爱德华·诺顿（卫报）

Edward Norton
On stage at the National Film Theatre, the Oscar-nominated actor discoursed on working with such directors as Spike Lee and David Fincher, why he's not really an indie player, and why he wouldn't dream of pulling a hanky out of Richard Jobson's ear.

guardian.co.uk,
Friday February 16 2007

Richard Jobson: Welcome, Edward Norton, to the National Film Theatre. Edward's been doing interviews since seven o'clock this morning, but he feels full of life still. Before we discuss The Illusionist, I think the audience should be reminded of your body of work since you came to our attention with Primal Fear in 1996 - The People vs Larry Flynt, Everyone Says I Love You, Rounders, American History X, Fight Club, Keeping the Faith, Catch Her in the Eye, The Score, Death to Smoochy, Frida, Red Dragon, 25th Hour, The Italian Job, Kingdom of Heaven, Down in the Valley, The Illusionist, The Painted Veil, Pride and Glory which is being completed and the soon to start Motherless Brooklyn. That averages about two movies a year over the last decade. You've been pretty busy and they're all incredibly different films. How do you choose your movies?

Edward Norton: I can't say that I step back and look at it as a collection like that. A lot of people come up to me and say that they see threads between things, but I never saw them at the time. I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece. More often than not, it's not so much a committed interest in moving in one direction or another, but more based on the quality of the execution. I like a lot of things, I just like them well done. People were asking me recently if I had an impulse to do period movies all of a sudden, and I really never did. I just happened to see some good ones.

RJ: Because you've done two back to back - The Illusionist and The Painted Veil.

EN: But The Painted Veil, we've been trying to put it together for seven years and I would have done it at any point in that time. It just happened to fall on the heels of The Illusionist. It worked out, but it's just a coincidence.

RJ: Not just period pieces, but they're both essentially romantic films, although The Illusionist goes in so many different directions that it's difficult to categorise. It's got elements of the supernatural, of a detective thriller, it seems to go into so many different areas as a movie.

EN: The Illusionist is unusual for me in the sense that I probably gravitated to it mostly because it seemed fun. I didn't feel a deep connection to its themes, it didn't resonate for me in the way that a lot of things that I work on do. But it just was so different from anything else that I'd done. It seemed difficult to me when I read it - there are all these stage performances in it and it struck me that pulling those performances off would be really challenging, and that alone kind of pulled me in. And then other things came together - Paul [Giamatti] was going to do it; Paul and I went to school together and I really wanted to work with him but never had the chance to; and two really good friends of mine, the guys who wrote Rounders, were producing this. So there were just a lot of things about this that seemed a lot of fun.

RJ: It's also a film that required you to be a convincing magician. You actually did perform some of those tricks, didn't you?

EN: We committed in the beginning to not depicting anything that wasn't being done at the turn of the century. Everything in there, there was some form of that type of illusion being done in Europe at that time. We tried to commit to doing them live, and doing them only through the techniques that were used then. The only thing we ultimately couldn't do was the spirit manifestations. There were very sophisticated spirit manifestations: plasmas, ghosts and talking spirits, all kinds of things, but they were generally done in extremely low light conditions and we couldn't do it in that way and still film it. So those scenes we had to cheat.

RJ: So if it all goes wrong, you could join the magic circle?

EN: No. I was under the tutelage of a couple of excellent magicians. I learned exactly as much as I needed to learn to pull off what you saw. But it's not like riding a bike, you can't just pick it right back up. Those guys work so hard for such a long time, and they don't improvise. I would never presume to do what they do.

RJ: You take your work very seriously; do you have a specific approach to acting, in the sense of research to create a character?

EN: No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I'm never sure how to get started. They're all so different. There's no way that you could approach Death to Smoochy in the same way as you would American History X. It would be absurd to put yourself even remotely in the same headspace. I feel that way about a lot of things. How do you bring the same approach that you would bring to a Coen brothers film to Spike Lee? The demands are so different. So in the beginning, I always feel like I'm fumbling for an entry point. There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there. But a lot of times, like in The Illusionist in particular, for me it was all about the externals at the beginning. It was about the beard and the hair and the clothes. Paul and I talked about this - we felt like cheats because the clothes and the set did 90% of the work for us on the film. You put on those waistcoats and those boots and all of a sudden you're standing like an adult. I don't wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see Eisenheim, I'm not that cool. And I thought, I'm really not the right guy to play the part, so I'd better get busy getting rid of me. There was a great comic book when I was growing up called Doctor Strange. It was all about this magician with mystical powers, and that's how he looked - he had the goatee and the swept-back hair. So I got a copy, took it to the makeup person I worked with, and that's what we did. And sometimes, I'm only semi-joking, it's things like that that can help you get inside. And then other times, it's the other way round.

