Edward Norton's emergence as one of the most powerful actors in American films has ironically coincided with one of those eras in movie culture when esthetics have taken precedence over artistry. Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon, and Ewan McGregor are all gifted actors whose popularity has much to do their looks. But as dreamboats go, these are sloops and schooners, not destroyers. They are peculiarly passive idols - their nonthreatening faces suitable for the walls of teenage girls - who represent the wholesale post-feminist eclipse of the Stallone-Schwarzenegger brand of cartoon machismo, and even the manly types of the late Eighties and early Nineties, the Alec Baldwins and Kevin Costners. It says much for Tom Criuse's durability that he has been able to ride out the changes, Alpha-male aura intact. Norton doesn't fit any of these molds; rather he cracks them. Not blessed with cuteness, matinee-idol handsomeness, or obvious movie-star charisma, he possesses something far more interesting and troubling. That is, he is equally convincing playing a runt who jackknifes into an evil little punk (Primal Fear, 1996, his astonishing debut), straight-arrow suits with whimsy (Everyone Says I Love You, 1996) or ambition (The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996), a pumped-up, bile-spewing neo-Nazi skinhead (American History X, 1998), or a sleazy, feckless high-stakes poker player (Rounders, 1998). Try to imagine another actor carrying off such diversity and you realize the extent of his achievement so far.
He is, then, one of the genius-touched chameleons like Alec Guiness or Daniel Day-Lewis who are unfashionable these days. We are impressed and unsettled in equal amounts by Norton for, if we are truthful, we yearn for fixed objects in the cinema - recognizability is the foundation of stardom - and he has pledged not to give us one, either in his career or within a role. His Derek, who stomps a black kid to death in American History X, uncannily metamorphoses into the prison-chastened figure who ministers tenderly to his mother and his siblings later in the film. We have followed the plot. We know our screen characters have 'arcs.' We get that Derek's a better guy coming out of the can than he was going in. We are willing to suspend some disbelief...yet how does Norton do it without straining credibility? It's because, with a subtlety that goes beyond the signposts in the script, he imperceptibly lays the groundwork for emotional change. Few of his collegues in the so-called Young Hollywood can manage that, or even get near it.
Norton was born into a well-to-do East Coast family in Columbia, Maryland, on August 18, 1969. In 1991, he graduated from Yale with a history degree, having also studied astronomy and Japanese and acted in student plays. After a spell in Japan, he moved to New York where he wrote for the Enterprise Foundation and acted in off-off-Broadway productions of such plays as Brian Friel's "Lovers" and John Patrick Shanley's "Italian-American Reconciliation." In 1994, he played the lead part in the premiere of Edward Albee's "Fragments", produced by the Signature Theater Company, and subsequently became a Signature board member.
Norton followed Rounders with a role opposite Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter in David Fincher's Fight Club, about an underground club for young urban professionals who engage in brutal fistfights. He was, at the time writing, scheduled to direct and coproduce a romantic comedy called Keeping the Faith, starring himself and Ben Stiller as, respectively, a priest and rabbi in love with the same woman.
The following conversation took place in a hotel room overlooking Central Park in Manhattan on 29 October 1998. Months after American History X had finished production, Norton was happily back to his slender, pre-skinhead physique - and he articulated himself with erudition and no little ebullience.
What impels you to act?
I have an almost intellectual or creative faith in the importance of storytelling through acting; it's a long-standing compulsion I've had since I was about five or six years old. I can literally identify the moment it struck me. I went to see a play in which a baby-sitter of mine was performing. I was completely shell-shocked by the magic of this little community-theatre play; it just riveted me. My parents have said that I had a tendency towards mimicry prior to that anyway. I started taking acting classes but went away from it for a while when I was in high school because I had that teenage self-consciousness about the performance aspect of it, and it wasn't cool where I went to school.
But when I was 16 or 17, a teacher took some of us to the national theatre in Washington DC, to see Ian McKellen do his one-man show Acting Shakespeare and that reconnected me definitively with this compulsion. It was just him alone on the stage and it was a totally transporting experience for me. I remember sitting apart from my friends on the bus going home and being almost frightened by how intensely I had felt about it. Swirling around my head was the realisation that this kind of communicating or representing was very profound - that it was valuable and not just frivolous - and that it was something I could do myself as an adult. After that, I was completely obsessed with it.
For a while I pursued other things because there's a panic that comes with deciding you're going to be an actor, especially if you think something else can bring a structure to your life, as well as a regular pay cheque. But once I started acting in plays, the more the obsession was confirmed. Even if I wasn't in a play, I'd catch myself following people on the streets of NY and imitating their walk or whatever. Or I'd just be walking along talking to myself and scripting scenarios in my head and playing them out, or doing voices. Finally, I just surrendered to it. I still have that compulsion, and it's the thing that grounds me against the hoopla that surrounds it at the Hollywood level.
