Why We Love Ed Norton

Actor’s Power-packed performance in STONE is Oscar worthy

The intersection of a hardened parole officer and an eerie convict collide in the psychological drama, Stone, starring Academy Award® winner Robert De Niro and Oscar® nominee Edward Norton. Milla Jovovich gives a startlingly raw, breakout performance as the sexy, casually amoral woman they both desire.

Parole officer Jack Mabry (De Niro) is counting the days toward a quiet retirement when he is asked to review the case of Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Norton), in prison for covering up the murder of his grandparents with a fire. Now eligible for early release, Stone needs to convince Jack he has reformed, but his attempts to influence the older man’s decision have profound and unexpected consequences for them both. 

Stone painstakingly weaves together the parallel journeys of two men grappling with dark impulses, as the line between “law man” and “law breaker” becomes precariously thin.

Set against the quiet desperation of economically ravaged suburban Detroit and the stifling brutality of a maximum-security prison, this tale of passion, betrayal and corruption examines the fractured lives of two volatile men breaking from their troubled pasts to face uncertain futures. 

I sat with Ed Norton at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco to discuss Stone --

Sandra Varner (Talk2SV): This film rattled me.  Reason being, I’ve been in church my entire life and rarely does anything come along that challenges all that you have been taught, all that you think you know and puts you in a state of near confusion. In that regard, this movie did that for me. What did the story do to you and how do you interpret it?

Norton: I relate to that, I mean, I find it to be a very unsettling, it’s a very unsettling story. I think so because it reminds you that there is consequence to going on cruise control for too long in your emotional life, in your spiritual life. John (Curran), who made the film, said to me that he was interested in the idea that many people --and, certainly in America-- rest somewhat easy on our confident sense of ourselves.  Typically defined by whatever we are and what we think about our marriages, our attendance in church, our faith, our belief in our democracy. 

John is a very deep thinker.  He used to say to me, ‘Look, as soon as you start getting comfortable is when you’re in real danger.’  I think Robert DeNiro’s character in this film stands in for many of us. Not that we’re all in the crisis that he’s in, but, that he’s a portrait of what can happen when you don’t grapple with the lack of authenticity in your life.

His character works in a prison, judges people who are in prison to see if they’re ready to get out, but his own life is in many ways, sort of a ‘soul-less’ prison. Ironically, his spiritual life, though he goes through the motions, is not very authentic.  I think those are good things to prod people to think about like the idea that you can be liberated physically but not actually liberated in your soul --not facing up to the truths of your life-- is a very profound idea.

Talk2SV: You have alluded to the cultural and societal norms, if you call them normal, of American life.  So often we want everything to be ‘right and wrong’ and when we move into gray, people get uncomfortable. This entire movie is in gray.

 
Norton with filmmaker John Curran

Norton: I agree. John Curran likes his shades of gray. I think it’s a true piece of wisdom that a person or a culture’s strengths taken to excess are also their weaknesses.  In America, very often, we have our confident sense of ourselves and the belief in our value system is a beautiful thing.  We take a righteous pride in who we are and what we’re based in, but, the idea that you can coast on that is a very dangerous one.

The idea that you don’t have to continually reinvigorate an authentic commitment to who you are and examine how you might be saying certain things when the insides are sort of decaying, the guts are decaying.  I think, too, the idea of a person who sits and judges other people while not grappling with themselves is relevant in our country because we’ve taken that seat in the world.  We’ve decided that we’re going to arbitrate what countries are reflecting a value system that we support and stuff like that while some of our actions may challenge our own commitment to those ideals.  Those kinds of gray areas are very healthy, I think.

Talk2SV: Well, to that point, America wants to be seen, sees itself, and refuses to be none other than the world’s leader. That said, our penal system is questionable by any other country’s standards.

Norton: That’s true. I think we have more people per hundred thousand in prison than any country in the world.  We have more people --per hundred thousand-- in prison than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.

Talk2SV: So why do you think [that] we think we know so much about the penal system?

Norton: I don’t know if we know so much about the penal system, but I think we retain, as you said, a somewhat puritanical sense of right and wrong that doesn’t always necessarily create the nuanced views of people and judgment that might serve us better. To me, the film is not --at its core-- a political film, at all. I think at its core it’s a spiritual film.  It’s very much about four people, not even my character and DeNiro’s, but the two women, our wives, in the film.

I think that its about four people who are all in different states of spiritual distress.  Some are moving in some directions and some are moving in others.  I think that it asks a lot of questions: is a church the only place that authentic spiritual epiphany or revelation or illumination might happen? It questions the idea of the ways that illumination can come to you and I think that’s really interesting. 

When I read the script, it pricked things in me that made me realize that many of the things that sometimes throw the sharpest perspectives, new perspectives into your life, don’t necessarily happen inside the doors of a church or sanctuary.  Many times, things happen in your life in the strangest of ways that really alter your perspective.

