When you see Edward Norton, it's hard to believe such an unsuspecting individual is such a powerhouse on film.
But the moment the actor--whose resume includes amazing turns in films like American History X, Fight Club and The 25th Hour--starts talking about his craft, you hear the intellect in his words and suddenly it all makes sense.
Norton was recognized this weekend by the Mill Valley Film Festival for his work, followed by a screening of his latest feature, Stone, where he plays a Detroit inmate trying to make parole. Robert DeNiro plays the correctional officer overseeing his case.
Norton recently sat down for a roundtable interview that included examiner.com in San Francisco where he talked about his new film and his thoughts and processes as an actor.
This is your second film with director John Curran (they worked together on The Painted Veil). How would you describe your working relationship at this point?
Great, I really, really enjoyed my experience on The Painted Veil with him. I loved what he did with the film, so I was eager to work with him again and I felt like we developed a really nice shorthand with each other, which was important on this film.
I think he knew that this film was a challenging one…he was going after some very elusive themes and I think he knew he was going to be making a film that asked a lot of questions and didn’t give a lot of answers, so I think he wanted to go there with actors that he had a lot of faith in. And if I'm going to do a role like this, I'd like to do it with someone I feel really good about, because you know, you're swinging wide and you sort of have to trust someone’s sort of tastes on what to pick. It was a good fit, a good fit.
And DeNiro and I had also been looking for something else to do (they previously worked together on The Score). We had talked about trying to find something that would let us sort of dig in a little bit deeper way and he rang me up as soon as he read it and said ‘This is really, really good, we should do it,” so it was good on all levels.
There was this whole notion (in Stone) about things that people take for granted and thinking that they were set in all these ways and then finding out that everything had crumbled that they had anchored themselves in. And John was really saying "I want to roll around in that sense of decay and abandonment and like the way that we build up lives around constructs of marriage and work and stock portfolios and we don’t necessarily do the hard work to make sure those things are as authentic as we think they are." If you look at DeNiro’s character as the protaganist, that portrait of somebody sliding off the rails as they deal with the fact that a lot of what they built their life around was inauthentic..it’s bleak, but I think bracing in a sense...I read it and thought, "This is relevant." There is consequence to denying confrontations with yourself. All of that was interesting to me, and the idea that imprisonment can take different forms too, that you can be imprisoned in an inauthentic life as much as in a jail, those were all things that were interesting to me.
What was it like re-teaming with DeNiro, and what is your favorite DeNiro performance?
What I really admire about him is that across a long period of time he’s really investigated in a committed way, like some very deep themes in American life. Because an actor is not the writer per se, you don’t necessarily think of the actor having control over the conversation, if that makes any sense, and yet when you look at somebody’s career like DeNiro's, you see somebody exerting a very specific artistic sensibility and a real impulse to explore certain themes about dysfunction and particular kinds of pathologies.
The reason he’s become what he's become is not just based on his skills as an actor, but his commitment to the things he works on, and I think that’s very high standard, because it's not always commercial. Now he’s become part of the cannon, but none of those films, they weren’t commercial at all. Burt Reynolds was the biggest star at the time when DeNiro was doing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and King of Comedy, and he wasn’t the biggest movie star in the world. But those films are still around and the other ones are not and I take a lot of inspiration from someone like that.
What kind preparation did you do for this role?
I had a lot of uncertainty about it. There was nothing in the script, the script was set in the south and in fact the description of the character was extremely different. Then the way we took it, John really wanted to stage it in Michigan. He said to me, "Can you imagine a place that’s a better representation of this idea of assumptions and collapse, it was like the biggest industry in America and now here it is in decay. I want to feel that Stone is from Detroit." But beyond that, I just couldn’t get a beat, I didn’t have any image of him in my head, so I felt a little more at sea with this than I have with many other things. Ultimately, it was just meeting these prisoners, I was doing it for a while and I was getting great insight, but still not a specific idea of the character, and just like in the last five days before we shot it, I met one guy who just blew it all open for me. I really thought he was the ultimate person..his physicality and his voice…he also just had this enormous amount of anxiety that he was pretty honest about, and I just said I'm going to channel that. And then it got easier. It's sort of like a car, once you figure out the right key, now you can drive this car.