RJ: The irony of course is that the illusion of being an actor is part of it anyway, of creating the mystery of a part and hiding behind that.

EN: I talked to a lot of magicians I really admire. I worked a lot with Ricky Jay, who is very well known in the States as an actor as well. He was my main technical adviser in the preparatory phase of this. Rick and I talked a lot about acting and magic, and how similar they are in some ways: the misdirection that's involved, the way that great magicians often wrap a great trick in a narrative, a lot of things that are similar. But this one was just a fun thing to do.

RJ: So there's no chance of you pulling a hanky from one ear through the other tonight?

EN: No.

RJ: As an actor, your body of work has really stamped itself on a certain generation. Things like American History X, Fight Club and 25th Hour are very much films that really have something to say but at the same time give you a platform to really show what you can do.

EN: Back when you asked how I choose something, with those ones, I do think there's a frequency I look for in things. I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through. Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times. They were documents of a moment, or an exploration of what was dysfunctional, fucked up or painful about that moment in time. Stepping back further, I think that most of what's really good that lasts probably fits that litmus. Whether it's Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg, it really represents its moment. And most of those ones you're talking about are films that, on some level, I had a strong feeling that I saw those things reflected around me. Or, in the case of some of these, we wrote them because we wanted to talk about things the way that we saw them.

RJ: The thing that cinema can do better than any other medium, I think, is time travel. The beauty of doing a period piece is it gives us a period through the vision of a director and through the characterisation of actors.

EN: Even with period pieces, and perhaps it's less true of The Illusionist but definitely applies with The Painted Veil, which opens here in April - and I've worked on genre movies like Rounders, The Painted Veil and this film that's coming up called Pride and Glory - I still think you can apply that standard to genre pieces, in the sense that you can say, here's a cop corruption film, but let's do one that in some way is really about Abu Ghraib and the idea that our generation is getting co-opted into participating in things that are deeply corrupt and how we face that moment of going against the institutions that in principle we support. And if you can find a way to take a cop corruption film and make it resonate within the themes that are flowing around in that moment, then you've made your cop corruption film. Like Serpico - Sidney Lumet made other cop corruption films but why does Serpico hang around? I think it's because Serpico is the 60s, early 70s and Serpico is really a hippy. He is that generation's representative within that genre and they can see themselves in him, and he kind of stands for the idealism of that time. Even in a period piece like The Painted Veil - it's based on a Somerset Maugham novel, and it's mostly about a marriage, but in some loose sense it contains a critique of the colonial class. You have the opportunity, which I think [director] John Curran really took, so that even though it's not really about our generation, he turned that story into an examination of that unique western arrogance of mucking around in other people's countries and telling them how to fix themselves and wondering why they don't thank you when you do it.

RJ: And he did it really beautifully, but never let it get in the way of a rather beautiful love story. Let's have a look at The Painted Veil, which you also produced.

[runs clip]

RJ: John Curran did a pretty damn good job with that movie, and gave it a really beautiful epic quality. It's almost got a hint of David Lean going on in the landscapes that he captured.

EN: He's a remarkably talented director, I really just thought the world of him. He's got an almost classical eye, and a very fine sense of the nuances in relationships and things like that. I thought he did a beautiful job with that movie.

RJ: And was that your first time doing an English accent?

EN: On film, yes. I've done it before in theatre. You remember CP Taylor, the British playwright? I did a couple of CP Taylor plays.

RJ: I met a couple of your English friends tonight and they all seem to talk like that [puts on broad northern accent]. Did that have any influence on you, or did you have to keep them at bay?

EN: Yeah. All my Mancunian and Blackpool friends were banned while I tried to learn proper English.

RJ: I guess bacteriologists don't talk like that.

EN: No. It would have been Billy Bragg in China.