Can you talk about the psychological reasons behind your need to be an actor, or do you fear that deconstructing it in such a way might be detrimental to your process?
I was wary of deconstructing it for a long time, but I'm much less so now - I don't know why. I think I've come to grips with the fact that not intellectualising it is actually a pose. There's a craft to it, just like there is to anything else, and that's something you should be proud of.
But beyond the excitement of acting, and your vocational drive, any neuroses urging you on?
(laugh) I'm sure a need for attention is a way of explaining it, and that some people who have little respect for acting would call it narcissistic. But I don't think or feel those things. I think my impulse is actually the furthest thing from narcissism because there's nothing that compels me more than getting away from myself and creating a character who lives distinctly and independently of me. I've almost never had an experience of working on a character or a piece of drama in which I've found that myself or my own experiences were a very colourful or useful resource. There is a certain addictive quality to acting, certainly in theatre, but that's not the case in film, where you experience none of the energy that comes from interacting with an audience and performing a whole play seamlessly and live.
There were times in the theatre, when I was working in a good play or doing something that I really liked, when I'd feel myself in the zone. It's a difficult thing to describe, but it's a very floaty 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 responses to a degree that if something unexpected happened, you would respond completely as that person - and it's such a high. It's like cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Brick is talking about drinking. he says he drinks until he gets that click. I think with acting too, you go and go until you hit this click. And when you do, I think your pulse doesn't go up, it goes way down and suddenly the moment can't go on long enough, because you're so completely there that truly anything could happen - because you're out of your head.
When I'm working with another actor and feel myself watching or analysing the process and I'm not living in that zone, I'll refer to it as "I'm back in my head", or "I can tell you're in your head". Everything I do is to try to get out of my head, even when I'm working on a film. It's much harder in film because film-making is so fragmented. I used to read books between set-ups but I realised that books refocus you too much on other things, so now I play really mindless Yahtzee computer games. That way I can step back into a scene without having lost the thread of where I was.
Before I first interviewed you, towards the end of 1996, you gave me a tape of a test you'd made for AHX. It showed Derek, the LA skinhead you ended up playing in the film, gesticulating and ranting neo-nazi rhetoric. What was the key to finding Derek when you came to play him?
Whenever you approach a character, it's as if you're supposed to enter a room that's completely boxed off, and you can walk all the way round and there's no obvious door you're going to go through. There are lots of doors. One door it might say 'clothes', on another it might say 'physique', on another 'accent'. Sometimes you have to go through all those doors, but you always have to start with one. With Derek, in particular, the physicality was a big part of it, not necessarily because I thought it was the most important part, but because when I started talking with the director, we were very confident about my ability to represent the intellectual ferocity and emotional intensity of this guy. But if you're honest as an actor, you sometimes have to say to yourself "I know this interests me emotionally and that I'd like to do it, but is there anything about the unchangeable package of me that means I won't be able to represent this?".
Tony felt - and I agree with him - that Derek needed to be as physically intimidating as he was on every other level. He needed to be larger than life, especially in his younger brother's memory> he needed to be the uber-skinhead - the king of the skinheads. The physicality was the part I was least sure of being able to pull off. But I shaved my head, grew a beard, bulked myself up, and we shot a test to see if it went over - that's the footage you saw. I wasn't nearly as large then as I would be when we came to do the film, but I think Tony and I were both satisfied that we were on the right track, that I'd
be able to stretch my elasticity over the role and encompass it. I proceeded from there to get really large. I put on thirty or thirty-five pounds over the next couple of months.
What do you mean by elasticity?
This is something I've been talking about with Anthony Minghella. He said he thinks every actor has a certain elasticity and every role has a certain elasticity, and some actors have more elasticity than others and some roles have more elasticity than others. And if the elasticity of the actor overlaps the elasticity of the role, then you have a match, but sometimes they just don't and maybe it's because the role is not very elastic. It's not something that can be manifested in different ways.
Did changing your look prove to be the right approach to Derek?
Yes, it was a good entrance point because I started to feel different. Derek's physicality and how he carries himself is part of how he feels about himself, part of his intensity. I found you do carry yourself differently when you have that much power in your upper body; you start to feel that right away. One thing leads to another. I next started experimenting with tattoos, which is another way skinheads have of empowering themselves. That, in turn, led me to another type of research: which is, what does all this stuff mean? What are the specific ideas that these people are connecting with? So, yes, the door to this character was, for me, the physicality.
Derek goes through several stages in the film. there are two glimpses of him as a young, impressionable kid. There's his skinhead phase -
His nightmarish incarnation, I call it.
Then he experiences the catharsis in prison and finally there's the Derek who turns his back on violence and racism. So there's a real arc there. How did you go about effecting Derek's evolution, or did you break down the arc into segments?
