Edward Norton, ES '91, can barely get through the day without a film critic declaring him "the best actor of his generation." When he returned to his alma mater to talk up Fight Club this past Sunday, we put Robby O'Connor, world's biggest Fight Club groupie, on the case. Below is the best of the weekend's Norton dirt, gleaned from his Master's Teas, his Q&A's at the Fight Club screenings, and a backstage interview arranged by the Yale Film Society. To your right is Robby's adoring preview.

The Yale Herald: How much theater did you do at Yale?

Edward Norton: I had done a lot of theater prior to coming to school here, and one of the reasons I wanted to come here was that there was a lot of undergraduate theater life but I didn't want to be a theater studies major. It seemed to me that there was more to be learned by just doing it. I didn't have enough interest in the pure academic side of it. I did a couple plays a year here. I took Murray Biggs' Shakespeare class. I took everything you could take without being a major.

The last play here I did was the big Dramat play. It was The Three Sisters. Looking back on it, I'm mortified because we were 21 and trying to do Chekhov. But it was a good experience. And actually I did a student film. A parody of old Bogart and noir movies, which I've gotten the rights to and buried. It was fun. We showed it in Davies Auditorium and it was kind of a cult hit around school for two years.

YH: Why Fight Club?

EN: Fight Club - which I have to say I think is the best film I've been involved in - part of the thing which is really terrifying and great about it is that it's highly ambiguous, not in its morality, but in its message. It's pretty unapologetically neutral in terms of its suggestions of what you're supposed to take from it. I think a lot of popular films let you walk away without your having to think about them much more because they've delivered what they want you to know about them.

When I watch David Fincher's other films, Seven especially, I thought that it was almost like philosophy in the sense that it was structured like a dialectic. He had an idealist and a cynic, and he put them at heightened extremes of the modern world, and the film never resolved in the sense that he left it for you to decide: who did you feel was right?

He just dumped a lot in your lap and I liked that and I felt like Fight Club was even more so. It was a dark, comic, sort of surrealist look at some of the dysfunctions of our generation and of young people who are feeling out of sync with the value system they are expected to engage in.

YH: What is the physical aspect of acting? EN: I think different parts have a physicality component of them to different degrees. Sometimes it's goofy dancing in a Woody Allen movie, and sometimes it's more about the physical manifestation of a character saying a lot about who he is. Like in American History X, I thought the key to this character emotionally is that he's essentially built up enormous walls of defense against the pain of his father's death. He's built them up intellectually in terms of his politics and he's built himself up. I think he's really armored himself physically against the pain he's experienced and so I felt like that was a reason to take on a physical characteristic. Not just for the visual effect of it, but because it said something about him and who he was.

YH: How did you prepare for Fight Club?

EN: Without giving away what the film's about, if you know what the reality of it is in the end, Brad and I made a decision together about how we were going to take that on. We decided together that I was going to get very thin. It's almost a junkie metaphor. This guy is an unreliable narrator in the sense that he's saying "you became carved out of wood and you felt powerful" and yet his body's disintegrating and he's bruised and shattered. And Brad made the decision to go the opposite way because Tyler is the way my character sees himself. Brad got progressively bigger throughout the movie, he bulked up and got huge and tan and beautiful while I became Gollum.

YH: Do you worry that the film might promote violence?

EN: People will always find the cultural cues or the justification for their behavior. This week, it's being blamed on Marilyn Manson and in the '60s it was being blamed on "Helter Skelter." I think it's just silly, the response of people who would rather find something easy to point the finger at and not deal with the more complicated and disturbing roots of it.

The irony is to me, I think that's what the film's about. I think the film is wrestling with "what are the roots of these feelings." So I don't really have any apologies to offer for it.

YH: Have you ever been in a real fistfight?

EN: Probably not in 10 years.

YH: What happened 10 years ago?

EN: I think I had a fight in a Spanish train station. But the details elude me.

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