RJ: It's a movie that you produced along with Naomi Watts. Is that something that's happening more in Hollywood now, with actors such as yourself stamping your own territory and having more power and getting movies made that might have been more difficult to get made previously?

EN: I don't think it's all that unique, to be honest. I think it was more groundbreaking when Warren Beatty was producing Bonnie and Clyde. But I think there're a lot of actors out there wearing a lot of hats now. A lot of people I know are taking a hand in the work they're doing. It's an interesting time in film-making - there're arguably more ways to get a movie made than ever before, and so there're a lot of opportunities. And there's a point when, as an actor, you get tired of waiting on other people to say yes and if you get the chance to exercise a little autonomy in your vision of what you want to do, you take it because in the life of actors so much time is spent sitting on your thumbs waiting for the phone to ring. I was never wired very well for that.

RJ: Quite clearly, and it shows in your body of work. I think you're often identified as a cool actor in the indie world, but actually you've never done any indie work.

EN: There's this writer, Peter Biskind, who wrote this book about film-making in the 70s [Easy Riders, Raging Bulls]. Anyway, he was writing a book about indie film-making in the 90s, and he called me and said, "I gotta talk to you for this book that I'm writing about indie film-making." I said, "OK, but why?" So he said, "Because you've been in all these seminal indie films." And I said, "I've never been in an independent film. I've been in studio films that didn't make money, but that's not the same thing." I think that people look at films like American History X and Fight Club and Larry Flynt - they have an independent sensibility but those were all made by big studios.

RJ: In a way, you could associate what the studios were doing with what was going on in the 70s, with that new wave of studio films that had an energy, a fresh language, and were trying very brave things.

EN: There was a period - I remember in 98, we were in LA making Fight Club that whole year, and that summer, Alexander Payne was making Election, the Wachowskis had just made The Matrix, David O Russell was making Three Kings, Spike [Jonze] was making Being John Malkovich, and Paul [Thomas] Anderson was making Magnolia. And I had this really strong feeling that something was going on. There was a sense that they let us in, and they really shouldn't have. All those films came out in 99, and I had this distinct feeling like we had taken over the castle. And all these friends and peers were doing really distinctive and very personal work and I felt like a lot of people were throwing down their first claims at auteurship, and it was exciting. I haven't felt a moment quite as dense since then.

RJ: It would be interesting to identify the executives behind those films and see if they lost their jobs after that year.

EN: A lot of them did. In fact, of the top of my head I can think of three or four who moved on quickly after the films came out.

RJ: That takes us to Down in the Valley, which felt to me like a homage to 1970s films such as Badlands and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. It has almost like a Terrence Malick vibe about it.

EN: It does. [Director] David Jacobson and I got a great letter from Terrence Malick about it, which meant the world to us because he was certainly a huge influence on David in particular. And I think that David has that kind of sensibility as a film-maker. It was interesting, as an experience that film was really, really special for me. It was like Fight Club in the sense that it was so far out on a limb sometimes, I didn't know where we were, or what we were doing exactly. I felt like David and I knew what we were after, we knew what was in our heads, but there were moments doing it when it was very hard to know if anyone else was going to come along with us, or if it all held together. It was a very exciting way to work.

RJ: And it's another piece of beautiful directing, a director with a clear vision. He also used obscure but beautiful music as part of the narrative, not just as wallpaper or atmosphere.

EN: The guy who wrote the score and most of the songs [Peter Salett], I've known since I was 11. David and I cut the film on our Macs. We raised the money from a private individual and we made it in 40 days out in the valley. It was very much about a feeling that David had growing up in that place. And it grew out of conversations that we'd had about the whole idea of the western and how much fun it would be to make one, but with the conviction that it would be pointless to make a western about a place that is gone or maybe never existed. So at a certain point, the conversation became, "Let's make a western but let's make it about the west as we have experienced it or the west as what we feel it's become." And also ask that question of, if you tried to live that life or tried to have that dream today, what would you run into? If a guy tried to take a girl and ride her off to My Darling Clementine in the San Fernando Valley today, what would happen? What would happen is he would run into a highway and a tract housing development. That's what the west is now, and that's the west that David grew up in and knows. There's something really tragic in that, and that's what we thought we'd do. And it was strange, at times we felt we lost the plot, but in the end, it was a really great experience. I liked working on it, and it felt very vital.