That was directly impacted by the sequence in which we shot the film. I had hair on my head at the beginning of the shoot and I didn't want to wear a wig for the later scenes, so we shot the present-tense colour scenes first, which include all the redemptive, post-prison Derek stuff and go right to the end of the film. then I cut my hair down halfway and we shot a few of the scenes in the prison where Derek's hair is growing back. Then I shaved it all the way and we shot all of the skinhead stuff in black and white. the last thing we shot was Derek as a kid and I did put a little wig on for that.
So you reversed the chronological sequence?
Literally. I worked hard at maintaining some consistency between Derek as a skinhead and Derek after he's renounced the skinhead movement. I didn't want there to be a total discrepancy between what he was like before he went to prison and wheat he was like afterwards because he's fundamentally the same person. Obviously he undergoes a change inside - his anger diminishes - but it was very important to me that this guy didn't suddenly become the Saint of Venice Beach. One of the things that's a thread is that he's intensely controlling; that's not something that changes in prison. He doesn't really start to let go of that until things really go to hell at the skinhead rally, where he finally says to his brother: "I'm not even telling you what to do. I'm just telling you what happened to me." In fact, he lets go of a lot at that point, but I think he's the same hard person in both halves of the film.
What about Derek's rage? I remember you telling me that you had no particular need to identify or explore any such rage in yourself, so how did you access it?
I usually don't find I can pull on my own emotions. 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 - in the sense of the Method as taught by Lee Strasberg, or what's often very glibly interpreted as the Method. 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 (though I hate to use that word) for understanding how other people express their emotions. It's an almost clinical ability to observe those emotions - to soak them up like a sponge and then turn around and represent them. I find that approach works best for me and is more in sync with the kind of roles I want to pursue.
It's certainly how I found my way into Derek because I've never experienced anything like that kind of frustration or rage or violent tendencies 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 realise how long that person's been holding it back. That can lead to extraordinary moments in drama. I enjoyed the disconcertingly intense conversation at the dinner table in AHX where you can almost feel Elliot Gould getting caught in a trap. Elliot thinks he's having a heated but impersonal discussion about ideas and politics, but you can see in him this growing perception that there's this intensity in Derek that's out of sync with the conversation. And the, of course, it suddenly erupts into this out-of-control fury that targets the wrong people - Derek's own family. And when, in the middle of the wreckage Derek urns on Elliott's character and says "You don't think I see what's going on here? You think I'm going to sit here while some kike tries to fuck my mother?" you realise in a flash that the entire scene has been about none of the things that have been discussed.
You mean that Derek's rage is Oedipal rage?
Absolutely - it's Hamlet. It's about a young man simmering with rage because another man is sitting next to his mother in his dead father's chair at the dinner table. Elliott's face drops when I come out with that speech and it's such a wonderful reaction because it totally supports the revelation of the moment. here's this poor guy suddenly realising that he's walked into something that's not about politics, not about Rodney King, but about this boy who's projecting his anger at the death of his father onto other people. Those kinds of moments are very challenging because you have to connect with what's going on and then play the opposite almost. People have asked me in relation to this film "How do you find that level of intensity within you?" Part of my answer is that I don't really know why, but I have always felt a certain facility for those levels of emotion.
And there are certain tricks of voice or the way you use your eyes in relation to the camera that can help you, as well as tricks of stillness and silence - pauses and stares - which I think are greatly underestimated in terms of the impact they can have. If there's one working actor who has a corner on the intensity of stillness on film, or who most profoundly understands how terrifying a stare can be, as opposed to what you might call generalised indications of anger through gestures or scowls, it's Robert De Niro. I think a lot of film acting is about coming to an understanding of those kinds of techniques.
You know there's this famous story of Garbo being panicked about the last close-up she had to do in 'Queen Christina' and the director Rouben Mamoulian telling her "I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience." What's implicit in that story was his understanding that, if he'd constructed his film well up to that point there was no need for her to emote. The close-up is a completely artificial perspective provided by the camera, and that's why directors will often tell actors to do less, but good actors come to understand intuitively how tiny gestures have to be - if they're necessary at all -when the camera's in there. I've learned from some of the good actors I've worked with not to pay any attention to where a director is framing up a shot because you should always just know where the camera is instinctively, you should never have to look for it. But it's hard in something like the dinner-table scene in AHX because Tony shot it from many different angles and you had to be aware of the framing. For example, if he was shooting a mid-size shot from a wide angle I'd need to know that because my hands would become part of the visual language of what I could express. There was a moment in there where he did stay wide as the conversation broke up and the mother walked out, and Derek is tapping on the table with impatience - tap, tap, tap, tap - and you know his anger is still simmering in him. he wants to go back into that conversation - he wants to let it out.
Would you have been saying to yourself at that moment "Keep tapping because it's building up tension" or would you have been unaware of it?
It happens intuitively. Once you've channelled into an emotion, all kinds of interesting things can happen and you learn to trust yourself in the moment. It's a broad generalisation, but I would say that acting on film often has a lot to do with what happens off the lines, through non-verbal gesture. I find that, on stage, more gets communicated through the language.
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