But this versatile thespian actively seeks out challenging roles, which is how he came to not only star in his latest film, Keeping the Faith, but to produce and direct it as well.
Norton was bitten by the acting bug at the tender age of five. By the time he graduated from Yale with a history degree, he had enough acting experience under his belt to command the attention of legendary playwright Edward Albee, who cast him as the lead in the world premiere of his play Fragments.
While Norton has played his share of dark, violent characters, he has a strong philanthropic streak, serving on the New York Board of the Enterprise Foundation, which works to create decent, affordable housing for low-income families. In many ways that makes him a lot like Father Brian Finn, the character he plays in Keeping the Faith. He talks with iCAST about acting, directing and creating a movie from start to finish.
iCAST: I think most people are going to be surprised at how funny you are. Were you sort of waiting--
EDWARD NORTON: Thanks, I think.
iCAST: -- I mean, based on the way they've seen you in film in the past. Were you waiting for this opportunity?
EDWARD NORTON: No. I did this great little musical
comedy with Woody Allen that nobody saw [Everybody Says I
Love You].
It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm going to do a comedy,"
you know? It was more that I just liked the story. I wasn't
originally going to be in it. My friend [Stuart Blumberg] wrote
it and we rewrote it together for a long time, and it reached
this point where he looked at me and went, "Why don't you
direct it?" And I said, "D'you think?" And he said, "Well, you
know what's going to happen. They'll go and they'll get
somebody, and they won't get our Bella Abzug jokes, and stuff
like that, and they'll screw it up." And I went, "You know,
it's probably true, and we'll end up sitting around
tearing our hair out while they shoot the
wrong parts of New York." So we just decided to do it.
Once I was going to direct it, I figured
I might as well be in it, and the studio [Touchstone]
was obviously more excited about me directing
it if I would be in it, so it was a way of getting it
done. And I thought it would be fun. I've lived
in New York for a long time, and Stu and I wanted to
make a movie here. So that was a big part
of it.
I don't have a tendency to look at things in terms
of the filmography. It doesn't really mean a lot to me,
because I look at each of the things I've done as very
different from each other. I don't look at, like,
Fight Club as very connected to
American History X at all. I think they're very,
very different kinds of films. They're heavier, but I
thought Fight Club was hilarious. To me, I was
always doing a satire or a dark comedy, and so this
didn't seem like any bigger of a jump than any of the
other ones to me. They're all kind of their own experiences.
The only thing about comedy is that it's just a
very all-or-nothing proposition: It's either funny or
it's dead. So that's a little bit scarier. I showed the
movie to David Fincher [director of Fight Club],
and I was kind of nervous because he's like, the king of
darkness. And he said, "Oh my God, I could never make a
movie like this. This is so cool." Because technicians,
I think, are terrified achieving tone in this kind of a
film. And it is true, it's hard. It relies a lot on the
chemistry of the people you have, and I think that we got
lucky on that score. We cast good people.
iCAST: You were talking about working with Woody Allen. Did you bring any of that experience to this movie?
EDWARD NORTON: Sure, yeah. I love the way he's
always presented New York, and I learned a lot from Woody.
We would talk about stuff, and he used to go: "Long lenses
are not funny. They're not funny. Anything longer than a
40 and you're dead in the water." I would always sort of go,
"Huh." And then I really understood it when we got shooting.
You learn stuff from everybody you work with, and there's
things that are Woody-inflected in this film.
And there are things that are very Milos Forman-inflected,
and there's other stuff that I've learned on a technical level
from fringe work. No one would ever spot it, but I was thinking
a lot about Jules and Jim when I made this movie, and put
little hommages to it in there, and even though it's not a
comedy, it's a perfect example of a movie where your interest
is held by the relationship of three people and watching
characters you care about go through their dramas.
One of the things I was happy to learn from people
like Milos and Woody was that they're not afraid of their own
influences, they don't strike the pose of, "I'm purely
original." They're totally comfortable letting their influences
refract through them and become their own thing. It's a posture
of certain people in my generation, I think, to disdain
anything that is not ultra-new and hip; but the silly thing
about that is that there's not much that's ultra-new and hip,
and the self-referential, self-conscious thing has
become almost it's own cliché now anyway, so I couldn't think
of any other way to do it, other than to use what I've
learned from other people.
iCAST: You said you thought it would be fun to direct this movie. Was it?