RJ: And you didn't have the backup of a studio system - that was a truly independent project.

EN: That was arguably the first really independent film I've made.

RJ: And it's a damn fine one. Let's have a look at Down in the Valley.

[runs clip]

RJ: The dialogue in there really struck me. The first rule of screenwriting is never use narration, but in all of your movies, that's been an essential ingredient. Except in this one, where you'd expect it to be, but it's not really there; the narration is coming out of his mouth.

EN: [Harlan]'s such a strange, poetic soul. I think he's kind of a lost dreamer. The thing that's so sad about that character is that his intentions are pretty beautiful but the distance between what he imagines what his life to be and what it is and his inability to accept that is a problem.

RJ: Did you find on this movie that even though you had less time, less money and less backup, that you had more freedom to investigate the character, and give really quality actors like David Morse the opportunity to let their characters breathe a bit?

EN: Oh, yeah, for sure. For me, it's a mark of a really good director that for you as an actor, it doesn't matter what's going on in the schedule, you don't feel the pressure of time. David definitely has that, Spike Lee has that, that sense that they're in such command of what it is they're doing that they make you feel that what you have is an open palette, a piece of paper that you can just scribble on for a while. You don't feel you have to deliver certainty.

RJ: Did [American History X director] Tony Kaye have that?

EN: Yeah. The shooting was a really great experience, extremely vital and extremely collaborative. Tony really never said boo to the actors. He was an obsessive shooter. The thing I remember more than anything - because Tony's a great DP, he operated, lit and shot the film, everything - he would always have two rigs slung up and ready to roll, and he would literally have them turn one on and hand it in to him and he would never call cut. He would roll through thousands of feet of film. For perspective, shooting 600,000 or 700,000 feet of film on a 50-day shoot is a lot of film. Tony shot 150,000 feet of film the first week on American History X. He would go, "Again" and "Again" and "Again". And I finally had to say, "Tony, I gotta take a break between takes." There has to be a bifurcation, it can't just go on ad infinitum. He just loved to watch.

RJ: How do you feel about the movie now, the finished product?

EN: I haven't watched it in a long time. It's been many years since I watched it. I'll catch a glimpse every once in a while, and the clips they run become sort of familiar to me. But I know that I felt good about it and I really liked it. We all worked really hard on it but when it wrapped up... There's always something that when you look back you wish you had more time or more money to get this or that. But on the whole, I think we accomplished what we discussed together when we set out to make it, which was in essence to take all the conventions of tragedy as a classical dramatic form and put a contemporary skin on it, so that if you broke it down it's not much different from Othello or Macbeth, but is about something that we thought we saw going on around us. Which was largely just rage tearing people up. I feel it accomplished that. You always question certain things when it's finished, but ultimately you don't get to decide whether it worked or not; other people decide what their relationship to it is and I find, the best way to know whether it's succeeded is hearing the way other people interpret it in ways that I never even thought of. That's when I know that we've done something that's rich enough for other people to take from it things that maybe were never even in our heads. Have you seen Scorsese's documentary about Dylan [No Direction Home]? It's one of the best things I've seen in terms of a portrait of an artist, of somebody with a relentless unwillingness to deconstruct his work, to go where he needs to go regardless of whether people are following him or not. It was a real kick in the ass for me watching it. He will not dissect it for you, he kind of knows on a core level what he needs to know about it and it's there for you to take from it what you need or what you get out of it, and his reducing it is only going to poison it. I really admire that, and it made me think that I ought to do this kind of thing less.

RJ: One of the films that you've been involved with, a film by David Fincher, is a film that's constantly being reassessed and deconstructed as people look for subliminal and different levels. You can take the film in so many different ways, as a visceral, kinetic experience or a film that's really punching you in the face and telling you something about the world that's going on around you. It's Fight Club of course. Let's have a look before you talk about the film.

EN: Yes, that's a good example. I remember, somebody sent Fincher a PhD thesis about Fight Club for a divinity school, and I looked at him and said, "This has gone far beyond us."

RJ: Let's take a look - it's the moment where Fight Club begins, in the car park.

[runs clip]

RJ: How was Fincher to work with, as a director?