You mentioned the idea that imprisonment can take different forms, and it seems like that may be kind of a through-line in some of your performances. Your thoughts on that?
I definitely find myself pulled toward things that are rolling around in what's difficult about contemporary life, if that makes any sense. When David McKenna and I first talked about American History X, when he had the idea and we sat around to talk about the script together, he had this idea of rage as a trap or a cage, the way that marginalization makes people punch back. I think Fight Club, Down In The Valley, The 25th Hour, I think those are all films that are very much about people sucked into one form of a trap or another. I think the reason I get pulled into them is because like everybody else…when you read a certain piece of work and it names a thing you recognize that maybe you weren’t conscious of before, and then you go, “oh,” it puts a name to it. Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club “Everybody felt it but he gave it a name.” I think that speaks to what zeitgeist films do. I think the films that put a big dent in me are ones that made me feel that way, that made me feel like I was watching something that was speaking to the experiences I had. And when you have that sensation, its very cathartic, its very thrilling, it makes you feel more connected. Once you can see that films can do that, for me, those are the movies that made me want to make movies. I mean I liked The Terminator, but The Terminator is not what made me want to make movies. I watched Do The Right Thing and Taxi Driver, and those are the kinds of films where I thought "I could be part of making that kind of film," whereas those other ones I could just be in the audience for.
As an actor, what do you expect from your directors to make you more comfortable on set and which directors have you enjoyed working with?
I always think one of the great qualities of many of my favorite directors is they look to be surprised. A director's impulse to control what happens is almost indirect to how exciting the work ends up being. Milos Foreman, David Fincher, Spike Lee, John Curran, the people I’ve worked with who I think are really inspiring to me are often the ones who are so confident. They know what their part of it is and they sit and watch and watch and watch and don’t say anything for a long time; they listen and they hope to be surprised. I think the directors I’ve worked with that have been the least original are the ones who want to see a videotape played out of what they’ve already been playing in their heads and the magic evaporates. I would say the most masterful ones I've worked with don’t operate like that. They know how to take those things, and run with them.
I know you chatted with Johnny Greenwood and Thom Yorke at one point about the score for Stone, can you elaborate on that partnership?
John (Curran) and I got to talking really early on about the whole theme of Stone and how he talks about becoming a tuning fork of God and how when sound comes to you, it's terrifying. And it wasn’t in the script, but Curran and I started talking about this idea of "Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a trope in the film that was like that tuning fork" and I happened to be in England and I was with Johnny (Greenwood), and Johnny is obsessed with sounds and he’s obsessed with wave form and all kind of interesting stuff, and so is Thom (Yorke). And I said to (Greenwood), "Hey, if you were going to try to deconstruct something, like a sound, what would sound like a huge tuning fork," and he was like, “Oh yeah, maybe an organ, maybe an organ…” (Norton says in a British accent).
Those guys didn’t score the film because they didn’t have time, but they play with stuff all the time, so they had files and files and files of stuff, like taking intrsuments and literally breaking them down into wave forms and sounds...and they flipped a bunch of stuff off to us, to just play with and then we worked with their engineer a bit, but then you needed themes too, so (Curran) went to Jon Brion, as we both really love his work, and it seemd in sync in many ways with what the Radiohead guys play with. (Brion) does a lot of atonal, arrhythmic stuff, so Johnny recorded some organs, (Brion) recorded some organs, (Curran) did some things and then two of the sound engineers came up with some textural stuff. And at the end of the day, John Curran really conducted it all, he just threw it all into a Cuisinart to create this sort of soundscape. It was fun, very experimental and very unusual.
Is there one question that keeps coming up that you hate?
(Norton laughs) No. When you go through like a series of conversations and people are observing very different threads of it, I like it because that means you're getting into that sweet spot where you’ve provoked a lot of thought, but you haven’t imposed a pat meaning on the end. And I think, not to be academic about it, but Joseph Campbell had that idea about transparency in stories, he talks about the need for a person to be able to see through a story to see how it's really about them, and when you tell people what the film is about you get much less interesting questions, but when the film has enough grey or open endedness of it, it's interesting.
Stone opens in select theaters this Friday.
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