EDWARD NORTON: Yeah, fun, assuming that occasionally, you know, curling in the fetal position is fun. It's fun in the sense that it's a high wire act, and it pulls on a lot of your skills creatively and managerially. On a communication level it's an unparalleled challenge because, more than anything, you're responsible for communicating to a whole bunch of other people the tone that you're trying to achieve. That's what's rewarding about it -- when you can get people to work in sync with each other.
iCAST: What have you learned about yourself from making this movie?
EDWARD NORTON: I think it was a good experience
for me. It's a spiritual challenge to remain Zen in
the face of the chaos that inevitably happens in the
course of making a movie. All this money is flowing
straight down the toilet, and you're sitting there, waiting
on clouds to move, and you just have to cool out and accept
it as part of the process, and it's good.
I tend to be micro-managerial. As an actor, it's hard not
to give line readings to other actors. But it was good for
me, in terms of trying to take a deep breath and have the
confidence to just back off and let things happen on their
own for a while, before coming in over the top and saying,
"Okay, that was miserable. Now let's do it my way."
iCAST: Did you get ideas from your stars?
EDWARD NORTON: Sure. One of the great things, of
course, is that Ben is a writer and director as well,
so it was terrific to have somebody who knows what
you're going through. He's always going to come up with
a great line; and can not only just make up a funny line,
but has a great instinct for a scene. As a director, it's
always a great thing to have somebody who can think about things
directorially with you, who can say, "You know, this
feels a little forced to me here because of this."
But he's also entirely capable of something like
that shot where Anna's walked out of the shot and he's still
looking at the Casanova through the window. I just got this
line in my head, and I grabbed the bullhorn and I yelled, "Say, 'Hang on,
I'm learning something here. You're going to benefit
from this.'" Most people would go, "What?" you know? And he
doesn't even break; he hears it come in, and just, boom,
feeds it right out, and then we drop the sound of me yelling
out later. And it's just great -- he's just sharp as hell.
iCAST: Does this experience make you fall in love with the idea of directing more than acting in the future?
EDWARD NORTON: No. Acting is a better job. It's fun to direct something if it's your own thing. If you're going to work for hire, it's much easier to act. [Laughs] If people could act, they would.
iCAST: Did you second-guess anything about the final cut, or your performance?
EDWARD NORTON: Sure. I think it was
[Francis Ford] Coppola who said the famous line, "You
never finish a film, you abandon it." And it's very true, because
at a certain point, you just go, "Okay, I'm to the point
where I hate every inch of this. So I'm just going to stop
working on it." Because you can't do it anymore, time runs
out. Like in this case, we had a release schedule, and you've
got to be done at a certain point. I think what you have to
learn to have faith in is that, at a certain point, you're
entering a zone of changes which, at the end of the day,
represent less than 5% difference to the audience. And I
felt we were in that zone. We could've taken a little out
here or there, depending on your taste, but I was content with
letting it go.
Nora Ephron said something to me once: "No romantic
comedy should be over an hour forty-eight." And I said,
"Well, but we've got these faith things in there." And she
said, "Okay, you get twelve extra minutes." Yeah, you get twelve
minutes for God. I figured if we could keep it to about two
hours we would be fine.
iCAST: You dedicated your film to your mom. What did she teach you about keeping faith in yourself?
EDWARD NORTON: Well, the dedication was more because this is the kind of movie she liked, a lot of the Broadcast News's and Annie Hall's and those sorts of films. Since my poor mother and grandmothers have had to endure so many films they couldn't go see with their friends, I felt like I owed them one. My grandmother is very excited about this. She's like, "Even the title just feels nice." No, they're not Catholic.
iCAST: Given the dark movies that you've made, do you think there's a misconception out there about you?
EDWARD NORTON: Yeah, but I don't really think this is any more of window into me than any of the other ones. I mean, this isn't going to put people on the scent.
iCAST: Of the real Ed Norton.
EDWARD NORTON: Yeah, of anything more accurate.
iCAST: So who is the real Ed Norton?
EDWARD NORTON: That's not relevant. It's really not. It's also counterproductive to the things I'm doing within this sphere of being effective.
iCAST: Has anyone seen this film and said that it seemed like you were trying to poke holes in religion?