EN: He's brilliant. Probably pound for pound, he's the most comprehensively talented film-maker I've worked with. He is a better photographer than the DP, a better writer than the screenwriter, a better actor than you are - he's just an amazing renaissance technician of film. And he could be your shrink and he's got a great grasp of it all. I can't explain it, he's really got a facility with the medium, it's like film becomes more fluid in his hands. I don't think he sees it as literally as other people, and his sense of how to juxtapose imagery is really wild. He can really put you through the wringer as an actor, not psychologically but just technically, because he shoots so much. He'll do 30 takes of something without even blinking, and that can be challenging because you try to pace yourself but he still grinds you down long past where you've done your best stuff, your second-best stuff and your third-best stuff, and you've stopped connecting with any of it 10 takes ago and he's just starting to get happy with the way the camera's floating. And so it calls on - this is boring actors' stuff - it's almost like doing a long run in theatre, where you have to start trusting that the difference that you feel between number 30 and number 10 is not showing up.

RJ: It's also a reminder that cinema is not just about actors performing dialogue, it's also about the language of the director, his vision and the way he shoots, to tell such an incredible story in a somewhat simple way, that is the art.

EN: Everybody kicked in on this. There was a strong feeling of synergy among us: Chuck Palahniuk, Fincher, Andy [Andrew Kevin] Walker who did a lot of the script [uncredited], Brad Pitt and myself. We all threw in a lot of what we were thinking and feeling, but really it's Chuck's text and it's Fincher's film. It's hard for me to imagine Fincher getting a text that almost unleashes him the way this one did. I really hope he does again some day but I really think it was a piece of work that was made for Fincher.

RJ: I think David Fincher's the closest we have to Stanley Kubrick.

EN: Yeah, he certainly has a visual sensibility that's really remarkable.

RJ: And the ability to exhaust the hell out of actors with endless takes.

EN: It'll be interesting to see where he goes. I always hope to see Fincher do something light, something about an actual relationship, because I think he's brilliant, intuitive and insightful. Maybe one day when he's exercised his muscles enough he'll do something.

RJ: A lot of the characters that you've played have a sort of ambiguity, a moral greyness about them, a darkness. But when you went on to direct your own first picture as a director, it wasn't like that. It was a comedy. It was a new place for you. Why did you choose something like Keeping the Faith?

EN: In part because you just have to respond to a moment. One of my long-time partners had written that, and even though it's not necessarily dark, when I read it, it really did fit the same standard that we've been talking about. I did recognise people, I recognised him in it, and people that we knew; people who were struggling with the fact that they're modern people who date people from all walks of life, and yet because they're Jewish somehow that matters, and how those things are reconciled. And it was funny and light-hearted but the heart of it wasn't total fluff. It wasn't like, "Our dogs' leashes got entangled and I wonder if we'll get together." There was something added, he was exploring how to be part of where you come from and be modern at the same time. And I like that. And eventually, we got to a point where we'd worked on it for so long and we thought, what if we get somebody else to do it and they don't get our jokes? We'd be sitting there tearing our hair out. So we might as well just do it. And it was funny because I talked to Fincher about it, and people I respected like Milos Forman, and they both said the same thing to me: if someone gives you the money, just do it. Don't over-think it, don't be precious about it, it doesn't matter what it's about because the first time's a dry run anyway. Fincher said something to me like don't wait for the one that really matters to you because you should do at least two or three before that. His first film was Alien 3, which is sort of case in point. And I thought that was really good advice. I don't think Fincher would have been ready to make Fight Club if somebody had handed it to him as his first film.

RJ: But it's also the choice of genre - you picked comedy, which is the hardest one.

EN: Yeah. Anne Bancroft was in the film, and Mel Brooks came to the set a couple of times, which was intimidating to say the least. At some point, we were talking about this generally and he said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

RJ: You haven't given up on directing, you're about to direct and star in Motherless Brooklyn. But before we get to that, and bring the audience in, I want to show a clip that shows you at your best, a tremendous film from Spike Lee, 25th Hour. You were talking about films that catch the moment, this one really did it.

[runs clip]

RJ: I think only Spike Lee could have gotten away with that, nobody else would have dared.

EN: Yeah, although I think you have to be a little careful because that clip taken out of context... It's really all about him, and especially because at the end...

RJ: Yes, the ending, where all these same people are smiling.

