Edward Norton
by Megan Parsells
UniverCity Magazine May 2000
In Keeping the Faith, Ed Norton makes his film directoral debut and combines this challenging role with starring in and producing the film. Norton plays Father Brian Finn, a Catholic priest living in New York City. Along with his childhood best friend, Rabbi Jake Schram [Ben Stiller]. Norton's character industriously attempts to garner the need for faith in his community. He is a young priest with a lot of spunk who trieds to use his sense of modernity to spread the essence of his faith to a more diverse portion of the population. All is thrown into tumult, however, when Jake and Brian's third musketeer from childhood, Anna Reily, re-enters their lives after many years. Suddenly faith and loyalty bump heads woth love and friendship.
Ed Norton's extensive film career includes work in Primal Fear for which he was rewarded with a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and also earned him an Academy Award nomination. His other film credits include Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, Milos Forman's The People Vs. Larry Flynt. These three films earned Norton the title of Best Supporting Actor from the Los Angeles, Boston, and Texas Film Critics and the National Board of Review. His most recent films include John Dahl's Rounders, American History X for which he was, again, nominated by the Academy, this time for Best Actor. He also recently starred with Helena Bonham Carter and Brad Pitt in David Fincher's Fight Club, a startling commentary on the detrimental effects of capitalism. Norton is also involved with New York's Signature Theater Company.
Why film this picture in New York City?
The U.S. is ahead of the curve in terms of dealing with multi-cultural issues and New York is at the front of the United States' curve. There's a more dense interweaving of culture and tension beterrn tradition - and the whole modern culture. New York is where you have the Irish bar with the Indian guy tending bar. To me, in addition to the fact that I live here and I wanted to walk to work, I'm a total New Yorker and it's everything I like. I couldn't think of anywhere else better to set this king of a story.
Why do a romantic comedy?
I didn't over-think it really. A long-time partner of mine and collaborator wrote this script and we were working on it together for awhile. I was really just producing it for him and then it reached this point where we looked at each other and said, if they'll let us do it, we should just do it ourselves. We're going to have the experience of turning this over to someone and just tearing our hair out while we watch them screw it up. I thought he was right - I had a window and just kind of jumped at it. I think it's really true - there's no other way to learn that job than just to do and get into it.
What is in store for your next directoral project?
I don't have a plan. I didn't do this movie because I thought it would be easy. I showed this to David Fincher. I think he's one of the modern masters of cinema and visual language. He watched and he was like, "I could never make a movie like that." He loved it. Achieving a balance of tone is somehting that I think terrifies directors - it was not less scary for being a comedy, because like they say, 'dying is easy, comedy is hard.' It's an all or nothing proposition because when its flat, its deadly. There's no middle ground.
Which role did you like the best: actor, director or producer?
Producing is awful and no one should ever want to be a producer. It's an enormous amount of work and you have to work for such a long time for anything to pay off. It's about diplomacy. Directing was a totally consuming experience. Acting is too, but more contained - someone else is left to put it all together. But when you're the person who's left to put it all together, you go through so many different phases with it. Directing calls on so many disparate aspects of skills - pure creative storytelling. It's really about communication - communicating a vision of a style or a tone to a whole lot of other people. Then you hope they can bring their part in sync with what the tone is supposed to be. That's what was hard about it, but also what I liked about it. The collaborative aspect of it is what makes it rewarding.
How did you prepare for your role as a priest?
I wasn't raised Catholic. Fortunately when we ran the script by the New York church authorities, they liked it a lot, so we were able to shoot in a Catholic church. They approved it and the pastor at that church was really helpful to me. I asked him if I could follow him around and he let me in on most of the specifics of mass ritual and on his daily life. He was a lot like my character in the sense that he was really grounded, went out to dinner, and didn't wear a collar. He was an integral part of the community and people relied on him as a source of support. He was a very impressive person.
How was working with Jenna Elfman and Ben Stiller?
They're great. I mean, that's where you live or die - whether or not you're able to achieve a kind of chemistry among people. Ben was the person we were really thinking of when we were writing it. And Jenna. I had never seen her show, but she walked in and she was kind of perfect. She was goofy, but beautiful, a perfect shiksa goddess. She had such a good, easy way about her and a good sense of the way of the character. She was one of the only one's who got that this girl had to be a little bit cold and sort of warm up as she went along. That's what I really liked about her.
The Rain Man bit in the restaurant? Care to explain?
That was the first day of shooting - the first scene we shot. I just started doing it, partly because you're just nervous the first day, but that scene, we got going along and we were doing it and I was like, it just needs a little something. I started doing it and Ben was looking at me kind of funny and I was like, "Do you get what I'm doing?" and he was like, "Yeah, that's really funny, you should keep doing that!" I was thinking, am I going to regret this?
What was it like directing Milos Forman?
It was pretty easy. He's a prima donna. All he cares about is his lighting. No, just kidding. We wrote the part for him. He was just a natural. I think he was a little nervous. He was always obsessed with things being very extemporaneous and natural and everything. So, we all just sat there, he smoked a cigar and we were just chatting about other stuff for awhile and I just went, go! go! go! and we did it. One of the things I loved about working with Milos is that he always has things in perspective. He always treats the whole thing as a great opportunity . He's always in touch with that, so I just thought he was the perfect person to have that kind of easy, humanistic wisdom, not being too dogmatic. It worked out well.
When you were writing it were you concerned about different religious groups?
No, because I felt that it was too obviously an affirmation of commitment. It was wrestling with the challenges of commitment but the characters remained very committed. I don't think that acknowledging the humanity of a priest is that controversial. I don't think we were trying to laugh at humanity. We were trying to design a kind of humor that the people who were familiar with the stuff would laugh even more with it.
You've covered the whole gamut of film genres, is there anything left that you'd like to do?
I don't think any one of these things encompasses a whole genre. I don't look back at my filmography all that often. That's caring too much about the external perception of the whole career and I just don't care about that. I do like, for my own experience, to try working on different things to learn through each one of them. I would get bored very quickly if I was working in the same tone all the time.
Do you have plans to return to theater?
I look at stuff. I haven't found something that kind of turns me on in awhile. They're rehashing a lot of stuff. Someone talked to me about doing "Look Back in Anger" which is a great play and it's a great part. But I was thinking, how do you make English classism relevant now? If I was going to direct it, I would probably cast a young black actor as Jimmy Porter. I think you might be able to deal with something relevant, make it relevant to issues with the kind of classism and racism we have in our culture today, I'm still very involved in the theater company though.
What's next for you?
I'm going to do a movie over the summer with Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando. It's kind of a crazy movie called The Score
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