EDWARD NORTON: We weren't trying to
poke holes in anything. We were trying to have
fun in a way that people could laugh with the
film at things they recognized within the foibles
and idiosyncrasies and characteristics of their
own thing, as opposed to feeling like they were
being laughed at by someone from the outside. The
good news was, we had lots of Jews and Catholics
working on the movie. My First Assistant Director
threw me the line, "It's customary to sneak out after the
communion," because he was a lapsed Catholic.
And so you get great stuff from everybody.
But I never felt that we were treading in
territory that was going to offend anybody. Not that
it's not good to offend people sometimes, which it
absolutely is, but that wasn't the point here. The
point here was, as I said to Stu one time, that
we should be able to change this to a lawyer and a
doctor and still have a dynamic that's consistent
irrespective of what they do. Obviously, that
component of the story brings in a special thing,
the conversations about faith. But to me, it
was almost more about turning thirty, or hitting
that point in life when you're young and
arrogant and you think you've got things pretty
hard-wired and figured out, and you get unsettled in
one way or another, in a way that forces you to
reexamine some of your presumptions about yourself.
One of the things I liked about Stu's script was
that it was about three characters, all of
whom become unsettled in their remeeting of
each other, and have to mature in certain ways. Ben's
character has to come to grips with the
fact that he doesn't put faith in other people, that
he's kind of a bronze god to whom everything
has come very easily. It's not until he offers himself
up as another person in a process of
learning like everybody else that he's really a rabbi.
And it's not until he humbles himself in front of his
congregation that he becomes a real leader, because
he's offering himself to them as a person
seeking understanding of himself like everybody else.
My character has to come to a more mature
understanding of his own commitment, or he has to be
able to frame his commitment within the context of
acknowledging his other human impulses. In the
beginning he's been very much in kind
of a Marine Corps denial about it. Like Milos Forman's
character says, he's got to see his own potentials
and recognize his commitment as a choice in the
face of those potentials, as opposed to the only
thing he ever could have done.
Anna goes through her own process of changing
assumptions about what she wants out of things.
All that, to me, had nothing to do with religion. That
was a part of what drew me to them as characters,
because that's what makes them -- despite
the fact that they're a rabbi and a priest -- human in
a way that other people could empathize with.
iCAST: Interesting that the one person who wasn't a spiritual person was the catalyst who really got everything going.
EDWARD NORTON: Yes. One of the things I liked about her character is when she confronts a changing sense of her own priorities it scares her, but she pretty much takes the plunge, and says to Jake: "I'm being offered the key to the kingdom and I'm changing my mind, I think I want to stay here with you." She's the one who doesn't back off of that which scares her; and he does. But I always felt that it was important on some levels that, amongst three protagonists, Jake's got the character issue that in some ways is the biggest obstacle in the film. He's got to get around this unwillingness to believe that other people can deal with their problems.
iCAST: How do you feel about Milos Forman ending up in the film, and do you see him as kind of a mentor?
EDWARD NORTON: Yeah, we wrote the part for him. Basically, I said, "Remember that cool speech that I wrote in the courtroom in Larry Flynt? Well, you owe me. You've got to be in my movie."
iCAST: You also did the soundtrack, right? Did you handpick a lot of the acts?
EDWARD NORTON: The main song in the movie and over the
end credits is done by an old, old friend of mine
who's a rising singer/songwriter. He actually
didn't write that song for the movie as much as it
sounds like he did. It was a song he had written, and
I had heard it, and I threw it in there.
Elmer Bernstein is an amazing film composer, and he did this
great music for our movie that gave it, I think, a
very classical feel; but I said to him, "Look,
the thing is, I got this Tom Waits song I'm going to
put in there because I want it to be our spin on
what's romantic about New York." And I tried to put in
Tom Waits and Elliott Smith, and Radiohead, and a
lot of the Buena Vista Social Club jazz artists
and other people I like to listen to, just to put
our spin on the classic theme.
iCAST: Seems like you got a good deal of maturity out of Jenna and Ben. They had a lot of different colors that they didn't have before.
EDWARD NORTON: I'd looked at a lot of Ben's movies, like Permanent Midnight, and I said to him -- when I was trying to convince him to do it -- "The thing is, I think that you can really handle both sides of this well." Ben's a really good dramatic actor and a really intuitive, grounded actor. And Jenna is, in some ways, more like this character than she is like her character on [Dharma and Greg]. She's got a real tough streak in her. I think it was a good fit.
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