EN: At the end of the film, it's revealed that these are exactly the things that he loves the most about his city. It's not so much that only Spike Lee would get away with it, only Spike would do it that way and pull it off. David Benioff, who wrote the novel and adapted it for the screenplay and did a beautiful job, gave it to us and that monologue, which exists in a condensed form in his book, that moment where Monty slams everything, he'd left it out of the script and both Spike and I had circled it in the book. We asked him why he left out one of the greatest things in the book, and he said it was an internal monologue and he just didn't see how it would work. And Spike said, "Yeah, but that's my. job." And it is. And that's what's incredible about Spike. You're talking about someone for whom cinema is very plastic. He throws grenades in it, every time: every assumption you make about the way that narrative and images have to flow, Spike just goes, "Forget all that, I'm not interested in that." And he takes something like that and fashions a real piece of cinema out of it. And he's been doing that over and over again, and for my money, is one of a really short list of people who are almost always chewing over what's going on. He's more in his moment than almost any film-maker that I've worked with. He's really a compulsively engaged film-maker.

RJ: As you say, that could be seen as a hate letter to New York, but the film is a love letter to New York, I think.

EN: Very much so.

RJ: Let's take questions from the audience.

Q1: On the subject of engaging with what's happening at the moment, film-making is being transformed technically by the digital revolution, sweeping through both film-makers and viewers downloading films on the internet. Do you think that's going to change the nature of film and the nature of what you do? Or will film remain fundamentally the same?

EN: That's a complicated question. In terms of downloading movies, most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them. If that gets these films to more people, that's great by me. But I guess, not being flippant, I think technology is having a democratising effect on film. It's not hugely visible yet but I think what's happening with digital... Like I said, we cut Down in the Valley on Final Cut Pro on Macs. It's not going to be long before some 16-year-old shoots a film on VX2000 [Sony digital video camcorder] and cuts it on his Mac, and it's going to be great. I think there's an aspect to what's going on that's wonderful - for 100 years, film as a medium has been prohibitively expensive to most people and I think it's opening up hugely. And when you combine that with the web and all the impossible to predict ways for people to access that - YouTube is already demonstrating that - I think the capacity for people to share what they're doing directly is amazing. And I have no idea if it will deconcentrate things or dilute things, I couldn't say. But there's always going to be a place for artists. You know, everyone said that movies were going to die when TV came out, and that movies were going to die when VCRs came out, but that never happened - we're still drawn to the collective experience, it's our version of the cave and a campfire and a story. There's still something more to gathering together and seeing it, so I don't think that's going away. And it's very exciting.

Q2: What are you most proud of from your body of work as an actor, or your environmental work?

EN: It's hard for me to quantify those kinds of things, because your life changes and hopefully if you're growing as a person, you don't have the same aspirations that you had 10 years ago. To me it's kind of fluid. I tend to be somewhat happy about the thing I've just done. Right now, I'm very happy about The Painted Veil, it was a great experience for me and it lived up to my best hopes for it. That's probably something that I'm content with. It's a little bit strange for me to be watching these clips because I don't often review these things. I kind of hate the way my voice sounds and I'm hoping that it's gone through some kind of compressor to come out that nasally and hope that it's not actually like that.

RJ: I'm sure you've never seen yourself this big this close.

EN: I'm also very aware of my pores right now. I'm happy about some of these films. It's clear to me, looking back at them now, implicit in them is the decision that I made to do them versus something else. And for a lot of these, I'm thinking I'm glad I did this instead of that other thing, even though it wasn't the commercial success I'd hoped it would be.

Q3: Hi, I'm a big fan of the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven. How did you get on board that film, why weren't you credited, and what were the difficulties you had to overcome in acting behind a mask?

EN: I've never seen that, how is it? I can only imagine that it's better than what they ended up putting out. I felt bad for Ridley [Scott] and Bill Monahan in particular. It was a really wonderful script, and it should have been a three-hour film. It was one of those classic Hollywood dynamics where someone else's film comes out at three hours long and fails, so that means that yours can't be three hours long either. It was all the worst kind of corporate decision-making. I have to be honest, I wasn't deeply involved in it, just observing it from outside, but I felt that any hope it had of being a good film was killed by corporate think. My interest in it, to be totally honest, was that I was looking at this big-scale film that my company was thinking of producing. Ridley Scott and I had talked for years of making a film but it just never happened. He asked me if I would play another part in Kingdom of Heaven but I was going to do Down in the Valley and I just didn't have the time. But I read it and I asked who was playing the guy in the mask. And he said he was just going to get a guy who could do a voice like James Mason's. And I said I could do a pretty good James Mason. And when he said it would only take two weeks, I just had this thing in my head: I just wanted to see someone make a movie on that scale. I suppose I could have just gone and visited. But I was just curious about whether the process was extremely different when there's that much going on, and he's a guy who clearly knows how to make films at that scale and is comfortable with it, and I just wanted to see how he worked. And I got to do that, and it was well worth it. And I remained uncredited because it would have spoiled it, I think.