Talk2SV: When you talk about an altered perspective, one of the first things I appreciated about your character was the slang, the lingo, the jargon that he/you used. How much of that nuance was innate in terms of who you identified the character to be and how much of it was studying someone else?  Did you decide to model that character after someone familiar?

Norton: Mostly, I would say [that] more than half, maybe up to two-thirds of the specific lines and phrases of the way that character speaks came out of conversations that I had with inmates at that prison facility where we shot the film. John wanted the film to take place in Detroit so I focused on guys who were from the tougher parts of Detroit and who had been in gangs; who had been in the drug culture.  They were an unbelievable resource to me; not only did you get to hear their voices, see their looks, see how they talk, but you also were able to go through the script with them and dissect their analysis (of the dialogue).  They would say to me, ‘I would never say that, I would say this…’ and in just asking them about their lives and recording them, the vernacular is so interesting and in some places, really funny.  We just pulled as much of it as we could.  I mean, the guys were great.  There were a couple of guys, in particular, who took a real pleasure out of knowing they were going to contribute.  

Talk2SV: We’ve talked a bit about being judgmental.  Realizing you spent so much time with incarcerated people on this film, did you find yourself to be more judgmental than you thought and now that you are on the other side of this project have your views altered regarding others?

Norton with Milla Jojovich

Norton: I would hope it didn’t make me more or less judgmental.  I mean, as an actor, you learn almost intuitively not to judge.  Acting, in many ways, is about empathy, that doesn’t always mean sympathy but empathy, I think, is the act or the talent of simply just being open to hearing things from someone else’s perspective. It’s like trying to absorb how do ‘they’ feel about something because you’re going to represent that [feeling]. 

So, empathy is a built in part of the job. For me, the main thing that was fascinating was the stark perspective when you are sitting in front of ‘a prisoner.’  We use that word ‘prisoner” or say things like, ‘he went to jail and so forth’ but the reality of ‘locked up’ people is intense.  It’s very, very intense and if you’ve never experienced it, when you go in there, it’s quite shocking.  You realize these guys are all the clichés…you’re a number, you’re moved around, it’s all true.  It is quite amazing to be sitting across the table from another human being who’s reality this is; they are a ‘locked up’ person and it gives you a lot of perspective.  There is no way that [the experience] couldn’t give you a sense of appreciation for how lucky you are to have the freedoms that you have.

Talk2SV: As a performer and one held in high regard, you are very fortunate to have built a body of work that reflects a skill set we don’t see often. Has this been your destiny by design or by luck?

Norton: Well, I think any actor who is working regularly is very fortunate.  I know many, many, many talented actors who haven’t had certain good fortune or the breaks that I did.  Early on and past a certain point, you have to take responsibility or authorship of your own creative choices.  I guess the best way I would put it is --I work on the things that interest me-- I work on things that can be as superficial as the fact that it sounds like it’s going to be fun.  It’s (a film role) going to go somewhere fun, that I’m going to get to poke around in a world like that of pro poker players and learn something.  Or, it could be that Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando are in the movie and I’m going to do it.  If it’s about three guys reading the phone book… there’s that too. But, when it all comes together really nicely, I think I’m most drawn to things that I feel on some level are rolling around in the times that we’re living in. When I think about movies that made a dent in me, really got inside me and made me think, they were often movies that you could look back on and say those are a real document of a moment in time.  So, I think I have definitely had an impulse toward things that I feel are grappling with themes that people my own age would relate to or see in the world around them. I think that’s how you participate in the moment that you’re living in.

Talk2SV: Well, I’ve enjoyed this moment in time with you. 

Norton: Yeah, me too.

 

EDWARD NORTON (Stone) has acted in the films Primal Fear, Everyone Says I Love You, The People vs. Larry Flynt, American History X, Rounders, Fight Club, Keeping the Faith, The Score, Death to Smoochy, Frida, Red Dragon, The 25th Hour, The Italian Job, Down in the Valley, The Kingdom of Heaven, The Illusionist, The Painted Veil, The Incredible Hulk, Pride & Glory, Leaves of Grass and Stone.

He has been nominated for two Academy Awards, for Primal Fear and American History X, and won a Golden Globe along with numerous other awards for his performances.

 He produced and directed Keeping the Faith and also produced Down in the Valley (Cannes Film Festival selection), The Painted Veil, Leaves of Grass and the documentary By The People: The Election of Barack Obama.

Norton also founded and runs Class 5 Films in partnership with writer Stuart Blumberg and producer Bill Migliore. Class 5’s first two features, Down in the Valley and The Painted Veil, were released in 2006. Class 5 more recently produced Leaves of Grass (written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, starring Norton, Susan Sarandon, Keri Russell, Tim Blake Nelson and Richard Dreyfus) and is developing adaptations of Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn for which Norton is writing the screenplay.  

Class 5's most recent documentary, By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, was released by HBO in November 2009, and was nominated for 3 Emmy® awards.