Q4: I saw 25th Hour again the other night. How did you feel about the way the fate of this drug dealer seemed to parallel what happened to the city on 9/11? Did you ever feel that was problematic?

EN: For me, I kind of have to put myself in the frame of mind we were all in at the time. It's really hard to describe what it felt like in New York at that time, if you've lived there a long time and were there when that happened. It was like the whole city was suffused with melancholy. I don't know if everything we were thinking and feeling at that moment was entirely rational or intellectually thought-through. But I just know that in the loosest sense, that story was so sad, and the city was so sad, I just felt that I understood what Spike was trying to do, to capture that mood of how broken in spirit and sad the city felt. So what's the vector for this emotion? It's this story of a guy who just blew it and the shame of that. It was like Monty's story - Monty's responsible for what he's done, but are his friends responsible, is his girlfriend responsible, should his father have taken the money and is he implicated at all? It's that sense of regret and questioning and second-guessing that was going through New York - whose fault is this and why did this happen and is this because we're in bed with things we shouldn't be in bed with and did we deserve this or is this because they're just assholes? There was no way to rationalise the connection between the two but the backdrop of what was happening in New York just felt like that story to us. Your question's a good one, but I don't really know that I can say if we were right or wrong, but it was flowing out of that feeling at that time.

RJ: There's a simple way to read that film, as a film about friendship. That's what I got from it, after watching it for the fifth or sixth time.

EN: I should watch it again - I haven't watched it since the night of the premiere. I just watched it and wanted to leave it in a box. I've never really wanted to watch it again, maybe because I don't want to confront exactly those questions or reassess it, because it felt very pure in the moment. Like I was saying earlier, you never know if you've succeeded or failed because at best you take the soup - that one's just a soup of what was going on, there's so much going on in it and there's no way to jigsaw puzzle it all out, and it was sort of like we either do this right now or we don't do it at all, and we throw in everything we can and Spike will make of it what he makes of it, and then it's for other people to decide. Really, you have to answer the question yourself.

Q5: When you're playing a character that's doing something on camera that your conscience knows is wrong, say killing someone, when you prepare yourself to do that, do you feel like you're playing with fire because you're drawing these things from within you? Do you feel it's cathartic? Do you feel somehow that it's a privilege to be able to do that and there's no consequence?

EN: Yeah. I've never really thought of it but I do think it's a privilege. Sometimes I feel that at its best, acting is like having a skeleton key - it lets you into every door on an experiential level, a learning level, and it does do that on emotional level as well. In some ways, it's a free pass to exorcise all kinds of emotional stuff without the consequences. And that is kind of a privilege. I also am not one of those people who subscribe to the idea that acting should put you in the nuthouse - I think it's very possible to do all that and retain psychological health. In part, what makes the process that you're getting at possible is an environment of safety. It has a lot to do with your collaborators, a shared collective intention and understanding of what you're doing, so that if you're going to put a guy's head on a kerb and break his teeth on it, there're Mexican guys on your crew, African-Americans on your crew, and a Chinese woman is your first AD, and everybody knows what you're all after and supports you, and the director has created an environment where this is not going to reverberate out beyond here and taken out of context. And then you're liberated. When those things aren't present, it can be uncomfortable. Not only with violence, but also with sex, any of the intimate things, self-exposure things that make you vulnerable - that's where the environment that you and your collaborators create is hugely important. You get everything from actors if you can create that feeling.

RJ: At this point, I'm going to have to draw this evening to a close. It's been a privilege having you on stage here at the National Film Theatre - Edward Norton, probably the finest actor of his generation.

EN: Ah, don't say that.

RJ: Thank you for being here.